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> 3) Napkin stage ideas. Most of them will be culled before shipping. Why should I dedicate my limited time on a project which will probably be shelved, when I could instead work on something which will, with certainty, help people? Thanks for this. I've spent too much time helping people work out the scenarios and options for projects which will never happen. I only recently started realizing this for what it is, and you just summed up really well exactly the problem with it. A couple other observations - a friend of mine makes nature documentaries and commercials, and he's constantly getting requests from people who want to work for free for him, get mentored, get advice, "look at my stuff", etc, etc. He says whenever anyone asks to work for him, with him, etc., he gives them a simple, straightforward, ~5 hour assignment to do. That cuts 90%+ of people right there. > I enjoy backing underdogs, not losers. I've found "helpful-but-not-compassionate" goes a long ways, since I almost never get requests like this any more. I write all over the place "drop me a line, what can I do for you, etc, etc." Lots of people take me up on it (I got 23 emails from people today, most were interesting... this is a bit higher than normal). But I find losers like compassion. Instead of wanting to win, they want to feel good about being losers. Thus, any help you give them is useless to them, until they gain a real desire to win, and ideally evidence some of that desire. If you write touchy-feely stuff, you get people coming to you ostensibly for advice, but secretly just wanting a shoulder to cry on, which is worse than useless if you want to build real world stuff. Ultra-practical, humble, disciplined, hard working, willing and eager to serve, charitable, empathetic, but absolutely no compassion seems to attract just about everyone you could really help, while turning off most people who want a shoulder to cry on. Of course, no compassion completely outrages people who have compassion as a heavy part of their identity. That's the price you pay, I guess. I reckon all the practical people will look at these comments and nod, and the people whose hearts bleed will be outraged. That's not actually a good thing in my book, but so it goes. All life includes tradeoffs. |
FWIW: I'm a bleeding heart type who has spent a lot of time pondering how to be genuinely helpful without stepping in a lot of the pitfalls I've either witnessed or experienced first-hand. I've drawn similar conclusions. I would go so far as to say that if you really want to help someone, it is actually cruel to go the "I feel your pain" route. A lot of people will stop trying to really fix the problem if they can get some emotional relief. Also, my observation has been that tea and sympathy is generally offered for really hard problems that people believe cannot be fixed. I have come to view tea and sympathy as a very ugly message -- a veiled way of saying "you poor thing, you're doomed".