A Resilient Liberty: Outgrowing Obligation

I think it’s most important to tell the truth, with honesty and distance, about the results of your choices, so others can make better choices and live better lives.

Personally, I’d underestimated the importance of work experience from an early age. There were summers I drifted when I could have been gaining a start in answering the question of: what do I want to do with my life?

It might be the most important question that only you can answer.

How do you want to use your precious time here, taking into account that certain equations exist between the choices you make and the inevitable consequences? The more information we can gather, the better we can understand the implications and how to avoid the unwanted ones.

In my youth, I believed that education was the most important thing. However, I didn’t spend those summers learning anything structured or even self-directed. In retrospect, I wish someone had taken me aside and given me a talking-to about how life works.

When your answers aren’t reflected in your behaviors, they are likely not completely honest, unbeknownst to you. One day, the veil drops, the mirror shifts, and the blind spot comes into view.

People asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I looked for answers that impressed them. I kept pivoting from laughter and doubt until I finally impressed my grandmother. It wasn’t an answer from within, but one rooted in external approval.

External approval is not enough to sustain a life. Especially after that person dies, and you start wondering, “Now who?”

In the process of outgrowing obligation, one day, you settle on, “Me.”

Life Skills

At the grocery store today, an exuberant young man with thick glasses stuck out his hand and introduced himself. I returned the grin and the introduction. Following him was a woman holding a clipboard, watching him closely.

Over the course of my shopping, I realized she was either teaching or testing him, as if they were seeing whether he had the skills to get groceries on his own. He had the smile of someone outgrowing obligation with newfound liberty, or on the verge of getting it.

I know that smile. I felt it when I got laid off from a job, from a dysfunctional team that I couldn’t stand. It was toxic and debilitating. In the end, it relied on my weaknesses while changing my life conditions to the extreme of what I’d tried my entire life to avoid. When I walked out that door, I stopped and took in the warmth of the sun on my face on that February day. The grin on my face came all the way from my toes. Pure relief.

I do not have certain skills, and I’m happy to admit it. I think everyone has a certain set, and not others. We only have so much capacity, and we are all different. The world needs all types, those with the orientation to think deeply and precisely, and those who find the depths intimidating, but master a breadth.

To understand your ability to thrive is to know or move toward the conditions that match who we are and what we do, naturally, and not when we are attempting to suit someone else. Oriented on the external approval of others, I wasn’t engaged enough to plot my own future. I was burdened by obligation and struggling under its weight.

Systematic Glitches

Before outgrowing obligation, I was looking for relief wherever and whenever I could find it. Oriented toward approval, I found interviews intimidating rather than a chance to show off my talents, interests, and skills while rooting out an honest and complete picture of what to expect.

I was a nervous wreck in interviews, and my job prospects were singular, dictating the path of my future. Despite my ability to get good grades, I was scraping by in my engineering education, with bare minimal performance in the other half, called employment.

As an engineering student, I was required to submit work-term reports. If there wasn’t anything you did at work that would support one, you could find one anywhere. When it came to completing credits, I submitted the bare minimum required.

Having no ideas for subject matter, as to be expected from someone emotionally unengaged, it was suggested that I write a report on alternative fuels for gasoline.

I did that report, which won me a small cash award, but cost me inclusion at my graduation, because it was misfiled due to the award, and, by their count, I didn’t have enough to graduate.

I learned that doing the bare minimum might be a poor strategy for life, and I’d better step up my level of interest, engagement, and dedication.

Finally, I was being interviewed by a company I felt proud to name, by people I found intimidatingly smart, with a chance to live a rural lifestyle while pursuing a fairly solitary daily life.

It was a perfect fit, and when the salary equalled the other choice that required a block heater for my car, there was no competition.

At least, it started as a perfect fit, but perfection is always a performance, and performances get tiring.

Cumulated Experience

When I worked in the automotive industry, I was responsible for developing new ideas for automotive exterior accessories. I learned about emerging plastics, metal coatings, lights, and even seemingly small things like adhesives. I also knew about electronics and cold temperatures, packaging, steel, and paint.

One day, a fellow snowmobiler opened his side panel, and I said, “Oh, you lost your secondary clutch, but don’t worry, we’ll make sure you get home okay.” Then I walked inside to warm up. Afterward, I heard everyone was taking so long to follow me because “What?”

Each of us has some specific, deep knowledge and experience that others simply haven’t been exposed to. Don’t assume what’s common knowledge, even while it’s so completely obvious to you that one glance sums it all up.

When I learned from my email newsletter subscription that Skidoo wanted my idea, I had both the time and experience to sit there all day and submit 12. Each of these ideas was based on a time when I’d gone over the experience afterwards and thought, “If this were invented, that wouldn’t have happened.”

The following year, eleven of those things came to fruition. Yippie!

Experience is a wonderful thing to have. No matter how it turns out, you now know better. If you simply look back and think, “What could I have done to have made that go better?”

When you have the perspective that only you can have, your answer will be completely different from mine. Neither is right nor wrong, because the world needs all the solutions. It’s not about whose is better. It’s about plugging all the holes, seeing all the blind spots, getting as many people outgrowing obligation as possible.

My mission is to achieve optimal participation in this thing called life.

