It Is Okay to Be Seen Climbing Cringe Mountain

At a recent professional conference, I crossed paths with a colleague I had not seen since 2012. In the decade and a half that followed our last meeting, our careers took vastly different paths. As we caught up, our conversation turned to my recent activity on LinkedIn. He winced slightly and said, Oh, you post so much. I would never do that. I prefer to remain low key.

His reaction stayed with me. It was not just a passing comment on social media habits. It was a window into a deeply seated cultural attitude toward work, visibility, and achievement. For a long time, I lived in that low key space too. For most of my career, my labor was intentionally invisible. I spent years supporting leaders, writing opinion editorials under other names, and crafting the institutional voices of organizations, including the United States government. My job was to be the scaffolding, unseen and unrecognized, while others stood in the spotlight.

But as I enter this next stage of my career, I have realized that staying invisible is no longer an option. To figure out my next step, I must cultivate and demonstrate my skills in real time. That means writing publicly, communicating raw ideas, showing how to break down organizational silos, and building programs from scratch.

This process requires me to do something deeply uncomfortable: I must be seen trying.

To some, this active visibility looks like vanity. It looks like what the internet calls climbing Cringe Mountain. It is the act of posting your thoughts, sharing your milestones, and admitting that you are proud of your work. But why does showing our work feel so uncomfortable to others? Why do we label visible effort as cringe?

To understand this discomfort, we have to look beyond personal preference and examine our cognitive biases. Your colleague's preference to remain low key is not just a personal choice. It is a protective shield against a very real social penalty. This penalty is explained by the ground breaking research of Dr. Chia Jung Tsay, an Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at University College London.

In her widely cited research on the naturalness bias, Dr. Tsay investigated how we evaluate talent and effort. Her studies revealed a profound paradox. When asked, most people state that they value hard work, discipline, and striving over innate talent. We claim to love the underdog who works eighty hours a week to master a craft.

However, when Dr. Tsay measured actual behavior and decision making, she found the exact opposite.

In one experiment, she presented professional musicians with two identical musical performances. The only difference was the backstory. One performer was labeled a natural, possessing innate talent from a young age. The other was labeled a striver, someone who achieved success through years of rigorous practice. Despite hearing the exact same audio, the expert evaluators consistently rated the natural as more talented, more employable, and more likely to succeed.

Dr. Tsay replicated these findings across other fields, including business and entrepreneurship. When investors listened to identical business pitches, they overwhelmingly preferred the founders who were framed as naturals over those framed as strivers.

This is the naturalness bias. We say we value effort, but we secretly prejudice ourselves against those who have to work for their success. We prefer the illusion of effortless perfection. We want the genius to emerge fully formed, without ever having to see the messy, sweaty practice sessions.

This research explains why climbing Cringe Mountain feels so risky. When we post about our achievements, our learning processes, or our ongoing projects, we are exposing our striving. We are admitting that we did not just wake up with these answers. We are showing the work. To a culture infected by the naturalness bias, showing your work is the ultimate social sin because it shatters the illusion of effortless expertise. Staying low key is a way to protect ourselves from being judged as strivers. If people never see you try, they can imagine that whatever you achieve is the result of pure, natural genius.

But this safety comes at a massive cost, especially for those of us who mentor others.

In my current role, I work closely with students. These young people are entering a world dominated by curated feeds and polished outcomes. They are paralyzingly afraid of failure because they rarely see anyone try and fail in public. They see only the final, shiny product. They assume that if they have to struggle, they must not be good enough. They internalize the naturalness bias and use it to silence themselves.

If I hide my own journey to preserve a low key reputation, what signal am I sending to them?

By refusing to climb Cringe Mountain, we validate the idea that effort is something to be ashamed of. We teach our students that they should only speak when they have achieved flawless success. But growth does not happen in the shadows of effortless perfection. Growth happens in the public arena, where we are willing to be seen making mistakes, testing hypotheses, and learning from failure.

Over the last eleven months, I have launched several new initiatives. Many have succeeded beautifully. Some have not worked at all. But the moments where things fell short have been my greatest teachers. Sharing those moments, along with my successes, is not an act of ego. It is an act of pedagogical leadership. I want my students to see me try, fail, pivot, and try again. I want them to know that the cringe of being visible is a necessary tax we pay for growth.

But let us challenge a common defense mechanism we often use when confronted with this discomfort. We often tell ourselves, I am not posting for you, I am posting for myself.

If we are honest, that is a convenient self delusion. If we were truly only posting for ourselves, we would keep a private journal. The moment we hit publish on a public network, we are engaging with an audience. We are posting for others. But the shift in mindset is not about denying that we want to be seen; it is about changing why we want to be seen. It is moving from seeking empty validation to offering a transparent blueprint. We post to model the process.

So, to my former colleague, and to anyone else who finds public striving uncomfortable: I understand your hesitation. The naturalness bias is a powerful force, and staying low key is a comfortable place to hide. But I am choosing to step out of the shadows. I am choosing to show my work, to celebrate my victories, and to own my failures.

I will gladly keep climbing Cringe Mountain. The air is clear up here, and the view of the future is far too good to miss.