Nonchalance Has Become a Shield Against Visible Effort
Joe Santagato argues that treating effort as embarrassing is less a sign of coolness than of insecurity. In a conversation with Chris Williamson, he says nonchalance protects people from the risk of visible failure, but also deprives them of the satisfaction of earning competence through repeated, exposed attempts. Williamson frames the same problem as a culture that rewards ironic distance and undervalues the experience of doing hard things until they change you.
Nonchalance is treated as style, but Santagato reads it as insecurity
Chris Williamson frames the problem as a cultural preference for appearing untouched by effort. In his description, a certain internet sensibility “only ever talks in irony”: people make ironic statements, mock things, stand against things, or soften their own commitments with passive-aggressive distance. The posture is not “I am giving this my absolute fucking everything,” but something closer to “all right, I guess.”
That matters because trying hard has become socially risky in the environments Williamson is describing. He says enthusiasm is looked down on in parts of the UK, where people who try hard are called “keenoes” — too keen, too excitable, too visibly invested. He connects it to “tall poppy syndrome” and to class expectations: coming from a working-class background, he says, he repeatedly heard the warning not to “get too big for your boots.” The point is not merely that some people dislike ambition. It is that being visibly keen can invite ridicule or a warning to stay in one’s place.
Joe Santagato accepts the premise but gives it a sharper psychological explanation. People who act nonchalant about things they are actually passionate about, he says, are often showing insecurity. They want to appear as if they are not really trying, even while they are. Santagato’s counter-position is blunt: he is willing to be seen trying hard because he is not doing it for the perception.
That changes the meaning of failure. If the aim is to protect an image, visible effort is dangerous because it can end in visible failure. If the aim is to earn something, failure becomes useful information. Santagato describes a slammed door as clarifying: if an attempt fails, at least a final decision has been made, and he can move on to the next choice.
I'm not nonchalant about it, because I'm not even doing it for the perception. I'm doing it for me.
Santagato does not present effort as moral theater. He says the reward is internal: being able to go to sleep knowing he worked hard and got the thing. The satisfying arc is concrete — an idea is spoken aloud, worked on, and eventually made real. “That’s an amazing feeling,” he says.
The win matters because the work changed the person who won
Chris Williamson brings in a Mark Manson line to concentrate the claim.
Do hard shit. Not because it’s fun, but because the win actually means something. You bled for it. You broke for it. You earned it. Easy wins are forgettable. Hard ones change you.
Joe Santagato responds immediately: “Exactly. What is better than that? There is nothing better than that.” The difficult win matters not just because of the outcome, but because the outcome carries memory, cost, and proof. Easy wins do not leave the same mark because they did not ask as much from the person who got them.
Williamson extends that point to people using AI assistants for their jobs, writing, or creative pursuits. His concern is that if an assistant handles too much of the difficult work, it can rob the person of the thing Williamson thinks they came for — “the sensation of I did hard shit.”
Santagato adds the missing second half: “And I got good.” For him, the payoff is not simply having completed something. It is being able to look back at earlier work and know that the current version is better. Old videos, early shows, and first attempts become evidence of improvement. The embarrassment of the old work is part of the record; it shows that the skill was built.
Williamson phrases the same process as getting good “one rep at a time.” Competence, in this account, accumulates through repetition, exposure, revision, and the willingness to look bad before looking better.
A thousand bad reps can turn early work into a baseline
Chris Williamson supplies the clearest contrast from his own archive: the early work he describes was “1,100 episodes ago,” in 2018, in his old office in Newcastle in the northeast of the UK.
He mentions a recent video in which someone went back and analyzed the first episodes he had ever made. The analysis included a line to the effect that viewers might not think the person in those early episodes would become a successful podcaster.
Williamson does not dispute the judgment. “It’s true,” he says. The qualifier is the volume of work between then and now. The early version may not justify confidence from the outside. It may not look promising. It may even invite a fair assessment that the person is not yet good. But if the person keeps making the work, the original evidence becomes less a verdict than a baseline.
Joe Santagato describes improvement in similar terms. The point of looking back is not nostalgia. It is measurement. When he sees old material and thinks, “I’m better than that now,” the satisfaction comes from having a visible before-and-after. On Santagato’s account, nonchalance might protect a person from the embarrassment of caring visibly. It also risks denying them the clean evidence that effort has compounded.