Get Numb Before You Get Good
The article explores the concept that achieving mastery in a skill often requires desensitizing oneself to discomfort, fear, or frustration—becoming "numb" to negative emotions—in order to persist through the difficult early stages of learning and eventually reach proficiency.
Background
- Article by Cedric Chin (Commoncog), a blog about expertise, decision-making, and business for tech professionals.
- Core argument: to get good at a hard skill, you must first become "numb" to the discomfort of being bad at it. The emotional pain of conscious incompetence — knowing you suck — is why most people stop practicing.
- Draws on the "four stages of competence" model and deliberate practice research (Anders Ericsson). Key bottleneck: people get stuck in "conscious incompetence" because it hurts to fail in front of others.
- Examples include public speaking, sales, and coding. The remedy is not technique but emotional desensitization — doing the thing badly enough times that the fear fades.
- Relevant to founders, engineers, and managers who want to systematically improve but find themselves avoiding the painful early stages of practice.