The best part of the world is there are so many people. Most people you meet will have never met you before and you will never even see them again.
This means you can test out whatever identity you want. Nobody knows anything about you but how you present yourself. You have no set self. You can be whatever stereotype your culture has like a nerd or jock or make up a new one since they are all made up anyway.
When you go to a job interview, you can present yourself as whatever you like too. Maybe you are a self-made social media master or a tech-savvy guru. Yes it is true, you have to have some amount of skills. But even more important is simply knowing all the right buzzwords. You can tweak this by simply going on more and more interviews. At some point, you will know how to talk like the job you are seeking.
Unfortunately, there may be a limited number of companies to interview where you live and you may actually want to apply at that job or with that interview later in life. Several interviewers refused to interview with me again a year later. I must have really bombed those interviews. But that’s okay. I eventually found a job.
This is really great for start-ups though. This is why your start-up can “launch” dozens of times with different pitches and ideas. There are so many media outlets and potential customers it gives you so much freedom to test things out.
This is pretty much the playbook for how comics test out their material. They go on the road for years trying a joke 10 different ways. They might try with a different tone, different emphasis, different words, or they may just do it the same way and see if that particular audience or something else was the issue.
The point is you have a lot more freedom to test than you think. The embarrassment of messing up is minimal and temporary. It is also important not to give up as that testing phase is the reason you get good.
Jerry Seinfeld sums it up nicely
