A big practice in chaos magic is the use of sigils, which are abstract words or symbols you create and embed with your wishes. To create a sigil, start by writing out your desire in a single word, a couple of words, or a short sentence. Then remove all the duplicate letters, then all the vowels—basically, you can do whatever you want here—until you’re left with a bunch of lines that you can combine into one symbol. Then you put the piece of paper in a book, in your wallet, or some other place where it won’t get lost, and just forget about it.
The real “magic” of sigils is that you’re only forgetting about it on the surface level. Taking the time to think about what you really want and doing something about it, even if it’s just drawing some lines on a piece of paper, embeds these wishes into your subconscious, and then your subconscious makes it happen, even when the conscious part of your brain is busy doing something else.
I treat my Internet passwords as modern-day sigils, embedding them with wishes or promises to me, or even financial goals for the company. (Hey, I never made any claims to be normal here.) That way, every time I go to log in anywhere, I’m subtly reminding myself of what I’m working for. This kind of intention setting has worked for me. Dozens of times a day, as I tap out a few strokes on the keyboard, I’m reminding myself of the bigger picture. This ensures that when I’m bogged down with day-to-day bureaucracy and details, I don’t lose sight of what I really want.
I’m not trying to say that this kind of intention setting will always work, because you can’t just type “abajilliondollars” whenever you log in to Facebook and all of a sudden become Warren Buffett. It is, though, a heretic’s version of kneeling by your bed and saying a prayer every night. It’s intention setting. It doesn’t have to be as hard and fast as saying “I want a job at a fashion company,” but it can be something like “I want a creative job” or “I want to have fun at work.” Keep reminding yourself over and over that this is what you want, and you’ll soon find that the more you know what you want, the less you’re willing to put up with what you don’t. One of the best things about life—a reason not to go blindly after one goal and one goal only—is that sometimes it will take you to something that is way cooler than anything you would have consciously set out to do in the first place. I never had one particular goal or dream that I was working toward; all I knew was that I wanted to do something awesome, and was open to whatever shape or form this awesomeness took. I wanted to be a photographer; I wanted to go to art school; I wanted to play in a band; and when I started the eBay store, all of this came in handy even though I would never have associated these things.
My interest in photography gave me an advantage over other sellers who didn’t care about lighting or composition. My days of being the tardy employee at the record store gave me a cultural and musical understanding that was more unique than if I’d just listened to garbage-y pop on the radio my entire life. None of these were things I ever expected to add up to something called a brand, but they contributed to all the ways in which Nasty Gal is just a little off and a little surprising. All of that flailing about, trying new things and finding out that I liked some of them and hated others, ended up amalgamating into something very real and very meaningful, and in the end, made me capable of providing a life for myself.
While I truly believe that you must have intentions to fulfill your dreams, I also think you have to leave room for the universe to have its way and play around a bit. Don’t get so focused on one particular opportunity that you’re blind to other ones that come up. If you think about one thing, and talk about it all the time, you’re being too obsessive. You might ruin it. If you let yourself meander a bit, then the right things and the right people fall into place. Some things are worth fighting for—don’t get me wrong, I’m definitely a fighter—but I really think that what is right should be easy. My dad has always said that the definition of crazy is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, and it’s so true. If something’s not working out, but you keep hammering at it in the exact same way, go after something else for a while. That’s not giving up, that’s just letting the universe have its way.
Treat Your Thoughts Like Your Dollar Bills: Don’t Waste ’Em
Though I believe in magic, I’m not hippy-dippy and I generally abhor people who are. I remember I had a hippie friend once who whispered, “The cat can sense the stillness in my soul,” and all I could think was, The cat is really going to sense it if I barf because you sound so self-important. That said, if you approach everything in your life with a certain degree of intention, you can affect the outcome. At the absolute minimum, you will affect how you feel about the outcome and that is ultimately what matters the most. If I am in a shitty mood while making dinner, the food is going to taste like crap. But if I’m happy while I’m cooking, then dinner is going to be absolutely fantastic.
I also think you can end up ignoring, and even losing, the positive things in your life by focusing too much on the negative. That’s a huge drain, as well as a waste of time. When you think about people, you give them power. My ex-boyfriend Gary taught me this lesson when we first started dating. This was the heyday of MySpace, when you could always see who was commenting on whose page, so I knew way too much about this one girl—or woman, because she was waayyy older than me—whom he had once hooked up with and who was still lurking around. She was my favorite horrible thing to talk about, and I brought her up a little too often. For obvious reasons this would piss him off. When he finally got fed up with the subject, he said, “I don’t think about her, and I don’t want to think about her, but when you bring her up, I have to think about her and it makes me uncomfortable. Why are you doing that to me? Why are you doing it to yourself?”
Turns out he had a point.
