Giles' blog

Making a fool of yourself in public

On the Business of Software Blog, Neil Davidson recommends using your fear of making yourself look stupid by failing publicly as a way to motivate yourself to work as hard as you need to work on your startup. Sounds right to me. When I was in my early 20s I saw the mortality rates for smokers and decided that I would give up at the age of 30. In order to make sure that I stuck to that, over the years I told pretty much every one of my friends that I was going to quit then, which meant that I really could not back down. The result is that on the night of my 30th birthday party I quit, and (bar one or two particularly drunken evenings) I've not touched a cigarette since.

@misc{thomas2008may-making-a-fool-of-yourself-in-public,
  author       = {Thomas, Giles},
  title        = {{Making a fool of yourself in public}},
  year         = {2008},
  month        = may,
  howpublished = {Blog post},
  url          = {https://www.gilesthomas.com/2008/05/making-a-fool-of-yourself-in-public},
}