Find Your Metaphorical Cheerleaders
To achieve more, surround yourself with the people who will help you overcome your personal inertia 👯
Hi there!
You’re reading issue #6 of Light Gray Matters, and this is Étienne, writing the newsletter in advance on Tuesday, for once.
Two weeks ago, I wrote about ambition; last week, I wrote about communities. Today we bridge these two topics together, and this leads us to…
Cheerleading.
Not literal cheerleading as a sport/art form/extracurricular activity/whatever it actually is. Though now that I mentioned it, I’m growing kind of curious. Such a bizarre cultural practice, when you think about it. Very American. Did you know (yes I’m reading the Wikipedia article right now instead of writing) that organized cheerleading used to be an all-male activity, and appeared in the late 19th century? That female cheerleading started only in 1923, and became the majority in the 1970s? That it spread outside the US only in the late 1990s and early 2000s?
Anyway. Let’s talk about metaphorical cheerleading.
It’s fairly obvious that having friends and family who believe in you is, well, great. Pretty much nobody has a perfect assessment of their own skills, with underconfidence being more common than overconfidence. So when the people whom you trust say you’re good at something you want to do, it’s like having a nice push in the back, or wind filling your sails: it drives you forward.
But what if you’re good at something, but neither you nor your friends know? What if it’s unclear even to you what your ambitions are?
A good metaphorical cheerleader is someone who not only supports you in your choices and gives you help when you need, but also makes you go further than you had thought possible.
In Friendly Ambitious Nerd, Visakan Veerasamy writes:
[Ambition is] about recognizing that your own imagination is a bottleneck that limits the amount of good you can create in the world.
Most people are able to do much more than they’re doing. We tend to get stuck in certain patterns, and then we forget about the other patterns we could be following instead. We’re very susceptible to inertia.
A cheerleader is someone who helps you overcome inertia.
Good teachers are cheerleaders. They help kids overcome the inertia of their upbringing.
Good friends are cheerleaders. They help their friends overcome the inertia of everyday life.
Good communities function as cheerleaders too. When a group is selected for certain qualities, it can provide a safe environment for the growth of ambition. In the best cases, it can give birth to scenius—genius embedded in a scene, i.e. a “small group of people loosely-but-truly aligned on something,” in the words of Visakan Veerasamy.
And then, when you’re in a supportive community, it seems the inertia disappears, because there’s always someone in the group who’s willing to push you forward.
So. Think about your metaphorical cheerleaders. You probably have some already. But if you don’t, or if you feel the ones you have aren’t quite cheering you enough to overcome inertia, get out there and hunt.
I’ll strive to be a cheerleader too. Leave a comment, or contact me on Twitter or wherever you like, and I’ll do my best to make the wind fill your sails.
With my best Christmas wishes, I remain
Encouragingly yours,
Étienne
Another plug for my salon!
It’s coming up very soon! On Sunday, December 27 in the morning (if you’re in North America as I am), I’m hosting my debut Interintellect salon about cultural evolution. It’s open to everyone who loves quality discussion, and it’s going to be glorious.
Does anyone click those buttons I always put at the end? Whatever, they’re here, do whatever you want with them: