Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough.
Alain de Botton
The meaning of the quote
Before LinkedIn launched in 2003, Reid Hoffman‘s engineers told him the site wasn’t ready. They wanted to wait until they had built a “contact finder” to help people track down who they wanted to connect with.
Hoffman asked if they could add it after the launch. They said yes, so he went live without it and decided to build it only if users clearly wanted it. When he told the story at Startup School in 2010, LinkedIn still hadn’t built it, because nobody needed it.
Hoffman turned that lesson into a rule. In the podcast Masters of Scale, in the episode Imperfect is perfect, he says:
“If you’re not embarrassed by your first product release, you’ve released it too late.”
Alain de Botton points the same idea at people instead of products. When you look back at last year’s version of yourself and cringe, the cringe is proof that you’ve changed. You know something now that you didn’t know then, and that new knowledge is what makes the old choices look clumsy.
If everything you said and believed 12 months ago still looks fine to you, that’s the warning sign. You’ve probably been standing still.
Dig out an old school essay or a video you posted years ago. You’ll spot the mistakes in seconds. You couldn’t see them back then because you didn’t yet have the eye for them.
Bruce Lee wrote something similar in the book Striking Thoughts, a collection of his notes published after his death:
“Life itself is your teacher, and you are in a state of constant learning.”
If life never stops teaching, last year’s you was a student halfway through the course. No wonder some of the answers look wrong now.
The quote doesn’t ask you to beat yourself up. The goal is to notice the gap between then and now and learn from it. Then let it go, because lying awake replaying old mistakes won’t teach you anything new.
Exercise:
Measure how far you’ve come
You can use the quote as a quick check on your own growth. Grab a notebook and give it 10 minutes.
- Write down 3 moments from last year that make you cringe.
It could be a message you sent or an opinion you were sure about. Pick the ones that still make you wince a little. - Next to each one, write what you know now that you didn’t know then.
That sentence is the lesson, and it’s also your proof that you’ve grown. - If you can’t find anything, pick 1 skill to work on this year.
Sign up for that class or ask for honest feedback at work. By next year, you’ll have something to cringe at.
Keep the notebook and read it again in 12 months. If this year’s notes make you wince too, you kept learning.
About the author
As a boy, Alain de Botton was so shy he could hardly look people in the eye. Born in Zurich in 1969, he was sent to boarding school in England at 8.
He studied history at Cambridge and philosophy at King’s College London, then started a PhD in French philosophy at Harvard, which he dropped to write for ordinary readers instead.
His first book, Essays in Love, came out in 1993 when he was 23 and went on to sell 2 million copies. Bestsellers like How Proust Can Change Your Life and Status Anxiety followed.
In 2008, he co-founded The School of Life in London, which teaches people how to handle work and relationships.
De Botton also has a cringe moment of his own on record. In June 2009, critic Caleb Crain gave his book The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work a harsh review in the New York Times. When Crain posted about it on his blog, de Botton left a comment underneath that read:
“I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make.”
Newspapers and book blogs picked up the comment within days. Soon after, de Botton told blogger Edward Champion he felt bad about the outburst. Asked what he would tell his past self, he said:
“Put this message in an envelope, not on the internet.”
His answer is step 2 of the exercise above. He looked back at who he had been a few days earlier and named what he knew now. Most of us get to do that in private, whereas de Botton had to do it in front of the whole internet.
5 years after the blog comment, Austin Kleon shared de Botton’s line in his book Show Your Work!, where you can find this quote next to Kleon’s advice to keep pushing yourself to become a student again.
Resources
- Show Your Work! by Austin Kleon (Book)
- Striking Thoughts by Bruce Lee (Book)
- Imperfect is perfect by Masters of Scale (Podcast)
- A kinder, gentler philosophy of success by Alain de Botton (YouTube)
- The School of Life (YouTube)
- Startup School: Reid Hoffman On The Burden Of Competition (Article)
- Alain de Botton (Wikipedia)
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