Flash back to Halloween several years ago; he and I were at the Deco Lounge in San Francisco. He was dressed as a monk and was wearing this hundred-year-old Masonic robe—which, let’s face it, was basically a giant black dress with a skull on it. And I was dressed as a blaxploitation character, wearing a halter disco gown and a giant Afro wig. Not the most politically correct choice, I realize, but as I’ve said before, this was San Francisco and you picked a decade and stuck with it, even in costume.
As we were getting ready to go out that night, I mentioned this woman’s name again, wondering if we would run into her. It was unlikely, as she lived in LA at the time, but she was known to lurk up north. As soon as we walked into the bar, there she was. She saw Gary, made a beeline for him, and began to whisper in his ear as soon as she was close enough. She totally ignored me, even though I was only inches away and holding his hand.
“Hi,” I said, interjecting myself into her whisper fest with an introduction. “I’m Sophia.” I mustered every molecule of inner goodwill to put a smile on my face.
But she just turned and looked at me with a snarl. “Oh, are you his ex-girlfriend?”
“No, I’m his girlfriend,” I said, no longer caring at all about trying to be nice. “So, what are you even doing at this bar at your age, anyway?” And that, dear #GIRLBOSS, was what started the only fight I’ve ever been in.
She pulled my Afro off, I punched her in the nose, and Gary dove in between us, pulling her off me as we went at it on the Deco Lounge floor. Though I can laugh at it now—the absurdity of costumes and wigs and punches and a man in a dress breaking it up—it was a miserable Halloween and a miserable night. During the miserable cab ride home, I realized that I’d put so much energy into thinking about what I didn’t want to happen that I’d caused that exact thing to happen.
I conjured that bitch.
I have also had to learn to rein in my negative thoughts when it comes to business competition. Around the same time that I launched the Nasty Gal website, I had become pretty good friends with another girl who ran a vintage eBay shop. We talked shop, but in a way that I always assumed was friendly banter between two people who had a lot
in common, and not sharing state secrets. A year after I left eBay and set Nasty Gal up with a proper website, she also decided to launch her own. When her site went live it looked really wonderful . . . because it looked exactly like mine. The design was exactly like mine, the wording was exactly like mine. Everything was exactly like mine. I’d known she was launching a website, but assumed she had enough class to do something different. I had one phone call with her in which I told her to get some ideas of her own, and we never spoke again.
After this happened, I was obsessed with this incident. I talked about it all the time while rolling my eyes and thinking about how much she sucked. Finally, I did this so much that Gary pointed out I was obsessing about her so much that I was going to make her successful. I took this advice seriously, and decided then that I don’t want to spend time thinking about things that I don’t want to have a place in my life. You have to kick people out of your head as forcefully as you’d kick someone out of your house if you didn’t want them to be there.
Naturally, every boyfriend comes with an ex-girlfriend, every business comes with competitors, but it is entirely up to you to decide how much time you spend thinking about them. Frankly, even if that girl your boyfriend used to make out with suddenly gets hit by a car (like you’re secretly hoping she will), who cares? You’re still you. The same goes for business: There’s no karmic law that dictates your business will succeed if others fail, so why not just wish them well and get on with it?
Focus on the positive things in your life and you’ll be shocked at how many more positive things start happening. But before you start to think you just got lucky, remember that it’s magic, and you made it yourself.
7
I Am the Antifashion
Why fit in when you were born to stand out?
—Dr. Seuss
As the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre so poignantly put it, “Hell is other people.” While I no longer agree with this sentiment, I can empathize with the guy. When I was about four or five, my parents threw me a birthday party. There was cake, presents, and a piñata. When the time came, I lined up, got blindfolded, spun around in circles, and whacked the poor papier-mâché donkey with a broomstick, just like all the other kids. Hitting something with a stick was very gratifying, but I had never seen a piñata before, and had no idea that there was any sort of end goal. Therefore, it came as a complete shock to me when another child’s final whack knocked the donkey’s head off; it split open, spilling its candy guts onto the ground. The sight of Tootsie Rolls and Starbursts turned the other kids into screaming primates and as they immediately dove for the candy, I stood frozen. I was completely unaware that such a treasure trove even existed inside that piñata, so instead of jumping into the melee to fight for my rights, I turned, ran straight to the nearest table, and promptly crawled under it. And there I stayed until the last sugar-sodden five-year-old party guest had left and I felt it was safe to emerge from my cave.
Twenty-five years later, I’m still not a huge fan of surprises.
This is your brain on introversion.
Though it might not seem like it from the outside, I’m actually an introvert. Common knowledge used to dictate that extroverts were outgoing and introverts were shy, and this certainly never applied to me. I’m about as far away as you can get from a shrinking violet. However, research over the last few years has been focused on how the two personality types are actually more defined by what energizes them. Extroverts get their energy from being around a lot of people, but introverts find large groups draining and require time alone to recharge.
Introverts and extroverts also process external stimuli via different pathways in the brain, which means that something an extrovert would find completely fun and novel—such as a bunch of kindergarteners rioting for candy—would be totally overwhelming to an introvert like me.
