Get Numb Before You Get Good - Commoncog
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This is part of the Expertise Acceleration topic cluster.
Learning Techniques
Get Numb Before You Get Good
By Cedric Chin
Table of Contents
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The first time I sent the Commonplace newsletter, I was terrified.<br>It didn’t make sense. I had been writing in public for a decade at that point, and I knew that sending a newsletter to my subscribers wasn’t materially different from publishing a blog post to a larger, more anonymous audience. And yet there I was, uncomfortable and scared and staring at the Mailchimp compose screen.<br>I had forgotten how it felt to do new things. Or more accurately: I had forgotten how it felt to start things with public stakes.<br>Perhaps you’ve felt this recently. Perhaps you’ve attempted to write a blog, or you’ve taken up knitting and are loath to post pictures of your first pair of socks online, or you dread your first pitch meeting and have over-prepped over the weekend. Or perhaps you were like I was: you’d gotten comfortable in your job, and without realising it you had neglected the fear of doing new things for a bit.<br>This wasn’t always the case. When we were teenagers, most of us regularly tried new things. I remember dimly the first time I published my first blog post — about 15 years ago — and how terrifying that felt. And I remember how wooden my limbs became right before my first Judo competition. I was scared of my opponent. Sensei could see it in my face. In both cases, I did it again and again until I felt numb.<br>I want to talk about the value of feeling numb here, because I think it’s easy to overlook it in the pursuit of expertise.<br>Where Does The Fear of Starting Come From?<br>Some activities don’t come with a fear of starting. Starting with competitive Starcraft in the comfort of your home, for instance, seems a lot less scary than going to a dance competition for the first time. And other things — like writing a blog post, building a business, or publishing an ebook — appear scarier.<br>Why is this the case? I think part of the reason is that certain activities require you to succeed (or fail) in public. Publishing a book or blog post exposes you to criticism in a way that playing Starcraft at Bronze doesn’t. Which begs the question: where does our fear of failure come from?<br>Publishing a book or blog post exposes you to criticism in a way that playing Starcraft at Bronze doesn’t.I'm going to sidestep the answer here, because the truth is that it doesn’t matter. There are as many reasons to fear as there are grains of sand on a beach. There are as many reasons to fear as there are personal hangups.<br>Perhaps you are scared because you’re a perfectionist and you don’t like showing the shitty things you make at the beginning. Or perhaps you’re afraid of being judged by an audience. Or perhaps you’re imagining a worse case scenario when (if?) you fail.<br>I’ll stop here. I won’t waste your time with stories about how I was afraid of failing in public — my reasons will differ from yours, because my hangups are different from yours. (But also, it doesn’t matter.)<br>Others have written about this phenomenon in greater detail than I have. Amy Hoy, for instance, has a good essay titled The Harsh Truth About Fear that talks about exactly this problem. Amy argues that whenever you ‘fear’ a launch, what you feel isn’t fear, but rather your ego getting in the way. Telling yourself that you are afraid is a way for your ego to get the sympathy it feels it deserves.<br>Amy’s essay is good, but her recommendations come from a place of tough love — which is to say that it might not be a good fit for everyone. (But also: it doesn’t matter.)<br>The reason your reasons don’t matter is because there’s a simple trick to get over the initial hump: keep doing the thing until you feel numb. If you just keep doing the new thing, the new thing eventually loses its sparkle. It becomes ‘just another thing I do’. In the case of Commonplace’s newsletter, it became ‘another thing I write on Tuesdays’. Ditto for blog writing, and podcasting, and public speaking.<br>It seems a little callous to say “reasons don’t matter”. Normally, I’d be cautious about recommending some action without sandwiching the advice with appropriate context. But it seems needlessly complex in this case. Sure, the way you convince yourself to ‘keep doing the thing until numbness comes’ may vary from person to person — Hoy recommends stripping away your ego; I remind myself that numbness will come — but the underlying action remains the same: just do the new thing. Do it until it doesn’t seem like some shiny scary activity. Do it until numbness comes.<br>Get Numb First<br>The corollary to this idea is that you can...