There's another attack in Seattle. Somebody's saying somebody wearing a MAGA hat. I haven't seen that yet. Will you be embarrassed if you're wrong? I'm generally not embarrassed when I'm wrong about anything. I was gonna do a Periscope about how to not be embarrassed and how to not feel shame. It's the reaction to it. Hmm. Yeah, I'll probably give you a separate Periscope on how to avoid shame and embarrassment.

I'll give you, well, maybe I can make it quick. I'll give it to you right now. So this is how to avoid shame and embarrassment. These are just a few tips.

Number one, try to be good at something. It doesn't matter what it is. You could just have a good character. You could be helpful. It doesn't have to be a world-class skill, but you know, you could be a good parent. You could be a good student. It's not a very high bar, but try to be good at something. Because then if you fall on your face doing something else, you won't say to yourself, "Oh my God, I'm a gigantic loser and everything I do is bad." So you need a few things in your arsenal that you can say, "Okay, I'm bad at this or I messed up on this, but I'm clearly not a bad person because I can do other things well and I have good character or whatever it is." But be good at something. That gives you a little protection.

The next thing is it's a learned ability. The ability to withstand shame and embarrassment is completely learned. Not completely learned, but it's very learnable. And the way you do it is you put yourself in situations where you will absolutely feel a little bit embarrassed but it won't hurt you.

I took the Dale Carnegie course. Somebody mentioned earlier here. And one of the exercises was you would do something embarrassing in front of the class. Now even though it's a small group and you get to know them pretty well, maybe 25 people, the advice you get is you do... Here's what we did. This was many years ago. I'm sure they don't do the same exercise. But they make you talk like you're at least... The men, they would make the men talk like a weird hillbilly. A woman, they didn't use the word hillbilly, but you would have to go in front of the class and you'd say something like this. This is a bad example of it, but they'd say, "I am Scott. My name is Lug." You know, and you would just go way over the top in acting like somebody who was a different gender or something that would be weird and uncomfortable. And there's no way you could do it well. So the exercise by its nature was something nobody was going to do in an elegant, respectful way. You just couldn't do it. You were gonna look like an idiot and you were gonna do it in front of the class and everybody would do it. So all 25 people would have to get up and embarrass themselves.

And even though it's a controlled, safe environment, you still feel it. You still feel embarrassed because we're just wired that way. But you do it a few times and then the class simply doesn't care. They just don't care about you. They're thinking about themselves. They're thinking about what they had for breakfast. People don't really care about you embarrassing yourself. And once you go through the cycle enough times, you realize, hey, I've embarrassed myself 15 times this week and nothing's different. My coffee tastes the same. I still have my job. My loved ones are exactly the same. Look at all the ways I've embarrassed myself. Nothing changed. Nothing physical changed. It was all in my mind.

And it's never enough simply to just tell somebody that like I'm telling you. So the fact that I'm just explaining it won't help you a bit. You have to actually go and put yourself in positions where you are guaranteed to be embarrassed but in safe ways. Because you'll still feel embarrassed and then you just get used to it after a while.

Can you imagine the number of times I've been criticized in my 30 years of public life? You know, every single day, lots and lots of times. How many times have I sent a tweet with a typo or just a word spelled wrong? Whether, yeah, I won't even call it a typo because that's letting me off the hook on being embarrassed. But sometimes I just spelled a word wrong in public. I'm a professional writer and I'll spell a word wrong and then tweet it out and a quarter of a million people will see it. Should I be embarrassed by that? Maybe some people would, but do I? It's hard to block the right people here.

Somebody says never embarrassed equals a narcissist. So here's another tip for avoiding embarrassment. If you're hung up on who is or is not a narcissist, then you don't understand ego. If you think ego is who a person is, then you're also going to think that if they are not embarrassed they might be a narcissist. But none of this is about who you are. If you do it right, your ego is just a tool and you can ramp it up and you can ramp it down.

A good time to ramp up your ego is if you're going in for a job interview or you're in some kind of athletic competition. It's good to get your confidence as high as you can in those cases. But if you're going into some other situation, let's say you're meeting the parents of your boyfriend, girlfriend or fiancé or something, you probably don't want to go in looking like a narcissist. So you want to dial it down.