However, as a kid you’re not self-aware enough to understand why you’re different; you just know that you are. Being an only child meant that I naturally spent a ton of time alone. I preferred it this way and was never lonely. Yet at school this tendency to be alone made me feel weird. It was considered strange to want to be alone on the swings while everyone else was on the jungle gym, even if alone on the swings was where I was happiest. As a result I spent way too much time thinking about what other people thought about me, and what I could possibly do to make them like me more. Did they think my family’s house was big enough? Did they think I was pretty? Did they like my backpack? I think it’s cool, but what if this backpack makes me look like I’m in sixth grade when really I’m in seventh? Just typing that paragraph makes me exhausted, so I think it was no wonder that by the time I was a teenager, I ended up preferring to make tuna sandwiches at Subway, where at least I could be alone in my head, rather than subjecting myself to the nonstop emotional roller coaster they call adolescence.
Introverts are naturally more sensitive because they don’t need a ton of dopamine, the “feel-good” neurotransmitter that your brain produces in response to positive stimuli. Conversely, extroverts can’t get enough. They even love adrenaline, the chemical that your brain produces in the face of fear, so they need bigger and riskier situations to produce the same natural high that an introvert gets from just having a conversation with a close friend. Introverts are also more apt to pay attention to the small details (and an eBay store is a treasure trove of small details).
Much of the world, from school to the workplace, is set up to reward extroverts, and therefore it can be easier for introverts to feel overlooked or as if they don’t measure up. For instance, even if you know all the answers but don’t want to call attention to yourself by raising your hand, you might end up feeling, or being perceived as, less smart than the kids flailing their arms to get the teacher’s attention. Same goes for work. Just remember, as Susan Cain writes in Quiet, “There’s zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas.”
In business, a disproportionate amount of importance is placed on the ability to network. If you don’t thrive on going out and meeting a million people, you might end up feeling that you have less of a chance of getting ahead in your career. Also, introverts might hang back in meetings and thus not be perceived as “leadership material,” even though introverted people frequently make more empathetic managers. As I’ve said before, part of the reason that I started Nasty Gal was that I wanted a job where I could be by myself and not have to deal with people. I wasn’t great at in-person customer service, because I can’t fake a smile to save my life, but it turned out that I was really good at it electronically. Over e-mail, eBay, and MySpace, I was a customer service queen—able to respond to people politely and genuinely, infusing everything with a digital smile. Psychologists now believe that social media is a really valuable tool for introverts, because it allows them to communicate and even network on their own terms.
Even though introverts might keep quiet during meetings, they have several tendencies that actually come in handy in the world of business: They make fewer risky financial decisions (hello, $1 million in the bank at Nasty Gal!), are more persistent when faced with a problem that isn’t easily solvable, and can also be very creative. A lot of the world’s great artists, thinkers, and even businesspeople are and were introverts (Albert Einstein, Bill Gates, and J. K. Rowling, to name a few), so in no way does being an introvert doom you into a life in the shadows.
Getting Off at the Wrong Stop
I think I got off on the wrong planet. Beam me up, Scotty, there’s no rational life here.
—Robert Anton Wilson
I was once (and still am) a not-so-secret metalhead. I’ll admit that sometimes feeling bad feels good. A lot of people poo-poo downer music, but they must just be really well adjusted. Nothing, for me, feels more comforting than the sound of an angry, misunderstood man.
There is a great song, “Born Too Late,” by a band called Saint Vitus that I have always
loved. I can still recite some of the lyrics by heart, because they’re just too good. And by good, naturally, I mean bad.
Every time I’m on the street
People laugh and point at me
They laugh about my length of hair
And the out-of-date clothes I wear
They say my songs are much too slow
But they don’t know the things I know.
I have a friend who told me something recently that really resonated. He said that he felt like he’d “gotten off at the wrong stop,” as if there’s a bus traveling through space and time that randomly opens its doors and drops souls off to live through whatever time they’re assigned. I don’t believe we’re all fit for the time we’re assigned. It’s a weird world we live in, and until time travel exists we’ve all got to make the most of where we land.
Failure Is Your Invention
Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.
—George Bernard Shaw
I gave up a long time ago on finding anything that was 100 percent, totally “me.” I was not only open to trying on different lifestyles, I forced such experimentation upon myself—always knowing that I’d evolve past it, rarely surprised when I was ready to move on and never so attached that it hindered my growth.
Strangely, I think this attitude paid off when I started the business. From Nasty Gal’s inception, I have always viewed the business as a work in progress. I constantly tweak and move on, peeling back layers of the onion as new ones arrive. If something didn’t work—like if I put a dress up for auction and no one was bidding on it—I didn’t just assume that no one wanted it. I just tried something else. I rewrote the product description, or swapped out the thumbnail because I thought that maybe people couldn’t judge the silhouette correctly from the original picture I’d posted. I never assumed that I’d just done my best job the first time around.
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