This post is an excerpt from my forthcoming book (and builds on a couple paragraphs in my original post on agency). I’ll be running a few excerpts here in the next couple months, in hopes of getting feedback on the kinds of content people are excited to see in the book (which is a signal about what to expand or scale back). Let me know what you think!
Fear of being temporarily low in social status stops human beings from living richer lives to an unbelievable degree.
It happens on the micro scale, when a dance party doesn’t get started because nobody wants to be the first person on the dance floor. It’s fascinating: When I see someone alone on a dance floor, letting loose, it’s clear that they’re not doing anything wrong. Even if they’re not dancing well, they’re doing a public service by inviting other people to join them. But most of us hesitate to be that person.
It happens on the scale of decades, when somebody dreams of becoming a songwriter but doesn’t ever write a full song, because they’re afraid of confronting their current lack of skill. They would rather be hypothetically good at songwriting — talented in their imaginary world — than actually bad on the way to being actually good.
When you start learning or doing almost anything interesting, you will initially be bad at it, and incur a temporary penalty in the form of looking a little dumb. You will probably sound awful at your first singing lesson. If you publish writing on the internet, your first piece will not be your best work.
My husband calls this the “Moat of Low Status,” and I have gleefully stolen the phrase because it’s so useful. It’s called a moat because it’s an effective bar to getting where you’re trying to go, and operates much like a moat in the business sense — as a barrier to entry that keeps people on the inside (who are already good at something) safe from competition from the horde of people on the outside (who could be).
The Moat is effective because it’s easy to imagine the embarrassment that comes from being in it. It’s so vivid, it looms so large that we forget the novel upsides that come from transcending it. Easy to imagine the embarrassment from your first months of singing lessons, because you’ve faced embarrassment before. Harder to imagine what you’ll sound like as a trained singer, because that’s never happened to you before.
“Learn by doing” is the standard advice for learning something quickly, and it’s what I try to follow. But it’s hard to learn by doing unless you first learn to love the Moat. It’s embarrassing to learn by doing, whether you are trying to learn a language by embedding yourself with native speakers or learning to climb by falling off a wall at the gym over and over again.
As a result, people often engage in theoretical learning even in domains where experiential learning is obviously faster. I encountered this in becoming a professional poker player. In poker, it’s possible to improve via theoretical learning — there’s lots of online content that you can passively absorb, and some of it is useful. But you really can’t become a successful player without playing a lot of hands with and in front of other players, many of whom will be better than you.
How do you get over the aversion, so you can get to the other side of the Moat?
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