🤸🏻♀️ Delulu is the Solulu, Part Two
“You must maintain unwavering faith that you can and will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties, AND at the same time have the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”
—Jim Collins, Good to Great
Before jumping in, catch up here first if you haven’t already:
There’s a line from part one that has been bugging me ever since the post went live. It keeps knocking around my mind, clearing its throat as if to say, “Errr, don’t you think you forgot something?”
For context on my new favorite phrase in case you missed Wednesday’s post:
As a geriatric millennial—one who isn’t on social media—I first encountered delulu is the new solulu after my husband sent me this reel a few weeks ago, only ten years after K-pop fan communities first launched it.
. . . That’s the thing about potentially life-changing risks: they seem insane—and insanely stupid—until they work.
But still, I got something wrong by omission. The line in question:
As you know from Doh, sometimes one runs out of money and even delulu before a creative dream has time to succeed financially. Or maybe it’s that just one part of the dream needs to recede so the next right thing has room to surface.
Can you spot my error?
It’s in one word: before.
“Before a creative dream has time to succeed financially.”
🧐 I missed two crucial caveats:
*If* your creative dream even has the potential to succeed—it may not. How many atrocious American Idol auditions have we seen, especially in the early seasons when people weren’t angling for camera time come hell or high water?
Our creative dreams may have nothing to do with what the market wants. It is possible that we are unreliable when it comes to our own taste, and especially with regard to gauging our own talents. Does that matter? More on this below.
Or, conversely, the market may have “lower” taste than you. You are part of the ruthless cultural elite and will forever snob the uneducated masses who just don’t get you and your vision.1Creative dream + succeed financially = two verrrrry different things, sometimes directly in opposition to each other. This is common in the art world (I married a painter), where many artists feel called to create what’s in their soul, having nothing to do with commercial viability for collectors’ living room walls or their tax shelter storage units in Switzerland.
Even if one series happens to succeed, the gallery and collectors will be clamoring for the artists’ past, not their present and future. There’s a reason IG channels like @artreviewpower100 exist, teasing apart this tension on a daily basis.
I didn’t expect to call back to Jennifer Lopez today, until I read
’s post about J. Lo’s quintessentially Leo-like triptych. In it, she shares a sentiment prominent throughout The Discourse on this mille-feuille of meta (emphasis mine):The doc is 90 minutes of J.Lo speaking candidly and emotionally about the gargantuan effort it takes to, at every single moment, choose to be J.Lo. Lopez is not exceptional at singing or dancing or acting, but she is very exceptional at being Jennifer Lopez, and that is a separate, unique talent.
As we explored last time, the talent on display here is J. Lo’s delulu belief in her own artistic vision, critics be damned.
To be fair, that vision has landed her in the pantheon of megastars of our time—just not as critically acclaimed as TayTay and Bey.
of left an astute comment on the earlier post that might explain part of the impetus behind this braid of projects:“Methinks JLo, a Leo, really likes to see herself on camera with fabulous makeup, clothes, and backdrops. Not sure if there's anything else to it besides finding identity in looking back at yourself, especially as you envision the ideal you.
Reminding herself of her work ethic, dance and musical acumen, and performance chops probably helps the observer-view of herself act as high validation, even though she is crafting the observer view.”
Still, J. Lo has some pretty big blind spots. As I shared in the footnotes of part one, the documentary title, The Greatest Love Story Never Told, is so deeply ironic that you wonder if she’s in on the joke? Or only Ben? This is certainly not the greatest love story of all time, and secondly, once you tell it, THE TITLE NO LONGER APPLIES!!
And as
writes:There’s a funny lack of self-awareness on display in this self-portrait: for every moment she tries to consciously prove she’s not the version of her we read about in Us Weekly (desperate for love and marriage), she ends up proves she is (making a music video about just how desperate for love and marriage she’s been in her life).
“It’s not like anyone was clamoring for a new J.Lo record,” Lopez herself admits. But she makes one anyway, along with the nonsensical music video-movie that actually doesn’t do a very good job of presenting any of this music.
. . . By the ninth montage of her conspicuously working hard in The Greatest Love Story Ever Told, all of this content is just the tax we have to pay to keep the spigot of her outrageously entertaining personality flowing.
I remember two friends in college who seemed to be born with a magic elixir running through their veins. I would describe it as, “I am the world’s most gorgeous princess, and all will bow at my feet.” And crucially, “If anyone doesn’t, there is something wrong with them, not me.”2
I was incredulous! I had never met anyone with such confidence before, having no bearing to their actual looks or personal qualities and deficiencies. They were pretty, yes, but they weren’t EmRata. The thing is, THEY DIDN’T CARE. While I was stack-ranking myself against the actual models running around Los Angeles, these two were already sitting on their thrones atop the heap.
If going delulu is the new manifesting—with over 1.3 billion posts tagged #delulu on TikTok globally—then objective measures of talent and creative potential matter less than one might think.
In one breakdown on the phrase,3 NDTV writes:
In the contemporary world, being delulu means staying positive even when things seem tough. So, the viral phrase “delulu is the solulu” is all about finding solutions by keeping an optimistic and imaginative mindset. It’s like saying, “Being a bit dreamy or hopeful can be the solution to life’s challenges.”
In my series on being an Unreliable CEO (part one and part two),
made another insightful point in the comments:Here is what you are, Jenny Blake. . . Reliable: conveys the idea of constant occurrence; consistently good in quality or performance, able to be trusted. The ability to measure the same thing consistently. The latin root lig, li, and ly mean “tie.” Related to ligament, reliable, obligation. Whatever you do, you are always reliably YOURSELF!
We could all use a little more of that magical princess potion.
Embracing our most delulu selves may be the only way to muster the courage to create the art that’s in our heart, so long as we aren’t attached to the results.
Our job isn’t to be brilliant, critically acclaimed, celebrated by the masses, or even talented. It’s to be ourselves.
❤️
Continue reading part three:
For more on the BookTok phenomenon: check out this NYT feature on Colleen Hoover and this fantastic foray by
. I learn the most from ’s takes, who wrote one of my favorite satirical novels, Self Care:
Some would call this textbook narcissism 😆
For a quirkier take with some historical connection threads, check out this video:
I truly thank you, dearest Doh readers, for helping me realize this through your comments week after week. 🙏
As you know, I'm a big fan of truth, telling it, facing it, living in it.
The book "The Tools" includes the "Run Straight At The Problem" way of dealing with your challenges.
What I like best and find most share-worthy about this episode in your story: you recognize that there is no guarantee that positive thinking, fake-it-til-you-make-it behavior will EVER make the thing happen.
I find that no matter what the enterprise, most young starters have much more faith in their dreams than willingness to look at the truth of their circumstances.
The recent strikes in the entertainment industry laid bare the awful truth: there are far more people who want to earn a living by writing or performing than there are jobs for such people.
The strikers "won" but in the long run, the facts win: not enough jobs paying enough money for all the people who want them. Most union members will not be able to earn the small amount required to qualify for their union's health insurance.
Dreams are stubborn, though, aren't they?
What about our delala selves? ooooo is perhaps surprise or crazy-goofy-ness, while ahhhhh is more satisfaction and understanding. What about Rolling in dedohdoh? Helpfully yours,
Penney