You need to be more afraid of wasting your life than embarrassing yourself.
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Embarrassment feels real. The consequences you imagine aren’t.
This essay is your wake-up call in case you’ve forgotten (the title is a popular cliche online). The idea of embarrassment can either make or break you.
If you fall for the lie of embarrassment, you’ll do nothing with your life. If you understand embarrassment, you’ll use it instead of letting it use you.
You should be looking for every opportunity you can to be embarrassed. Here’s why.
The art of daily embarrassment
I went to the pool with my kid last week.
I saw an old high school friend. I saw him look at me in a way I thought matched my energy of “Long time, no see, pal.” I attempted to say hi. He completely ignored me. My face went red. My 3 year old looked at me like I was a complete loser.
The guy left the pool a few minutes later because he was so disgusted at how much of a loser I was in his mind. I embarrassed myself.
The cool high school kids clearly think I’m an embarrassment. “All those motivational Instagram posts… who does this Tim guy think he is? A freaking philosopher?”
The next day a friend texted me and quoted my instagram post. He said it was so damn cringe. He made fun of it.
This is a daily occurrence.
To retire at 34 as a millionaire required this type of daily embarrassment. The only way to avoid this embarrassment would be to fit in, go back to being an office worker, and drive a Toyota Corolla. No f*cking way that’s happening.
Nobody tells you this:
Embarrassment is the price of getting everything you want in life and being free. There is no other way. You’ve been lied to.
Your heroes are all embarrassing failures
Apple co-founder Steve Jobs died from a treatable form of cancer because he spent 9 months doing acupuncture and drinking carrot juice to cure his disease.
Mozart was a massive loser. He constantly asked his friends and family for money because he couldn’t avoid getting into debt. They hated him for it.
Isaac Newton wasted 30 years of his life writing 1M words about the topic of alchemy. No one ever read them. After he died his family hid those words for years because they were too embarrassed to share them (the writing was that bad).
Napoleon lost the Battle of Waterloo because historians argue he had hemorrhoids that caused him so much pain he couldn’t sit his butt on a horse. Seems small. But if he had got on the horse and seen the battlefield properly, he would have made different decisions that likely would have left him victorious.
Friedrich Nietzsche is praised on X/Twitter and Substack as being a god of philosophy. People would eat his poop if they could. But he proposed to one woman, she told him to F off, then became single and pissed off for the rest of his life. While he was alive he only sold 300 copies of his writings. He paid to print the final part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra himself, and only about 40 copies were made.
Martin Luther King has a day named after him. He’s the mark of triumph, inspiration, and of a movement. Yet on the last night he was alive he allegedly, according to FBI records, cheated on his wife with two women while they all beat each other up.
Fyodor Dostoevsky is a famous novelist with untouchable ideas. Yet he gambled away every dollar he ever earned. He was a gambling addict. He signed up to write books with stupid deadlines he knew he couldn’t meet just so he could get some cash to fund some huge bet. His poor wife had to constantly pawn their belongings to feed their kids. She even pawned her wedding ring.
Even the people you worship had embarrassing, messy lives, and history remembers them for their work anyway. Your embarrassments won’t define you either.
One of the craziest acts of embarrassment you’ll ever see
7 years ago I did something completely wild.
I hit rock bottom after I lost my job. It took me years to lead a team of 16 account managers in the marketing field. I gave up my banking career to get the job. And I missed out on 6-figures worth of bank stock the bank owed to me.
6 months of unemployment and being told “a career gap means you’re sh*t” smacked me around. The levels of frustration, stress, and embarrassment peaked.
So I did something wild and posted this on LinkedIn.
*This is the hardest thing I’ve ever written on LinkedIn.
I was let go from my job earlier this year. The process of getting that job looked easy and like a dream. Everyone was high-fiving me when I got the gig.
It was my first leadership role in a long time.
Losing that job after only 7 months was embarrassing. That’s why I didn’t really tell anyone. I pretended I was still employed because the guilt of it was enormous…*
You can read the rest of the post here if you want. It went mega-viral. The point here is I did the unthinkable and leaned into the embarrassment of my situation. I admitted I’d lied, too, which was risky.
To this day, this post is the one that changed my life the most.
Every good person who entered my life saw this post and resonated with it. It showed people I was a real human and it removed that fancy influencer armor so many leaders on social media wear to try and look invincible.
Everything good that followed this incident is the result of embarrassing myself in a big way in front of millions of people. In the moment it felt like a huge risk. Looking back, it feels like the cheat code to an extraordinary life.
Most people hide their embarrassment.
They pretend everything is okay. So people assume they’re fine or they believe they’re saving face.
When you admit your embarrassment it helps others. It rallies people around you. And it shows people who you really are, which is what we’re all so desperately craving in a world of inauthentic content and fake celebrities.
People watch far less than you think. And when they do watch, honesty wins far more often than it loses.
The meme that changes everything
This meme is my favorite of all time.
