Let’s say you want to be a DJ. You’ve done some DJing for friends, you’ve gotten good at the craft, and you’re ready to go pro. Your goal is to be invited to a mainstream festival stage and get offered tens of thousands of dollars.
You start to put some feelers to your family and friends. Unfortunately for you, the only DJ gigs within arm’s reach aren’t so great. Weddings, community center events, restaurants, street festivals, and graduation ceremonies.
When you say yes to one of these gigs, you realize you need to load, transport, and unload all of the equipment yourself. Nobody cares about the music you like. They care more about the top 40 songs that you find distasteful. You wonder if anybody would notice if you put a Spotify playlist on and pretended to DJ.
You have bumped up against the wall of cringe. What do you do?
The wall of cringe applies beyond DJing, of course. You want to be a professional freelance writer, and the only writing gigs you can find pay $25 per post—well below minimum wage—and are about a topic that bores you to tears. When you consider how a New York Times editor would think, you face the wall of cringe.
You want to start a marketing agency, and the only projects available are for boring small businesses who don’t have much of a creative vision, a boring brand, and often a very limited budget. Did Ogilvy need to do this? “No, of course not, I’m better than this!” you yell at the wall of cringe.
You want to show up to your community in the hopes of drumming up business opportunities, and the most effective way to do that on your current budget is to get on social media and start shooting vlogs. Great—so not only will you need to break down this wall of cringe, you’re inviting people to watch you do it.
Can you do it? Can you stop being cool long enough to take action and make progress? Can you start off doing a skill badly, knowing that you’ll eventually get good? Do your friends stay cool and just laugh at people, or are they also willing to be as effective as they need to—even if it means being cringe?
There’s a good chance that you’ll need to do some of the stuff you cringe at—maybe all of it, even—in order to get where you need to go. That’s often just what it takes.
There is no escaping the wall of cringe. It’s there in order to separate the people who are willing to do what it takes to achieve their goals, and people who aren’t.
The most popular recording artist in the world can offer some consolation. “No matter how hard you try to avoid being cringe, you will look back on your life and cringe retrospectively. Cringe is unavoidable over a lifetime,” Taylor Swift says. “Even the term cringe might someday be deemed cringe. I promise you, you’re probably doing or wearing something right now that you will look back on later and find revolting and hilarious. I can’t avoid it, so I don’t try to.”
The only solution is to build your muscle for doing effective things that are also cringe. Leave your cool friends behind, and get used to breaking through the wall of cringe. What waits for you on the other end is worth it.
P.S., Related: When Donald Glover was asked what advice he’d give to his younger self, he says, “Simp hard for life. Be a total simp and a total try-hard, and love that about yourself.”