You gotta go out on a limb.
Don’t do it recklessly.
Don’t do it when the penalty for being wrong will result in harm.
But when the penalty for being wrong is bruise to the ego, or blemish on our perfect records?
Go out on a limb.
Someone needs you to.
The world needs people to go out on a limb, or there won’t be anyone offering help.
People only ask for help when they think there is a chance someone will show up to help them, OR once everything is lost and we are turning to help in a desperation.
We need more people asking for help.
Imagine the world if more people asked for help.
In fact you don’t have to imagine it because worlds where people ask for help already exist: They’re called video games…
The biggest fantasy I’ve seen overlooked in games, is the Quest Giver.
Imagine you had to invent the quest giver today.
This is a person who:
Knows what they want
Is willing to ask for help
Is willing to ask a stranger for help
Has a finite number of ways that will satisfy them and you’ll know definitively once you have gotten them what they need
Only ever asks for something that is within the skillset of the person they’re talking to
Will repeat the directions of the task as many times as you need
Compensates people for their help
Imagine walking down the street in real life, and people had manageable tasks they needed performed, and they were happy you were there, and the thing they need is something you’re good at, and they’re offering to thank you for your time by giving you something that is useful to you…
But that’s not how real life works.
In real life, when we are in distress, it’s rare that we can articulate what’s wrong, and it’s not uncommon for us to be an unreliable narrator who misdiagnoses what our real problem is.
In real life, most people will not have the skills that would solve our problem, so that nearly anyone we ask will be bogged down by the task, not uplifted by it.
In real life, few of us have anything good we can offer in return, and rarer still that it’d actually match what is missing from the life of the helper.
Which means asking for help rarely matches us up with a satisfying experience of being helped.
So, most of us, most of the time, do not openly ask people for help because we’re imagining that we might regret asking.
Which is why the world is now full of people in pain, no one asking for help, and if we’re going to help, it often has to come in the form of going out on a limb.
“Hey this might not be useful, but it sounds like what you were talking about might be helped by x.”
And in many cases, it annoys the person we’re trying to help, because they didn’t ask for help.
But the people who do need help and who wish someone would come help them, do not often ask for help, so you will never know which person needs you to get over the risk of annoying someone who rebuffs your help.
Imagine if the people we could help, actually did ask, and asked clearly, and had clear end-goals, and asked us for something we’re prepared for, and helped us out in return.
Now remember that the satisfaction we’d feel completing such a clear-cut quest, is actually still available, if we’re willing to go out on a limb and offer help to the person who is only half-asking, speaks clumsily, is murky and torn about what they even want, needs something that’s a bit beyond us, and will forget us the minute we are done helping.
The satisfaction comes not from being a do-good-er, or patting ourselves on the back.
The satisfaction comes from participating.
We need houses of brick.
The things that matter in life take more time to build than a house of stick or straw.
We wish we were useful.
Somewhere, someone has use for you… but it’s going to require you guessing and being wrong, a bunch of times, before you find the person who needs you,
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