Image credit: imgflip
It shows you in a visual way what embarrassment actually is.
You avoid situations that risk embarrassment because your mind, by default, loves to fantasize about the worst-case scenario. So your mind draws a version of hell, creates some scary boogie monsters, and places you in the middle in sheer terror.
But it’s a fake reality.
That’s what embarrassment does. It’s a delusion. It doesn’t serve you. 99% of people aren’t paying attention to you and your simple life. They’re busy with their own problems and won’t even notice if you lose a leg in a car accident.
Harsh but true.
The hidden cost of avoiding embarrassment
You can brush off the topic of embarrassment.
You can say “this doesn’t affect me” or “my situation is different, Timbo.” I’m warning you, though. There’s a huge cost if you do.
Writer Raj Shamani explains:
A person who avoids embarrassment will usually avoid growth too. The same situations that threaten your image are often the ones that expand your life.
The very actions that change your life are directly tied to the moments of embarrassment you’re avoiding. There is no getting what you want without a little personal risk. Easy opportunities don’t exist anymore. AI is driving extreme efficiency in every aspect of economics and our daily lives.
Pretty soon, all that will remain is doing hard things that AI can’t do. Being willing to be embarrassed is one of those hard things. It’s the moat.
Choosing growth sounds easy. It’s not.
It’s something most people avoid or delay until “someday” (mayday). People love the idea of change or doing hard things but the data shows they don’t actually do it.
Just ask people who sell education. 90% of students never open the education they paid for. Because the cost of change isn’t high enough to wipe out their need for comfort. So they stay the same. They stay stuck. And they don’t risk anything.
The growth opportunity comes with risk. You don’t know if you can do it. People might be watching you.
There’s personal risk. You might borrow money to do it and not be able to pay it back. You may not deliver results and people online could trash you for poor delivery.
Growth is a threat. Growth attacks you. Growth challenges your self-image.
And 99% of people do not want that mirror to reflect back at them who they really are. So they say they want change but don’t actually change.
Without threats there is no expansion.
You don’t lack the skills, information, or talent to get what you want. You lack the willingness to pay the price of entry in the form of embarrassment – and that’s a bitter pill to swallow.
Wasting your life is the nightmare you should be trying to avoid instead
People get so obsessed in their head about the possibility of embarrassment that they miss the real danger: wasting your life.
That’s the f*cking boogie monster. That’s what will hurt you. And it’s the norm.
Most people settle for second best. They commute to an adult daycare center to get told what to do by adults dumber than them. In return they get no time with family, a peanut salary, and a bunch of flowers when they retire at 65 and die 10 years later.
Settling for second best guarantees you live a small, forgettable life. It guarantees you miss most of the good opportunities. What you get for making this terrible, unconscious choice is deep regrets that haunt you. That feel like death.
I don’t know about you, but that’s scarier than the villain Jigsaw from the movie Saw (where the guy saws his leg off to escape).
The most likely possibility is you waste your life. Sorry.
That’s where mainstream society and the traditional path will lead you. It’s hard not to be tempted by comfort, safety, and fitting in. I fell for it for 10 years. What makes you think you won’t?
The solution to the problem must be extreme – and that’s to embarrass yourself.
The unconventional antidote to an embarrassing situation
I don’t want to sugarcoat embarrassment. There are trade-offs.
Writer Sahil Bloom has an interesting perspective: Increase your recovery speed. When the embarrassing thing happens or you fail and/or get rejected, focus on what you can control. Choose to recover faster.
No matter how hard you try you can’t completely avoid embarrassment, anyway. And there’s no point trying to. Instead, decrease the time between the embarrassment and the reset. Some people hold on to their embarrassments for a lifetime.
They never let go.
But it’s a better approach to drop your embarrassments in record time. I’ve found admitting them decreases that time further. When I got fired, I admitted it on linkedIn and recovered within a few weeks.
When I had $1.2M stolen from my digital wallet, I admitted it online and moved on, fast. I made it all back within a year.
When my long-term girlfriend left me I told every friend, family member, and work colleague. Then I asked them to introduce me to new women. Many of them did. I got married not long after and now have two daughters.
The faster you recover, the more your results compound.
If you want to succeed in life, you can’t give a f*ck about embarrassment.
That’s the harsh truth.
You’re obsessing over something you can’t control. And most people don’t see your embarrassment the way you do (if at all). What’s truly embarrassing? Nothing.
Embarrassment is a lie. It’s an obsession with yourself. You’re a human, you’re here on earth for a short time, and nobody is watching your moves. Embarrass yourself more often or run the huge risk of doing nothing with your life.
That’s the game you’re really living.
The idea of embarrassment was created to keep you small. To force you to fit in. To help you grow into a tall poppy so that you could be chopped back down again to size if you get too big or too successful. Do the opposite.
Risk embarrassment. Admit it. Learn from it. Recover fast. Take more risks.
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— Tim
