Why You Don’t Need Permission To Help Someone (Even If You’re An Idiot)
When I was teaching first grade in Brooklyn, we were getting ready to out to recess. It was the usual catastrophe of crying kids who lost their fingers in their gloves, boogers, weird noises, and bouncy energy that young kids are known for. All were ready to go except one.
Hmm…recess is easily this kid’s favorite thing to do all day. What gives?
“Hey Johnny — what’s going on? Why are you just sitting here? We all are ready to go out.”
“Uh oh Mr. Cahill — I’m not sure if it was #1 or #2…so I just stayed put until I figured out which it was…”
“Oh — you mean like bathroom #1 or #2…?”
Nods his head.
“Oh- OK. Well lets just get someone to take you to the bathroom on the way down and then you can go. Sound OK?” (The room continues to break down).
“Well — here’s the thing. I think I already went.”
“Oh…” (bashes head into a metaphorical wall).
“Why didn’t you just get up and leave the room if it was an emergency?”
“I didn’t know if I had permission to Mr. Cahill…”
A few angry phone calls later (mom wasn’t too happy), a few pairs of fresh accident pack pants, and some good lunch time later Johnny was back at it at recess.
But I was miffed.
Why didn’t he just raise his hand? Why did he just sit there? But no matter how you cut it, this student had a bathroom accident because (aside from me not having a clear bathroom policy) he froze when he didn’t think he had permission to do something.
May I Use The Bathroom?
People are born with creative initiative and then they go to school.
The average first grader asks 300+ questions a day. The average high school student asks less than 3. Somewhere along the line initiative is sapped from students and while there are many well-meaning people in schools, school didn’t start out with noble purpose.
The Industrial Revolution necessitated the need for obedient workers to perform low skill, rote and repetitive tasks on assembly lines and for people to earn more money to buy the very things they slaved away at making.
Enter mass schooling (see Seth Godin’s What Is School For? article).
Schools in 2020 look eerily similar to schools in 1920 and schools in 1920 looked eerily similar to factory assembly lines — that was by design: desks in neat rows, walking on a certain side of the hallway, rigid hierarchy of power, when to and when to not ask questions, punishment for disobeying rules. Schools reward, largely, compliance today. And, so did factories.
Nearly every action you take in school requires permission and that’s not a good thing.
You can think of K-College education as one of those large airport conveyor belt walkways taking you between terminals: they have just enough room where you can maneuver and pivot here and there, but you’re all heading in the same direction.
Schools provide just enough obfuscation, just enough choices, just enough creative marketing mission statements to make its parents and students feel like they can be anyone, or be anything, but largely they’re all creeping forward on a passive predetermined track — college.
When your path is predetermined life’s easy. You don’t have to think about life’s juicy questions: Who am I? What do I want? Where am I going? What do I believe? Why are things the way they are? Someone else has already answered those for you. Raise your hand. Sit here. Sit there. Ask this question. Don’t ask that question. Go to college. Don’t go to vocational school. Don’t start a business. That’s the wrong answer. This is the right answer.
And so we awake after nearly 20 years of K-College education paralyzed by an inability to act without permission.
At the moment we need the most initiative, the most creativity, the most courage we have just left an educational experience that rewarded the exact opposite.
Expert Is A Flimsy Term
To your little brother learning basic addition, you are a math god.
To an MIT AI researcher, you are a joke.
Your talents, skills, knowledge and gifts aren’t for everyone and that’s OK. There are 7 billion folks living here — 6.999 billion of them could care less about you. But that .00001% of the population that does find value in you, might have their life literally change because of you.
An expert is just someone further ahead of whoever they’re trying to help.
When I was in the thick of my private training business teaching high school kickers how to kick, it did not matter that their physical talent exceeded my own abilities. Even if they were bound to the NFL, they still hadn’t played college football but I had. Therefore, to them, in this season of their life I was the expert.
Yet, when I stand next to Stephen Gostkowski, one of the greatest kickers of all time, I am definitely not the expert. He is.
Expert is relative to who you are helping and who you are with.
Are You Even Valuable?
When we can create a robot that can look at itself in the mirror and hates itself, then we’ll know we’ve truly created human A.I. — Silicon Valley A.I. Researcher
Most people struggle with self-hate — or at least strongly dislike a part of themselves. We’ve all got rooms in our lives we’d rather not open the door to the rest of the world to see. And that’s OK — that makes you a person. We’ve all got things that make us queasy about ourselves.
Here’s the thing: The people you want to help as clients are at least just as messed up as you are. The success gurus, marketing wizards, or guys on YouTube filming an ad with a rented private jet in the background that they don’t even own (yes I’ve thought about this) are only showing you their highlights.
Dr. Bob Rotella, one of the top golf sports psychologists once told me:
We tend to see everyone else’s highlights and while we only see our blooper reel.
To give yourself permission to help someone else, you need to feel like you have something valuable to offer someone else. While I can’t give you confidence, I can try to give you a few compelling reasons as to why should look in the mirror see value in your own reflection:
Your Odds of Existence
Your odds of even reading this right now are 1 in 10 x 27 million zeroes. That’s nuts. In an age when it’s easy to look on social media and say it’s all been done before the most unique selling proposition you ever have is you. There really and truly never was, current isn’t and probably never will be again anyone quite like you. It’s OK to see yourself as unique and valuable when it is a belief that enables you to help others. This isn’t the fluffy everyone gets a trophy we’re all special snowflakes even though we’ve accomplished nothing mindset.
Go Small, But Deep
If you truly have something, an idea, a project, a conversation, a new business or story that you feel can truly help someone else out, you have a duty to do so.
God didn’t create you to play small ball.
While we hear about the Mark Zuckerberg of the world and are enamored with multi-billion dollar valuations, most of the time your impact is only going to be meaningful to 20% or less to the people you are trying to help.
When I was in Peace Corps Ukraine 2012–2014 most people joined to change the world. The irony of course is that the only worlds you change, are the worlds of a handful of students or people you encounter. I would argue most of the 1,000 or so people I taught English to in Ukraine did not become fluent. But I did have 2–3 students get inspired enough to become fluent and now study at Oxford, or in America to create their own NGO’s.
2–3 clients will love you, 2–3 will despite you and the rest don’t care.
You are going to change the world in an absolutely massive way— just not everyone’s.
True Fans
Futurist Kevin Kelly put the math at creating your own meaningful lifestyle or startup business as simple: All you need really are 1K true fans to each pay you 100 dollars a year for the value you provide. That’s 100K. Or, if you want to go premium, find 10 clients who will pay you 10K/year. If you only have 100 clients, create a valuable service they’d pay you 1K/year for.
Starting something isn’t so scary when it has some numbers behind it.
I Give You Permission
If no one else will, shoot, I will. Right now you are worthy of success.
You are worthy of feeling great about yourself. You are worthy of looking in the mirror and enjoying the person you see back at you (warts and all!). You have both permission to be successful and you have permission to flop. The worst thing in the world is to be stuck in between — of living on the fence.
Don’t stay there long, it can get uncomfortable.
Brendan