You see the president doing this all the time, by the way. He dials it up and dials it down. So the tip is, if you're asking the question, "Hey, is somebody who is not embarrassed, are they a narcissist?" If you're even asking that question, then you're seeing the world in an unproductive way. The real question is, if all of you accused me of being a narcissist, does that embarrass me? Nope. Because first of all, I happen to have a better insight about myself and whether it's true or not, I wouldn't care. Because I can use my ego as a tool. If I crank it up and you say, "Hey, you're a narcissist," I don't care. Because what I need to do, I crank it down and then somebody will say, "Well, you're a very humble person." And either of those will be true. I'm neither the humble person when I ramp it down nor am I the narcissist when I ramp it up. I'm not those people. I'm a person who understands the ego is a tool and I move it where it needs to be to get me the best result.

So once you start thinking of it that way and it's not who you are, it's just how you manage your confidence, that's a more productive way to look at it.

Another way to avoid or reduce your shame or embarrassment is to use the imagination and to imagine yourself on your deathbed. So this is the deathbed imagination technique. So you get embarrassed and you're like, you know how sometimes you're just red and you're sweaty and you're super embarrassed. Say to yourself, okay, imagine yourself decades in the future and you're on your deathbed. Are you gonna be thinking about that? Are you gonna be thinking about that day that you were embarrassed? You are not.

In fact, ask yourself how many of your past embarrassments are you thinking about right now? Personally, none. Zero. That's how many past embarrassments I'm thinking about right now. So one of the great things about the way humans are designed is that they forget a lot of stuff. So however embarrassed you are at any moment, you should know with certainty that you'll get over it and you don't have to do anything special to do it. There's nothing you have to do to get over it. It just goes away.

So you just think yourself into the future and say, oh, if I do absolutely nothing special, this problem that I'm feeling just goes away. And that will actually make it or help diminish it in the near term because you know it's not a problem. The way our brains work is that when we're worrying about something at the moment, like let's say you're feeling shame at the moment, what you're really doing is worrying that that feeling is going to continue. And when you tell yourself it never does, it allows you to minimize it at the moment because you're not really worried about the moment. Because the moment is already past. How long is a moment?

So if you say I feel embarrassed at the moment, the moment is gone. What you were really worried about was the next moment and the next moment and the next moment. And the one thing you could say about the next moments for sure is that you will be less embarrassed. So the future looks good when you're embarrassed. Actually, when you're embarrassed, the future looks great because it's gonna be better than whatever you're feeling right now. Guaranteed. Pretty much always does.

So those are a few tricks. You know, I've talked about the simulation theory way too much. The idea that we're not necessarily an original species but we might be a computer simulation created by some other species. And the argument there, you mostly if you've heard it by now, is that if there is ever a species that can create a simulation, they'll probably create more than one. So the odds that you're the original and not one of the many copies of sims is very low.

So sometimes I tell myself, what if I'm just a simulation? What if I'm just software? Is this feeling that I'm having, the feeling of embarrassment, is that me? It's not gonna last. It's not who I am. It's not me. It's just transient. And you can actually just think your way past it by saying I seem to be whole. There's nothing wrong with me. My hands, my legs, my body, I can still eat. There's just no impact from any of these thoughts I'm having. So you could sort of think yourself up to, instead of being your ego and your ego just got beat up, you're not the thing that got beat up. You're not that thing. So stop thinking of yourself as the thing that just got beat up. You are some kind of entity, whether you're a simulation or not. You're something bigger than that event. That event was not terribly important to you.

So those are some techniques. Someone says I always get embarrassed. Practice. So if you always get embarrassed, run toward it. Don't run away from embarrassment. If you feel embarrassed, if you're feeling embarrassed on a regular basis, run toward it.

And yeah, and here's a little tip for those of you who feel embarrassed about stuff. Every time you feel embarrassed, you become more protected because you go through the experience of being embarrassed and then however long it takes, you know, a few hours or a few days, you're over it. You're just over it.