The question I was asked was, “What did you learn today?” It was an inquiry into the subject matter being taught at school. So close, but not nearly the same. The question about learning is for educators.

As a child, I wasn’t raised to reflect like that. I was raised to brush it off and move on. I was raised to respect my father and do what I was told.

In university, coming into my own house and my own rules, I was wild with newly unleashed boundaryless constraint. Sooner or later, I knew it would come to an end. I’d be stuck in a career, with only a couple of weeks of free time a year.

When that free time was entirely used up driving to Christmas dinners at four houses, I pulled the plug on attending them all. When I was set to host, the water supply line froze, and I had to rescind the invitation. It turned out that one offer would be the last.

Today, outgrowing obligation means tomorrow will come and go with no pressure.

“What could have gone better today?” is a question that helps nurture someone to navigate life. Not only will you learn what interests them as they evaluate events, but you will also equip them with the one tool that really matters – getting invested in life and how it might be used.

If you can’t think of anything specific, don’t feel bad. Once, I joined a team that was similarly stuck, only to provide them with a list of the seventy-some I’d seen. They asked me to recategorize them so there would be only four. Sure, size matters, I understand entirely.

If the answer is “Nothing,” then are you an overconfident perfectionist?

Minimal Participation

Or, you are a drifter like I was, so used to being told what to do, so used to being deprived of your liberty, that you forgot you ever had it?

Obligation crushed my quest for excellence with, “You’re lucky I showed up.” If merely showing up is your bar in life, life will quickly crush you.

The most powerful question you can ask, and there’s no age limit on it, is “What could I have done differently?”

It should be big and small, second-nature and intentional. It should be quick and cursory, and detailed and drilled in. Outgrowing obligation requires not one answer, but multitudes.

It’s taking ownership and accountability, not in a blame or bad way, nor is it in a rewarding or boastful way. It’s merely trying to participate, to put in the effort to make things turn out well for everyone who will or might be impacted by your actions.

I’ve brushed off and moved on from many unfortunate situations I’ve found myself in. Too many scary men, too many cars becoming cages, and too many hotel keys to be sure which one was my own.

I used to think that as long as there were women around, I’d be okay, only to realize that no, not that rule either. Some women weren’t lucky enough to survive to learn that rule, and I should have learned it from Lesley Maffey and Kirsten French years earlier.

Obviously, I played a role, even if it wasn’t one I did consciously, but claiming pure innocence keeps one trapped in powerlessness. Pay attention to red flags and learn what they look like. Especially learn the ones that you are likely to miss.

I take ownership and accountability for becoming an engineer, including the purely financial rationale behind that choice.

Completely Analytical

I thought that if a career is about making money, make as much as you can, or at least do it for as long as you can.

To me, it was about enduring and surviving, not enriching and thriving.

After outgrowing obligation, I have the unstructured free time I’ve always wanted, and the schedule I remember as oppressive and binding, but experience today as putting in the effort toward the change that I wish to see more of in the world.

A change for someone else to have more of their life on the side of making the good choices. Transparent and honest information, the ability to analyze that information in a way only experience has illuminated, and the ability to execute on that enlightenment.

The ability to remain child-free has liberated me. If my mother hadn’t shown me how the motherhood experience might play out, I might have gone down that path, only to have lived through an outcome too many women experience – double the workload, half the resources.

To pay it forward, I share how learning about investing liberated me and helped me bounce forward from a poorly suited career. How becoming interested from within helped me bounce forward from having no idea for a work report to having 12 ideas worthy of a report on their own.

I could have been intentional much earlier in life. I could have learned to make decisions for myself much earlier, as I now know it’s a skill, not merely about handing over the liberty to decide. It’s far more like handing over the keys to a car – this could kill you and others, so let’s make sure you know the rules of the road and the operating instructions of this device.

Outgrowing obligation starts with “What do you want?”

Practical Answers

Gone is the person who would have said, “To make my dad happy.”

I now know that you can’t make anyone anything. Not even happy. Good luck even holding their attention.

Gone is the person who transferred that intention to other people throughout life. Through will or through obligation, through naivete or through gritted teeth, that person who lived in a jail of obligation found the key.

Sure, you should, but do you have to?

Only you can make yourself happy. What is it that you do when there is no one else?

Tell the truth, with honesty and distance, because the truth endures, honesty serves, and your contribution is yours alone to make.

Whatever anyone else told you, your individuality is to be embraced, honed, and celebrated. Your worth is in your perspective, experience, and every breath you take. Your answer matters.

What could you have done to make a difference for the better? Then do it. Notice what difference you do make, and next time, minimize the collateral damage, maximize the benefit, and share the accolades.

Don’t do it because you feel obliged to the logic I’ve shared and the emotional appeal I’ve made. Do it because you can’t imagine living any other way. You can’t imagine serving a human being when you could be serving a greater good and a higher God.

Anything else would be a waste. A waste of something that will never exist again, but gets this once chance, and then it’s permanently extinct – you.

There is the story, and there is the truth. There are the emotional details, the triggers, and the complaints, and there are the cold, hard facts that don’t waver. Connect the dots any way you want, but recognize the path you pick, because there’s never just one way.