Here's How You Gonna Get Ahead of 90% of People
Words I Like: You can't want an extraordinary life and force yourself to comply with the social norms of who are ok with a mediocre life. It's like wanting to be a surgeon thinking about what school janitors will think of your sanitation process. Minute Read: If You’re Scared of Looking Cringe A lot of people stay behind because they treat shame, guilt, and cringe like they mean the same thing. That mix-up costs them years. They hold back the first post, the first video, the first sales message, the first serious attempt at anything public. They protect their image and delay their growth. Meanwhile, the people willing to look rough at the beginning stack reps, improve fast, and build real proof. Shame is breaking someone else's rules. Guilt is breaking your own rules. Cringe is supposed secondhand embarrassment. A lot of “cringe” rules come from people who optimize for social safety. Stay cool. Care less. Try less. Stay quiet. Stay average. Blend in. Those rules work great for fitting in. They work terribly for building anything meaningful. So someone saying, "Oh, that's cringe," will come off as saying, "I'm embarrassed for you." But in reality, it's a defensive status play. If someone says you're cringe for putting in meaningful work, it means you're beginning to change your status relative to other people or relative to average/mediocre, and therefore you're on the right path. And so we have to ask the question, like, whose rules are we breaking? Did we agree to their rules? If we set the rules, what outcome do those rules optimize for? Because a rule is an if-then statement, so they have to be for a meaningful desirable result. If your rule is “I publish and improve,” that leads to skill. If your rule is “I say what I believe and let the multiple attempts clean it up,” that leads to confidence. If your rule is “I care deeply about something and work on it in public,” that leads to momentum, proof, and opportunity. That is why cringe gets such a strong reaction.