Ask for forgiveness, not for permission

I've been thinking a lot recently about times when I do something because I think it is what someone else wants or holding off from doing something. After all, I'm not sure what kind of reception it will get from the people around me.

This happens a lot when I am trying to do something other people in my family or friendship circle aren't familiar with. A great example is this blog. I've thought about writing one for a while but never really took hold of it as a project. One reason for this is I was unsure how people that know me in "real life" would respond. When I internalised it I thought "this isn't something I thought Chris would be interested in" and "what's he doing? Why does anyone care what he writes about?" would be common thoughts among my peers. So, I floated the idea to a couple of people in a very committal way. That way I could gauge their response and make a judgement over whether I should go ahead with it. In truth what I was doing was seeking the permission of my peers and waiting for someone to say "yeah, you should go for it" so no matter what anyone else thought or said I knew I had at least one person on my side. The truth is since starting the blog the vast majority of comments from my peers (and from strangers) have been positive, I had nothing to fear.

"It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission" - Admiral Grace Hopper

Looking back and knowing what I know now I wish I had found this quote so much sooner. You see for most of my life I've been seeking permission from people for everything, wasting time wondering what they might think or say when in reality if I had just got on with it I could have achieved a lot more, and if it didn't, if it all went wrong I could have simply apologised and for most things that would be the end of it.I have been using this phrase a lot over the past few weeks to force myself into action, particularly at work. Recently we have set up a webshop (check it out here) and I have been one of 4 people in our company in the building process. We had an external developer set the site up and apply a customised theme but ultimately it would be us 4 making day to day changes, adding products etc. We were given a preview link and profiles in Shopify's platform. Immediately I wanted to explore, I love finding out what new things can do (I attribute part of the reason I'm in my current job role to over-exploring the systems we use at work). There were a few things we wanted to change with the site, naturally, it's a new site after all. So off I went, trying to find how to make the changes we wanted, making mistakes here and there but at this point, the site wasn't publicly available so it didn't matter if I typed the wrong thing or hid a crucial area, I had plenty of time to fix it. Within about an hour I had familiarised myself with most of the customisation features on offer and made the changes we wanted to see.

Why am I telling you all this detailed information?

The truth is that just a month ago I probably would have been sent my profile details, logged in and thought "I need to wait for the developer to do this. I don't want to step on their toes or ruin something." but here I was actively searching through something I had no experience in, making changes for change's sake just to see what happened. In my defence, Shopify's system is so easy to use that it is difficult to break anything off the bat so I knew I was fairly safe but for the purposes of the example let's pretend I could've completely ruined the site. By stepping forward and moving at the first opportunity I was not only able to make positive changes (well we think so anyway) to the site, I was also able to advance my learning of the system; how it worked, what it's limits were and what we would need to do to get it to work for us.

When Admiral Hopper said "It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission" she wasn't talking about setting up a Shopify webshop, but it is very easy to apply the phrase to my scenario, just as easy as it would be to apply it to any of your scenarios. Think about something you have been putting off because you're not sure how others could react, what is the very worst that could happen? Could that thing be made right if you apologised? If the answer is "yes" then what are you waiting for? Obviously, this doesn't work for everything but it is a great way to change your mindset and incite confidence in the way you live your life if you are otherwise struggling.

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Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash