When it comes to improvement, knowledge is often the easy part.
Adding information to your brain makes you better informed, but applying that information to your own behaviour is what creates change.
Reading lots of cookbooks does not make you a chef, not even a cook.
On your social feeds, knowledge and advice is everywhere – broken down into steps and phases, with encouragement to take any sort of action.
The confronting part is the first step, because it almost always feels embarrassing.
If you’re going to take those first steps, you need an embarrassment strategy.

Examining Cringe

If you have any sort of social and emotional intelligence, you know what cringe is.
Maybe you experienced it as first-hand embarrassment (doing something that gave you the feeling) or second-hand embarrassment (seeing someone else doing something that gives you both the feeling).
Maybe it was an accident, maybe it was a poor decision.
Maybe it was an attempt to brag or harm someone else that ended up backfiring.
It is a strong sensation, a mix of regret, shame and a desire to get out of the room.
It can happen when you’re alone, but it’s amplified when you perceive that there’s an audience.

Some people might argue that this feeling should be ignored completely.
Good luck to them.
The consequences of your actions should concern you; you should consider the ramifications before doing something.
This consideration can make you hesitate the next time, and that hesitation plays an important role in keeping you safe.
It should make you double-check your plans, but not paralyse you with fear while frozen on the sidelines.
It can be like Two Factor Authentication – do I really want to make this joke at work? Should I post this video online?
Am I about to take an expensive action that might bite me (or someone I care about) later?

The catch is, cringe is often the unlisted ingredient in a lot of good advice.
Yes you need to buy the equipment and learn the process, but then you need to sit with cringe while your work develops.
Cringe is going to be around forever, so you’re going to need a policy around it.
The policy can’t be “I will never make a mistake again”, nor can it be “I will never take a risk again”.
It will need to be more nuanced.

An Unspoken Second Goal

When you talk to younger people, or people your age who are refraining from taking action, you realise they are holding on to two goals at once.
The spoke goal is usually straightforward, perhaps they want to grow a business, start a channel, develop a craft.
The unspoken goal is less reasonable: I have to look cool the whole time I’m learning to do it.
When you dig into what they mean, cool means effortless, talented, hard to criticise and impossible to feel sorry for.
So when they encounter advice on the first goal, it usually comes with a recipe that instantly fails the second test.
In order to get good at something, you’re likely going to look uncool.
For a lot of people, that price is too high.
In some cases, people spend thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to get what they want and avoiding looking uncool.

The Dose Makes The Poison

Too much cringe will prevent you from doing anything new or unknown.
Full aversion to cringe will keep you small, and controversially does not feel good either – deep down you know you should be doing more.
That’s why we need to find the right dosage – the amount that can be effective without hitting you with undesirable side effects.

What works well is the “microdose” – an amount small enough to change your state, without knocking you around.
It’s just enough to “take the edge off”, but not so much that you lose perspective.
The term is usually used for other mind-altering substances, like a tech bro using small amounts of psychedelics to boost their creativity at work.

If you’ve seen The Princess Bride, you’ve seen the benefit of taking small amounts of poison – it builds up a resistance, almost an immunity.
Eventually you can tolerate a decent amount, which would knock over your untrained peers.

“You Can’t Fatten A Pig On Market Day”

While Westley might have saved himself by intentionally drinking poison alongside his rival, the real work happened months in advance.
The same goes for Cringe – if we’re going to build up a tolerance, it will take some time.
Frequent small doses, with time to recover in between.
Occasional large doses will make you ill, it needs to be regular and controlled for the effect to work.
You can even see people practicing “rejection therapy” – intentionally going out to get rejected, inoculating themselves against fear.

An entrepreneur needs the same thing; in order to make massive progress, they probably needed a consistent effort over weeks and months, rather than a massive sprint that will change everything.
50 posts on social media spaced over 3 months.
20 customer interviews over 2 months.
10 iterations of their product, tested every few weeks.
In theory, generating 50 posts in a weekend should yield the same results, but rarely is that the case.
You missed the thinking and development in between posts.
This is also why a founder can’t outsource the cringe to someone else, they need to sit with it and push through it, or else it will pop up in other ways that debilitate your momentum.

Practical Tips For Microdoses

This is as much about mindset and expectation as it is about forming new habits.
They say the formula for happiness is:

Happiness = Reality – Expectations

Therefore, lower expectations can feel as good as improving your reality.
Here are some useful concepts:

Break the work into baby steps – what are the specific tasks that you’ll need to learn and perform each week?
Work in batches – make a lot of something at a time, with variations that don’t feel like big risks. It’s easier to make things as a set and then judge them as a set.
Budget for failure – aim for a certain percentage of successes and failures. Too much failure is a warning sign, but having no failures probably suggests you’re playing it too safe. 7 wins out of 10 is a great result. 1 job interview out of 10 applications is a great result. 1 viral piece of content out of 50 is a great result.
Look for examples of what you consider to be “good enough”. Find people who are a few steps ahead of you whose work you admire. If you can’t find any, what does that say?
Separate the two headspaces of “Dreaming and Creating” and “Editing and Judging”. They are both valuable but they are different lenses. Another reason to work in batches.
No final showdowns. Don’t let one event or piece of work be a “make or break” moment. Always have the next few iterations in mind, so that no failure wipes out your momentum.
Put yourself in rooms where you are in the lower-middle level of performance. People love telling you to be the dumbest in the room but this can trigger your nerves. Find smart peers.
Microdosing the making of something is slightly different to microdosing the process of presenting something. You can be a genius but then seize up when you’re talking into a microphone, spotlight in your eyes, mouth suddenly dry. Find reasons to practice presenting in public, starting with small groups.
Stick to a schedule irrespective of how you feel. Amateurs do it when they feel like it, professionals do it when they DON’T feel like it – that’s what the money is for.
Commit to a quantity goal, not a quality goal. You are a terrible quality judge right now, but I bet you can count the quantity of work you’ve produced.
It helps to have something as a reward or distraction immediately after doing the most vulnerable work. This takes your mind off the work, so that you don’t overthink it and resent the process.

Cringe is inevitable

You’re going to be doing cringe-inducing work no matter what, but especially when joining a company or creating a startup.
The work isn’t always that hard, but it requires you to create content, talk to customers, speak at the events, and be the face of the business.
If you put in the work, if you start microdosing early, then you can handle the poisonous tasks that would have wiped out your peers.
You can choose between the pain of the work or the pain of regret.
Even if you avoid cringe for yourself, it might make you envious to see other people push past it and achieve success.

If you want evidence that it’s inevitable, as well as evidence that it gets better, here’s a good test:
Go look at the early work of your favourite people.
Their first drafts, the work that got them the job that got them to where they are now.
The post with 8 likes, the small audience, the lack of polish.
What advice would you have given to them at this stage?
And should that same advice be given to you today?

Microdosing Cringe