It’s Time To Stop Being Too Cool For School

In one of her books, Jen Sincero writes about a concept I am (unfortunately) very familiar with: Being too cool for School.

What Jen means by this is the resistance towards tried-and-true methods, towards expressing certain desires or goals. You can -defintely in my case- put the eyerolling at people, the ‘I’m too cool for X and I’m too cool for Y’ on social media stuff in that category.

It’s not a huge problem, because I do well enough for myself while maintaining my air of ‘I don’t give a fuck about all of this’. But it has also held me back in some ways.

All the things that I make (made) fun of that people around me were doing has resulted in them getting more revenue, getting a bigger audience, more experience. Putting yourself out there, however uncool the self-marked cool kids might think it is, leads to good things.

Of all my Internet friends I have the least pull, the least followers. Many people who started after me have surpassed me in numbers, revenue, opportunities. I’m not bitter about that; these people all worked really hard and they did the things I thought I was too cool for.

Afraid of putting myself out there, but framing it like I was just royally too cool for it.

But there are things I want to do, that I want to ask people for, that I want to get to.

And I have to unlearn the ‘coolness’ that is actually nothing more than fear.

I’m a much more fearful person than I seem. And I think I have a lot of unlearning to do about this attitude if I want to keep pursuing a career as a writer.

Because that is what I really want to do and that includes parts of putting myself out there, marketing and promoting myself in ways that I have always deemed myself too cool for. And opening up and showing some more vulnerability about my goals and dreams to readers and people who follow me on social media.

Because the only thing I’m too cool for is fighting on the Internet. I’m trying to be more open to trying the things I actually haven’t been doing because I was afraid. Afraid of judgment, what people would think, what if it fails, what if I bomb, etc etc.

So I’m going to try to ‘not be too cool for school’ anymore.

As one of my online friends Lenneke has written before: It’s okay to talk about what you want, and it is okay to ask for help. So here and there I might ask for some help.

Thanks for reading, I love you for still reading my blog when everything is Instagram and YouTube. I’ll be here pretty much forever I think, and I hope you’ll stick with me.

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