Run towards discomfort
Also, a embarrassing story from my teenage years
I remember when "The Internet” arrived. There was a presence to it: ISPs sent you plastic CDs, your modem interfered with phone calls, your computer made strange noises as if summoning the daemons of the online world. Everything was slow and deliberate.
In that wonder, I found out about the word "tutorial”. First to learn Photoshop (version 6.0) then other creative apps like Dreamweaver or Flash. But then it hit me: I could add “tutorial” to anything and learn how to do it.
I was 14 or 15 and still oblivious to “what girls want”.
This would mark the beginning of a couple of awkward years.
I don't love selling.
As it is common with creative types, my natural inclination is to believe that good work and care for the craft sells itself.
Also worth nothing is how pervasive is the archetype of the poor genius artist. That should tell us something.
For the last couple of weeks, I've been intentional about promoting my work. I write about it and I share my posts. I even ask for testimonials from people that have worked with me (this is still hard for me).
What what keeps coming back to me, is that moment, in my youth when I googled (was it google yet?) "tutorial” + “girls”.
For a clueless adolescent the results screen was astounding.
Pages upon pages on tips on how to actually talk to girls and perhaps even date them. It could learn the steps and the strategies and stop being perplexed at basic human interaction. I dove right in.
At the end mostly it all boiled down to:
be confident
be funny
I was good at being funny (for my mates, which is a very different kind of funny) and could picture what being confident meant. So I turned up the funny and faked the confident.
Hilarity ensued.
For good two or three years I became a bit of insecure jerk, while being confused as to why some people saw me as a bit of an insecure jerk. The tips kinda worked on some level, but this was not a game I felt any good at.
Calibration of the "funny but not weird and confident but not insufferable” would take years.
Now, no more a clueless and girlfriend-less adolescent but more like an amused and understanding married man, I'm facing familiar feelings of awkwardness.
Only the theme is not charisma but promotion.
Promotion is still a skill I'm actively working on.
Because advice so often comes at you in short lists of tactics, tricks and machinations, it is easy to misunderstand it. To go overboard or to be too timid.
When I try to apply cookie-cutter (one has to start somewhere) promotion advice I feel the same unease that I've felt all those years ago. The content is different, but the shape of the discomfort rhymes.
And still, I must continue.
With every cold-email that is too long I get better.
With every LinkedIn post that tries to trick the algorithm I learn something.
With every blog post that is too long and perhaps arrives nowhere I hone my skill.
The biggest lesson I got from those online dating tutorials, opened on multiple firefox tabs, and sometimes listened to on my MP3 portable player was not about girls.
The biggest lesson was about patterns of growing out of absolute incompetence.
Back then I was important that I grasped how to connect with others. It was worth the effort of feeling strange for a while and coming at the other side improved for it.
Now, what is important is that I refine that skill of connection, this time with a subtly different purpose. I'll fell really queasy for a while and then I will not.
I know it is worth it.
Fun fact: I remain a bit on the awkward side, but now equipped with lived experience that lets me know that it isn't the end of the world to lean into the weird.
That makes me more confident than I've ever been.