You’d been advised that you need to develop an elevator pitch, a 30-second speech that you could give, explaining why your ideas are worth paying attention to, if you just so happened to walk into an elevator at the very same time as a rich and powerful person with the resources to support your work.
You wrote your elevator pitch and memorized it, just in case. Then, the opportunity came, and reality hit.
The CEO of that company you’d been hoping to sell your idea to walked into the elevator a couple seconds after you, and actually looked you in the face, smiled, and said hello. You opened your mouth to begin your elevator pitch, but then the thought occurred to you that this person must hear people begging for money all day long.
“He’s achieved so much,” you thought to yourself, “and I have achieved nothing. Why should he listen to me? What makes me think I’m worthy even to breathe the same air as him? My ideas are ridiculous. They never work.”
You didn’t say this out loud, of course, but you also didn’t give your elevator pitch. Instead, just said hello in response, then turned away to look down at your shoes, the ones with awful scuffs on them that you’d been meaning to replace for months, as soon as you could get the extra money together.
You were struck with the realization of your profound social inferiority. The emotion you felt in that moment was malu, the feeling of sudden awkwardness that arises in the presence of people of superior social status.
