"And that's why funny is sexy," I said confidently as I put my feet up on my desk, leaned back in my chair, and looked around at all the journal articles spread around me in my window-less office located in the basement of 2 Hillhouse Avenue in New Haven, Connecticut . It was the latter part of 2007 and this phone interview with news editor Matthew Hutson at Psychology Today magazine was a welcome diversion from my usual data crunching and dissertation writing as a graduate student. This call was making me feel pretty good; here was someone asking me what I thought on topics of great interest and treating me as though I was a world's authority on such topics. I was also quite giddy, considering I read Psychology Today as a child all the time and here I was being interviewed for an article in that very magazine. Matt and I joked a bit more, I gave him some more tips (backed by solid empirical research) on how to use humor to attract whomever you are trying to attract, and we said our goodbyes for now. Little did I know it at the time, but that call would change my life.
***
In January of 2008 the article Fast Forces of Attraction came out in Psychology Today magazine. I was home for the holidays and as my family and I passed our local Barnes and Noble it suddenly occurred to me that the article might be out. My parents stopped the car and I ran out. As I approached the magazine rack, I could feel my heart beat faster and faster. When I finally found the stack of Psychology Todays, I tried to calm down. I told myself to play it cool, and for the moment ignore the fact that I was about to see my name in the magazine I always used to read as a child. I wondered which quote of mine they used. I laughed out loud, thinking of some of the whopper doozies I threw at Hutson.
"Scott?!", the girl at the check-out counter asked. I looked up from the Psychology Today magazine I already started leafing through and came face to face with the girl I used to have a crush on in high school. Even though she looked slightly different, with dreadlocks and a lot of face piercings, I could still clearly recognize her. She and I used to hang out a lot but nothing ever happened (even though she told me she liked me), most likely due to my intense shyness around girls at that time. "What's up!?", she asked. "Oh nothing much," I said, looking cool and resuming my search through the magazine. "Just trying to find my quote about how humor is sexy. I'm the world's authority on that topic, as you might remember." She laughed. "Oh Scott, you were always so funny." Score.
After I bought the issue, I jumped in the car, and tore through the pages to find the article. I found the article and after leafing through it found a section at the bottom called "Woo with Wisecracks". No quote. Not giving up, I flipped through the entire magazine two times, reading every word twice for good measure before I finally gave up, went home, and resigned back to my dissertation writing.
A few months later I got an email from Hutson. He apologized that my quote got cut, and explained it was a space issue. He said he enjoyed our phone chat and had a proposition for me. Psychology Today is starting a blog and he was wondering if I would be interested in being one of their inaugural bloggers. This one was a no-brainer.
On May 9th, 2008 I posted my first blog post for Psychology Today ("Introducing Beautiful Minds"). I remember how nervous I was hitting that "Submit" button. To my delight though, the feedback was immediately positive. Within minutes of posting, I started getting calls from my fans, including (well, I really should say consisting of) my Mom and her best friend Aileen.
Not soon after I started blogging, a wonderful opportunity came my way. In one of my more vulnerable posts, I wrote about the possibility of becoming a late bloomer ("The Nature of Genius II: On Late Bloomers and Ugly Ducklings"). Soon after that post, I got a beautiful email from the Editor-at-Large at Psychology Today, Hara Estroff Marano. She was touched by my post and wondered if I'd be interested in turning it into a feature article for the magazine ("Confessions of a Late Bloomer"). Before I even finished reading her email, my best friend Elliot Paul and I were on the next train to New York City to brainstorm with Hara in the Psychology Today office. Hara would turn out to be an important mentor in my life.
It's now April 13, 2010, and I'm now one of the 'old-timers' at PT blogs. Almost two years and 500,000 total views later, Beautiful Minds celebrates its 50th post.
Working on my blog for Psychology Today has been one of the most satisfying and personally meaningful things I've ever done. I've had the opportunity to be myself (and learn a lot about myself in the process) and write on a variety of topics that interest me deeply. I love the open-endedness, freedom of expression and creativity that blogging affords. Blogging allows me to combine my cheekiness with my seriousness with my empirical research with my life experiences with whatever other sides of myself I want to bring out in a particular post.
Blogging also allows me to connect with others; by helping myself make sense of the world we live in I hopefully help others make sense of their own lives and the world they live in. For most of my posts, I will wait until I feel especially inspired to dig deep into a topic and then I spend days completely consumed in the world of that topic, acquiring as much evidence as I can on all the sides of the issue. By working that way, readers know my posts are intrinsically motivated, coming fully from the heart. By having a blogging platform, I can also present interviews with lots of fascinating people, really trying to see the world through their eyes and in the process show others perhaps a different way of seeing the world.
For some of my posts, I sacrificed some things, such as food, money, parties, and peer-reviewed journal articles. But there is no doubt the journey has been worth it.
To illustrate the diversity of topics I've covered, here are my top 12 posts (i'm taking Bella DePaulo's lead here!), in order of how many total views they have received:
1. Could Michael Jackson Have Created Twitter?
2. Why are Narcissists (Initially) so Popular?
3. Do Assholes Really Finish First?
4. Are People With Schizophrenia Living a Dream?
5. Interacting with women makes men stupid
6. Straight Talk about Twin Studies, Genes, and Parenting: What Makes Us Who We Are