What if you make an important mistake? Well, I'm big on apologies and fixing things. In fact, one of the main ways that I define character is not by mistakes. I do not define character by what mistake you made. I define character partly by what you did about it. So if I were to judge any of you by your mistakes, well, you're all a terrible bunch of people because you've all done horrible things. Yeah, you haven't killed people necessarily, but you've all made mistakes. Probably most of you have lied. Some of you have omitted information. You've done selfish things. We've all done some bad stuff.

But if you make a mistake and then you atone for it, you know, you apologize, you restate your mistake so people know you understand your mistake, and then you do whatever you can do. Every situation is different, but you do what you can do to fix the situation. You pay somebody back. You promise to fix something. You talk to somebody. You apologize. Whatever it is in the situation. I definitely judge people by how they handle their mistakes. And that's the way you should judge yourself.

So here's another tip. You're probably going to judge yourself by a standard that you would judge other people by. Why wouldn't you, right? If your standard for judging character is the mistakes you made and the things you did that you should legitimately feel embarrassed by, if those are the things you judge who you are, you're probably judging other people that way too. That's not a good way to go through your life. Don't judge people by their mistakes. Judge them by what they do about them once they have been pointed out that there's a mistake.

So if I can think of situations in which I've done something, usually accidentally, that was just bad and I should be embarrassed about it, and I find that my level of embarrassment goes way down when I go toward it. In other words, I go right to the person that I harmed accidentally, directly apologize, directly state what the problem was, and directly say what I'm gonna do about it in the future. That's the Steve Jobs apology stack, if you will.

So the apology stack is you restate it so people know what it is, you know you're talking about the same thing and you're not trying to weasel out of it. So you state it in the most starkest, clearest way and then people go, okay, you get what went wrong here. Step one. Step two, you apologize for it in a way that sounds sincere because, you know, don't apologize if you don't mean it. And then you say what you're gonna do about it to make it better in the future. Can't fix the past. Can't fix the past. But you can do something about the future. So that's what I'll call the Steve Jobs apology stack.

Had to deal with an embarrassing problem. If you haven't heard this story, I tell it a lot. But when Apple had the antenna gate problem, when you held your phone, if your finger was in a certain place it blocked the antenna and the phone would drop its signal. What an embarrassing problem for a company that makes a phone you hold in your hand. It's made to be held in your hand and its specific flaw was that you couldn't hold it in your hand. It's the most embarrassing thing you could ever imagine for it. Well, I'm sure you could get something more embarrassing, but imagine how embarrassing that is as the person whose identity Steve Jobs is identified with this object. "Hey, I made a handheld object. I bet my company on it and the only time it doesn't work is when you hold it in your hand." How embarrassing would that be? Was Steve Jobs embarrassed? I'm not a mind reader. But look at the way he handled it.

He went on a conference call and he said some version of this, and I'm paraphrasing. He said all smartphones have problems, which was brilliant. He changed the frame so you could put it in context. And by the way, that's good for you too. If you're feeling embarrassed, put it in context. You're not the one person on earth who was embarrassed today. You're not the one person on earth who was ever embarrassed. You're living in a world where there's just embarrassment all over the place and most people don't care about yours. They think about their own, but they don't really care about your embarrassment.

And then he said we want to make it better for our customers and then he said what he was going to do about it. So if you handle your embarrassment in a proper way, that also helps you get past it.

Here's another fact that just helps you put things in perspective. And some of you have heard this. There's research that shows that the most loyal customer is not the one who had a good experience. The most loyal customer, and this is counterintuitive but you'll see how this fits in, the most loyal one is the one who had a bad experience, complained, and then you fixed it. When you fix somebody's bad experience, it bonds them to you.

So you should think, if you're on the other side of that equation and you know that you've done something embarrassing and bad and you need to apologize for it, your apologizing makes you a better person than if nothing had happened in the first place. Who would you trust? Somebody who messed up, sincerely apologized, understood the problem, and said what they were gonna do about it. Would you trust that person? I would. That's a person I would trust a lot. In fact, my opinion of that person's character would go way up and I wouldn't judge them by the original problem. I would judge them by how they handled it.

So those are a few techniques. Trump never apologizes. Yeah, in his case he's got a whole thing going on where he knows that if he starts apologizing he's never going to be done. Priests don't apologize. Is that true? I don't know. That may not be true.