Today I’m grateful for haircuts

I once heard someone important say the following…

“Fear is the surest indicator that what you’re about to do might just be great”

and I really internalised it. Well I never really acted on it personally but I at least dispensed it generously when asked for advice, so I guess I externalised it. Now I can’t even find the quote on Google, which hits me particularly hard considering my email signature is

Maybe I internalised it so much I actually made it up ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Either way, it doesn’t make it any less true.

My saying is applicable to the following situations:

• when you’re on the starting blocks pre-race
• when you go to a job interview
• when you’re about to get on stage
• when you’re walking up the steps to the beach about to see whether the 4 hour dawn drive was worth it
• when you get a haircut

If you’ll bear with me I’d like to get into some 3rd year Med for a second.

Hair + Face = Head

Your head is actually quite a prominent part of your body and very hard to hide. So of course you don’t want some flunky to fuck it up.

While we’re at it, let’s put aside the fact that despite you feeling like your haircut is the biggest thing going on in everyone’s world in reality 95% of haircuts are fine and no one will give a shit.

When your new head encounters the outside world for the first time you may look and feel somewhat confident but deep down you know that confidence, as they say in the classics, is more breadsticks than concrete.

The minute you step outside the hairdresser you’re checking to see if anyone’s staring at your new head and if they are, analysing what kind of stare it is. Is it a sexy stare or an amused stare? Men have never been great at picking the difference anyway so it’s not really a helpful indicator for us. We may not know what the stares mean exactly but we do notice how many stares we get, and if we are all of a sudden receiving many more stares than pre-haircut we know the haircut’s either awesome or laughable. So let’s just agree that stares are more of a valuable metric when it comes to measuring strength rather than direction of response.

This all means we have to wait for the first comment before we can start to gauge the general sentiment around your new head. If it’s an unprompted positive response there’s an 80% chance you’re looking at a successful haircut. If the first 3 comments are unprompted positives you’re looking at a 98.6% chance of a successful haircut. I’ve laid it all out in a complicated table.

Throw in a larger than usual number of post-haircut stares and you’re looking at a 98.6% chance of an amazing haircut. The stares are what gets you from successful to amazing.

As you can see, a lot depends on the period immediately following the haircut. No wonder our confidence is so fragile. But it’s this raw vulnerability — this standing naked on the Cliff of Greatness in a hurricane — that makes us feel alive. We’re putting ourselves out there and leaving ourselves wide open to unadulterated pain or glory. People pay a lot of money to experience dizzying highs and plunging lows these days because a lot of the time their working or home life just doesn’t provide it. We crave it even if we don’t know it. I’m grateful for that.