THERE IS NO ROOM AND THERE ARE NO PEOPLE
or How To Stop Worrying About Getting It Wrong or Right
It was around hour four that I realized I should probably stop smiling and nodding and kick him out of our house.
No easy decision. I was all of 27. What authority did I have? A scruffy ingenue or whatever the equivalent is for dudes.
What is that word?
…
Idiot. Yes, idiot. That’s the word I’m looking for.
So there I was, a 27 year old idiot, deferring to this window salesman purely on the assumption that he, being older than me, must be wiser in the ways of the world and this is just how things went in the important and very grown-up world of window sales.
He must have been about 60. What took me too long to realize is that many idiots easily live to 60 and much much older.
I was at an event recently and was introduced to someone with a very adult, very adult job. They were lovely and seemingly very smart. We spoke about how when you’re just starting adulthood you can get stuck in this logical fallacy that makes you feel like you’re just a passenger in the world.
At its worst, you feel powerless and at the whim of the powers that be and chained to the rules set in place probably in granite.
At its best, no pressure and you feel you can really take your foot off the gas because what’s the point.
This is a common mistake made by, I would argue, all humans.
The person agreed and said something that helped clarify the foolishness.
Here it is…
When you’re young you think there is a bunch of smart people in a room somewhere making all the important decisions.
Then you find out…
There is no room and there are no people.
It’s just one big planet full of morons of varying degrees.
I added that part.
When I shared this anecdote with Henry Winkler (watch your feet, I just dropped a name) he said he used to think surely there must be important people somewhere with badges making the big decisions but it turns out there are no badges and the people are all as stupid as the rest of us.
This is at once terrifying and reassuring.
Terrifying because it means we’re all just trying to figure life out.
Reassuring because it means… we’re all just trying to figure life out.
So cut yourself some slack… and trust yourself.
I thanked the window salesman for his time and four hour presentation and told him we’d be in touch.
We were not in touch.
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Well said. Is it all an “act”? I think of “Shake & Bake”: you mix the ingredients in a bag - privilege, hard work, connections, asking questions, (sometimes foolish) bravado, dumb luck (add whatever works for you) - give it a good shake, and voilà… But bottom line, if you gain some wisdom from experience and mistakes, you can act with a bit of confidence, and who knows how far you’ll go.
The people who have power are the people who decide they want power. They put up with all the dull things required on the way to getting power because they want power. You or I are easily as talented and smart. But did we want to go through what they went through? Nope. That’s the difference.