TRAIN OF THOUGHTS

You want me to write about a book that changed me, eh? Me: a lover of trippy escapist fiction and short stories. Me: someone who was grounded from reading as a tween and forced by my mom to “go outside and play” because I read so much as a child and teenager.

As a bonafide fiction bookworm exposing myself to reading material far before I was mature enough to appropriately process it, surely the first book that comes to mind as a life-alterer is fiction: something that opened my eyes to adult truths and introduced me to wildly new ways of moving through life. I have hundreds of favorite books under my belt that I love and left indelible impressions on me. Books that built and informed my world view and continue to see me through tough times. With dozens of alluring fiction titles to choose from, why did this Book Club Challenge immediately call to mind an outdated work of niche non-fiction with the dry technical subtitle “Designing the Effective Web Experience” published in 2002?

Maybe it was that year: 2002. A time of so much change in my life. The year after I started blogging. The year I designed and built my first (adults-only) paysite. The year I met the person who would become my wife. Maybe I think of this book as a life-changer because it came into my life during a time of life-defining changes.

Deciding at the turn-of-the century to quit my “normal” job to pursue money-making online via porn was hugely life-changing, and WEIRD at the time. I bought this book when the whole world and the way people connect with each other was on the cusp of changing dramatically: before YouTube or Facebook even existed. Back when being a “creator” wasn’t even a thing except for nerds and weirdos and Dooce (RIP).

I snatched this vivid blue book off a clearance shelf in Vancouver, British Columbia (Canada) during a much-needed lunch break from a Pacific Northwest internet porn conference. The conference was built for webmasters, affiliate marketers and site-owners to network, not for performers to meet fans or collaborate with other performers for content like the conferences in Vegas. I was a webmaster and site-owner in the Seattle area, so I went. But most of the people (older men and younger men and men the same age as I was) I met there did not perceive me as one of them or having anything of value to offer.

I will never forget the young man who interrupted his friend before he could finish introducing himself to me, eyeballing me while intentionally “whispering” at his friend’s ear loud enough for me to hear, “YOU DON’T HAVE TO TALK TO HER; SHE’S JUST CONTENT.”

Just content. Even though I had my own affiliate program they could make money on. Even though I built my own websites. Even though I had a blog where I, too, made money as an affiliate promoting sponsors. I was just “content” to them: a body used to make pictures and videos. You don’t even have to bother with even the most minimal of social formalities; she is “content” and not even to be regarded as sentient.

It was an unexpected slap in the face to be so overtly dehumanized in person at a professional event. I had never been belittled by an actual fan, site member or webcam customer in this way, so it caught me completely off guard to experience this kind of casual degradation face-to-face from someone who wasn’t even paying me for a consensual role play. The guy just really wanted to tell me I had no value and that he and his cohort were the real humans at the event, like I was a trespasser or decoy put there to test them instead of a colleague who paid to attend with at least as much experience, assets and pertinent interests as they had.

Maybe the young man was just drunk. Maybe I should have just been grateful for the interaction being cut short quickly before I wasted time trying to “network” with his buddy. But his words shocked and stung me.

It was such a comforting relief to find myself in a bargain bookstore the next day: a safe haven of quiet unassuming shelves filled with volumes of billions of bound words I could browse, buy and learn from without judgment.

There it was: this book TRAIN OF THOUGHTS coming full-steam-ahead at me with its powerful red engine. I bought it and brought it home and it’s been on my most-accessible bookshelf ever since.

Let me come clean about something; I have not read this book from cover to cover, but it did change my life. Like a cookbook can change lives with just one recipe that becomes a comforting favorite, feeding and nourishing through so many meals over so many years that the whole book is a treasure, Train of Thoughts gave me some timeless recipes and everlasting ingredients for designing content and experiences that feed people’s hearts.

I’m sure Train of Thoughts wasn’t written specifically with internet pornographers in mind, but it affirmed something I already knew and needed more confidence and confirmation to embrace; just about everybody is online to meet some kind of an emotional need. It’s a mistake to design anything that merely focuses on people’s practical needs. It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to sell a soft drink, a new religion, shampoo or bodice-ripping romance novels: people spend time and money on things that fill their emotional needs.

How do you design experiences that meet people’s emotional needs? This book that LOOKED like a dry technical reference guide for making websites told me that you need to design experiences that TELL A STORY. Stories — narratives — that *change* people and motivate them to take action. The ultimate success of your “product”, website or campaign isn’t for someone to have clean hands after they use your soap or to achieve an efficient orgasm after they look at your porn, it is for them to be moved and transformed by a story. A story that makes them feel safe, confident, pretty, forgiven, ALIVE, relieved of a burden, hopeful, or just less alone.

At the time they wrote it, Train of Thought’s authors were VERY PRO FLASH. Adobe Flash. A technology which is no longer supported in most browsers and on most platforms. But at the time they saw it as the number-one vehicle for telling compelling multimedia stories to achieve “effective web experiences”. This isn’t the only outdated thing in this book, but it doesn’t matter and is actually one of the life-changing lessons in this book that I continue to need to practice applying: SEPARATE THE WHEAT FROM THE CHAFF. It doesn’t matter how you do The Things That Matter, just do them. Tell the stories that meet people’s most timeless needs. The information in this book transcends its place in time and the technology it was written for. These people made evergreen content and spoke to telling evergreen stories before The New York Times’ ad people were calling it that.

Ultimately this seemingly-dated book for web designers gave me permission to see everything we do as having a transformative spiritual potential. To remember that everyone who is doing anything — ANYTHING — above and beyond meeting their basic immediate daily needs for food and shelter, is motivated by emotional needs. And so many of our most urgent-feeling emotional needs are met by stories.