How to be here
Today’s question comes to us from Dan Ryan:
So much of my personal growth is from small changes in how I look at the world. What's one of those “oh shit” moments for you that you wish everyone had?
I wrote my first book in 2012. That was the original Design Is a Job. I was terrified. When I started, I didn’t know whether I could actually write a book. I was afraid I was about to find out that I couldn’t. I was afraid I was gonna fail. Luckily, I believed I had a nice supportive publisher, and when you’re terrified and someone tells you it’s going to be ok you tend to believe them. You want to believe them. You need to believe them.
The other thing the publisher told me was that I wouldn’t make any money off the book, but I’d be able to leverage the book to get speaking gigs. Oh, ok, I thought.
So I wrote the book, and it was fine, and it did in fact lead to me getting speaking gigs. And it was during one of those speaking gig negotiations that a conference organizer told me that while the gig itself didn’t pay much, it would lead to sales of the book. Oh, oh shit, I thought.
Reader, the publisher and the conference organizer were the same person.
Now, I grew up in a Catholic household, and spent eight years in one of their schools. I didn’t care for either. But that school was eight years of someone telling me it was ok to abuse over here, because my reward was over there.
When someone tells you that your reward is over there, it’s generally because they’re doing something to you over here they don’t want you focusing on.
A prospective employer or client telling you that doing a little free work over here will lead to a mountain of paid work over there.
A current employer telling you the late nights and weekends you’re sacrificing over here will lead to a comfortable retirement over there.
A political candidate promising you equality for all over there in the tomorrow if you ignore the genocide they’re doing over here in the today.
Nah, they’re about to fuck you.
All of these are the subversion of hope. The promise that a sacrifice today will lead to a prize tomorrow. But hope can often be the solution to, and cause of, all of life’s problems.
Throughout our life we will put our hope in people, and lordy, I am not trying to talk you out of this. This is a good thing. We should be able to put our trust in one another. We should be able to rely on each other. We need to rely on each other. But when someone tells you that what you’re owed today is coming tomorrow they are using your trust against you. They are telling you who they are. Those people do not deserve your trust.
The good news is that there are people out there who do, and the sooner we cut the garbage people from our lives, the sooner we can shift our attention to the people we can actually trust.
And we can help each other right now, right here. Because the garbage people are where they belong, over there.
The revised, 100% owned by me, and union-printed Design Is a Job is available over here.
Erika’s book Conversational Design is now available for free over here.
…and since you read to the end: I’m making You’re My Favorite Client, which I will most likely never update because fuck Capitalism, a free PDF download. You might get something out of it. It’s over here.