If You’re Scared of Looking “Cringe,” Please Watch This
In a Nutshell
Everyone starts cringe—early content, efforts, and passions always invite mockery from those afraid to care—but that's the path to mastery, as proven by the speaker's evolution from his first awful ad to $250M+ revenue empire and Guinness record. Document your journey unashamedly, even at rock bottom, because success demands deserving it through relentless iteration and feedback, not perfection from day one. Caring deeply is the opposite of cringe; fearing cringe is the real embarrassment.
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This is the first piece of content I ever made. This is the first ad I ever made. Fast forward today: we make 450 pieces per week. I broke the Guinness World Record for the fastest selling non-fiction of all time with $16 million in sales in a weekend. We own a portfolio of companies that did north of $250 million in aggregate revenue last year. In this video, I want to show you just how far anyone can come and not to judge your first chapter by someone else's 25th or thousandth chapter. Shout out to Don Misetti, who inspired me for making this. Here's one promise: you will be cringe.
Shame is breaking someone else's rules. Guilt is breaking your own rules. Cringe is secondhand embarrassment. Someone saying, "Oh, that's cringe," means "I'm embarrassed for them." But in reality, it's a defensive status play. Interpret it as: I'm beginning to change my status relative to other people or them, and therefore I'm on the right path. Whose rules are we breaking? Did we agree to their rules? If we set the rules, what outcome do those rules optimize for? A rule is an if-then statement. Is that true? How do we know that? And why does that matter?
People seeing you try hard will say, "Why are you taking this so seriously? Why do you even care?" But they've never cared about anything in their lives. When's the last time they took anything seriously? Never. And it shows. A guy came up to me and said he saw how hard I was trying with content, then bragged he'd outsourced all of it down to two hours a week. I said, "Yeah, it shows." He was trying to be cool about not trying hard, but it looked like he was losing.
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