Learn to love the Moat of Low Status

It hurts, but less than you think

Illustration by Alexander Naughton

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!

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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?

My years of splashing around

I have often found it to be the case that the cruelty of others has done for me what I could not do for myself.

I experienced this in grade school, when the derision of other kids and teachers alike taught me to be self-contained and keep my own counsel, because there was no winning with them. This is how I learned I could be lonely and strange, and people could see it, and the world wouldn’t turn to ash.

I experienced it again in college, when I got doxxed on a pre-law message board and my appearance was picked apart by a bunch of trolls. This is how I learned that other people could notice the things I didn’t like about the way I looked, and gossip among themselves about them, and the world wouldn’t turn to ash.

Poker was the next level for this, because I so desperately wanted to be seen as good and clever — but the thing is, a lot of people hated me in poker. I’d made it a personal mission (in the pre-woke era) to draw attention to the poor way women were sometimes treated in the extremely male environment, which won me plenty of fans (unironically) and plenty of fans (ironically). So every time I played a hand badly, I knew one of the pros at the table might text their group chats about it, or put it on Twitter.

I didn’t exactly emerge unscathed from that environment — truth be told, I went a little crazy from all the attention. But I committed myself to the messy process of learning by doing, nevertheless. I got comfortable asking better players stupid questions, and improved much faster because I could benefit from their experience. I got comfortable misplaying hands on television, and got to benefit from the experience of the whole internet.

And I learned that people whose admiration I actually wanted could see me eat shit, and say so, and the world wouldn’t turn to ash.

One Weird Trick

Okay, but really, short of traumatizing yourself, how can you learn to thrive in the Moat, so you can experience the glorious upside?

The true secret is that getting over it means resolving yourself to not really getting over it. Unless you are truly emotionally strange, being in the Moat will hurt somewhat. You will feel embarrassed. There’s not a shortcut.

I realize this isn’t what self-help advice is supposed to sound like — I’m supposed to be able to offer you One Weird Trick for never feeling the sting of humiliation, a way to override the eons of evolutionary history that tell you it’s very bad to look weak in front of others.

But it’s not like that. I’ve written before about a hand I played so badly that there were news stories about it, but when I think back on it, I don’t actually remember the stories or the tweets or any of that. Instead, I remember the look on Christoph Vogelsang’s face when I flipped over my cards. It was a look that said, very plainly, “I have clearly overestimated you.” Sometimes, no matter how much you reconcile yourself to humiliation, it still pierces you to your core.

The One Weird Trick is … you just do the thing anyway. And the world doesn’t turn to ash.

Blooming, buzzing confusion

I don’t want to sound totally grim here — there are certainly silver linings and mitigations. For instance, it’s my experience that embarrassment and excitement are closely related. As we get older, our lives become increasingly routine, if we let them. We get more constrained and repetitive in our actions, and, as a result, our days get less memorable. We barely see life because we’re so good at walking the path of least embarrassment.

When you step into the Moat of Low Status, you also step away from the grinding of normalcy. On your first day of dance class, you don’t know how to move your body. Isn’t that exciting? You don’t know how to move your body. This thing you’ve been lugging around is now a whole new vehicle — it might move like a frenzied wolverine, or an indifferent spatula.

When you get past the flush of embarrassment in your cheeks, you might notice that you’re in a state of heightened awareness, with brighter colors and sharper lines. You’ve re-entered the state of childlike wonder where you don’t have adult concepts to mediate reality, what William James called “blooming, buzzing confusion.” Shame can be a golden ticket.

However, all this excitement can get overwhelming if you don’t have tools to deal with it. Here are some tactics that I find useful when I’m deep in the Moat:

• Attempt the basic move of mindfulness meditation: get curious about the tingling feeling of embarrassment in the body, rather than your mental stories about it or reactions to it. See if you can welcome it. Curiosity inverts resistance.

• Remind yourself that embarrassment is simply the feeling of breaking the rules, and you want to break your previous rules.

• Visualize the larger purpose. Yes, you have this feeling now. But it’s just one frame of the movie, part of the drama. The rest of the story involves you using your hard-won knowledge to live a fantastically interesting life.

And then there’s the real thing that gets me to do a lot of things I don’t want to do:

• Imagine the advantage you’ll have over all the people who let shame slow them down.

But none of these tactics will banish the feeling. You will still have to move through it.

In recent years, shifting from poker to biotech to philanthropy has meant repeatedly confronting situations in which I am the least-informed person in the room, at least in terms of domain-specific knowledge. Every time, I’ve had to reconcile myself to months of being a relative dumbass in a room full of experts, constantly asking them to explain basic concepts or terminology, exposing myself as not possessing knowledge they all take for granted.

I don’t always adore this. But I know this is what skill acquisition feels like. I know there’s no skipping the hot flush of embarrassment, or the blooming, buzzing confusion of newness. And I know there’s no one moment when those feelings dissolve into the assurance of mastery — but I know they do, gradually, eventually, slowly and then all at once. So, soon I’ll be good at this. I’ll be through the Moat. Then, I’ll find another one, hold my breath for just a moment, and jump in.

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