I don’t remember where I heard this, but it stuck with me:
If you were imprisoned in a foreign country and you could call only one person to try to get you out, who would you call?
What an interesting question. It’s interesting because it doesn’t just beg for the richest or most high-profile person you know. Those people may not even be able to do much for you. It’s more subtle than that. It begs for the most high-agency person you know. The person who is best at handling a wide variety of circumstances and challenges. It begs for the person in your life who knows the most about the most. And, in the absence of Liam Neeson, most of us might be hard pressed to find somebody in our lives who could handle this.
When I was a kid, I didn’t really know much about anything. I knew a lot about people, but not much else. I didn’t know how to change the oil in my car. I didn’t know anything about getting a mortgage. I didn’t know anything about how to seek out tools to help me solve problems.
I think it’s a great shame that our schools don’t teach us more about mortgages and finance and life skills, but that’s not the point of this note.
And as I became a young man, I started to piece together these random skill sets for myself. It’s really hard. And yet it’s not hard at all. It’s hard because you don’t know where to begin, other than by making a fool of yourself asking questions that seem obvious and taking chances to learn the hard way. And yet it’s easy because it’s how everybody and anybody learns anything. It’s the only thing you can do.
I know a frightening amount of people who turned 24, 25, even 30 while still letting their mothers make doctor’s appointments for them and help them with day-to-day decisions. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not making fun of those people. For a few years of my adult life, I was one of them. I didn’t know anything about anything.
It’s more like I wish I could encourage those people. Our kids. Us. We were not taught how to be high-agency individuals. At all. In many cases, we literally were not even taught how to be adults. In modern America, going into adulthood means strapping yourself down with tens of thousands of dollars worth of loans which you have only a faint idea how you’ll even pay back, paying someone to fix all of your problems because you don’t know how to fix any of them, and asking mom and dad for help because the world is too damn complicated to make any sense of.
It’s not a good place to be. It’s hard.
But we don’t have to stay kids forever. And we also don’t have to let our wallets solve our problems for us. The truth is, the more you expose yourself to the world, the easier it becomes. The more you offer yourself to the world, to let it make a fool of you and let it teach you something, the more you learn. Eventually it compounds and even becomes exponential.
If you want to learn how to change your oil, call your uncle who knows how, drive to his house, have him jack up your car and go get your hands dirty. Just do it. If you want to learn about shopping for a mortgage, get on the internet and spend 2 hours reading articles. Ask and you shall receive. Seek and you shall, despite the occasional awkwardness or pain, find.
It’s really astounding what you can get done if you simply decide that you’re going to do it. It’s as simple as that — you make a decision. “I’m going to do this thing that I just thought of.” And then you ask the world for the right tools, and you do it.
My new boss, Brent Donnelly, is the kind of guy I would call high-agency. He built a business out of nothing in a matter of months. He currently writes three outstanding finance and trading products (you can check out our website here), and does a mind-numbing amount of research every week. Before he hired me, he was doing marketing, sales, business management, customer service, and all the other requisite activities on top of the dozen or more hours a week he spends writing.
Something I have learned in these last two months working with him is: the tools are there. Find them.
If we want to do some research on a stock market phenomenon, we look up academic articles, we build a spreadsheet in Excel, and we do the research. It’s that simple. We just do it. If we want to pursue a new marketing initiative, I simply send emails until we get a deal worth taking. Simple. If we aren’t sure how to make our computer do a thing we want it to do, we Google it until we find the answer. So far, the answer is there waiting to be found 100% of the time.
It’s a rewarding and freeing experience to work in an environment where not only is “yes” always the answer, but where tinkering and testing and trying are completely encouraged. We are so productive some weeks that it’s borderline ridiculous. It makes me laugh out loud.
We run our business with a simple attitude: whatever the problem is, act on it immediately. No excuses, no “I don’t know how,” no “I’ll bookmark this for later.” Immediately. Talk to the people who can help, put together the simplest possible plan, and assume that yes is the answer until proven otherwise.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned more and more and more by just taking stabs and groping about wildly without much prior knowledge. It’s remarkable how life changes when you just accept that adulthood is nothing more than “figuring it out.” There is no instruction manual… and I feel that as we American kids have grown up, we have spent so much time lamenting the absence of an instruction manual that we’ve completely missed the point. And the point is: the only people who know what they’re doing are the people who figured it out.
And the only people who know a whole lot about a whole lot are people who have spent a whole lot of time doing a whole lot of things. It’s worth the time.
So if one day you have a friend or cousin or daughter who calls you from a foreign prison, maybe you could just do this:
Take 2 minutes to make a list of the first 3 people you’re going to call.
And then call them.
Just start there.
But first, drink some water.
JDR
“In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing. The worst thing you can do is nothing.” - Theodore Roosevelt
Great read, it's amazing what you can accomplish by just starting!