Learn to Love the Moat of Low Status
5th July 2025
When you start learning or doing almost anything interesting, you will initially be bad at it, and incur a temporary penalty in the form of looking a little dumb. You will probably sound awful at your first singing lesson. If you publish writing on the internet, your first piece will not be your best work.
My husband calls this the “Moat of Low Status,” and I have gleefully stolen the phrase because it’s so useful. It’s called a moat because it’s an effective bar to getting where you’re trying to go, and operates much like a moat in the business sense — as a barrier to entry that keeps people on the inside (who are already good at something) safe from competition from the horde of people on the outside (who could be).
The Moat is effective because it’s easy to imagine the embarrassment that comes from being in it. It’s so vivid, it looms so large that we forget the novel upsides that come from transcending it. Easy to imagine the embarrassment from your first months of singing lessons, because you’ve faced embarrassment before. Harder to imagine what you’ll sound like as a trained singer, because that’s never happened to you before.
“Learn by doing” is the standard advice for learning something quickly, and it’s what I try to follow. But it’s hard to learn by doing unless you first learn to love the Moat. It’s embarrassing to learn by doing, whether you are trying to learn a language by embedding yourself with native speakers or learning to climb by falling off a wall at the gym over and over again.