People like cool. They like to be cool and they like other people to be cool. Why do we like cool? I believe cool may have an ancestral purpose to signal that everything is alright in the group. If no one is losing their shit we can go about our efforts with calm. For an individual, to be cool has an ‘I’m part of the group’ calming effect.
What if you want to do more than your group? What if you want to achieve more to have access to the best resources and mating opportunities? You’re likely to seem uncool. You’re going to make them feel like suddenly you disagree with the group. If the group feels shunned they will shun you back. For some people being outside the group is devastating, and for good reason. In ancient times if you were pushed outside the group you were doomed. You’ve heard of being banished right? Sounds crazy today, but it might as well have been a death sentence.
Sometimes we see someone do something amazing and we might say ‘wow, that’s cool!’ How does that align with the previous perception of cool? Maybe because we identify with it. It might be that someone did something exceptional from our group, but we feel a part of it. It wasn’t done against us, it was done with us or in a nonchalant manner as if it could be done by anyone in the group.
What I want to dig into here though is how cool should we strive to be? Is it important that I maintain group norms? Am I reliant on a group for survival? No, not really, American society at least has built in quite a few safety nets for those that find themselves alone. In fact the laws and economy encourage Americans to be quite independent and therefore not have to stay cool, but we mostly stick to our groups anyway. We like our groups and we don’t want to be shunned even if it doesn’t mean death.
Would you consider Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, or Mark Zuckerberg cool? No, I wouldn’t either, but there’s no doubt they’ve done enviably well. So know where you stand with cool. Are you going to stay a low blade of grass so no one ever judges you or sees you as a threat? Or are you going to escape your group’s sphere by being really different and maybe succeeding or maybe not? I like the idea of quietly mastering a craft, making small repeatable improvements, and building toward a point where you break free of the gravitational pull of your group with a product that is widely regarded as special. If it’s done just right your group might think it was cool.
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