Yesterday, I was working at a desk with my laptop open, and someone stopped to ask me if I was from the Northwest.

I’m not, but I got there as fast as I could — and we spent a good few minutes talking about the place, the people, and the culture.

It turns out that we both miss a certain saddle up! learning style. There’s something in the culture out there that emphasizes figuring it out as you go. Each of us had learned to drive a four-wheeler that way: no manual-reading, and hardly any verbal instruction beyond, “This makes it go. Now come on — and don’t tip it over.”

A little later on, someone else asked for advice on how to find her people and start a conversation. I’m not sure there is a manual for that, and I didn’t try to give her one. Instead, I took a try-something-and-see approach.

Many of us spend an awful lot of time learning to read the manual, so it’s not surprising that we go looking for one in real life. But the truth is that not nearly as many things require as much manual-reading as we’re conditioned to think.

Sometimes it’s worth pushing buttons and making things go. It’s a good way to learn a lot quickly — and you probably won’t tip over.

There’s a space in my learning process between trust and belief.

Even as I come to believe that things are true, it often takes longer for belief to turn into practical trust.

This is how trust falls work: even with every reason to believe that everyone will be there, ready and able to catch me, I still have to do some internal wheeling and dealing before trusting myself to physics and friendship.

So, for example, I believe that going small and scaling influence is the best (maybe the only) way to go. Yet I still have an attachment to ideas of going big and trying to scale control.

As with the trust fall, the solution is to stay on the platform and face the tension. Climbing down won’t help build belief nearly as effectively as a quick step backwards — first into space, and then into the waiting arms.

Life, we tend to think, is given.

Given in the sense of unchanging and, mostly, unchangeable.

But when we reframe our conditions as given to us, as a gift, everything changes.

It’s not a punishment. It’s not even a constraint.

It’s an opportunity, and, being received, is given to be shared.

If you wait until you have “enough” to start giving, you’ll wait forever.

Start giving, and you’ll soon discover the abundance you already have.

As people like Steve Pressfield and Seth Godin have pointed out, fear can be a powerful guide to the work that really matters.

The more it matters, the more the Resistance or the lizard brain will try to sabotage it.

But it occurred to me in a recent conversation that fear may also point in the direction of our greatest gifts.

We were talking about fear, and someone noticed that the fears each of us were sharing seemed to be coming from precisely the place the others saw as our biggest strengths.

I kept sitting with that observation afterward, and it struck me that this is simply a sign of our instinctive trembling when we we channel powers that feel greater than our own.

Imagine how you’d walk through the world if you knew you could lift a car. How, then, would you lift a child?

If you did manage to lift a car — especially if you lifted it over and over again — other people would no doubt point and cheer. But you’d be shaking on the inside, wouldn’t you, doing something even you didn’t think possible in your model of everyday reality?

The fear isn’t that you can’t lift cars or jump buildings. The fear is that you can.

Taking a guided tour of a website earlier this week, I finally saw something.

The site is created for a specific group of people with shared interests, and it addresses them as such. It doesn’t spend any time selling them on joining the tribe — recognizing that they’re already enrolled, it merely picks up the conversation midstream.

The whole point of good marketing is to enroll the right people on the right journey. Other than an introduction to help orient people who might find your site by accident (how?), the audience should feel like they’ve just settled back in at the dinner table.

If you keep insisting “we are family!” before getting to the lighthearted (though purposeful) conversation of the day, it’s bound to get stuffy.

Enrolling new people is one thing. Continuing the conversation with people is another. It’s best not to cross the streams.

Not with less care or commitment or courage.

Merely less hard.

Work on the projects that matter, with the people who matter.

Work on the part that you can do, and don’t worry so much about positioning everyone else. Presume they know what they’re doing, and that they’ll be there when you need them.

Do the work — without trying so hard.

In the past few days, I’ve been playing with the idea of leading from anywhere on the field.

As the great coaches show, it’s very possible to lead effectively from the sidelines. There’s real talent and skill in seeing the field, communicating your vision, and teaching people to play better.

Yet there’s a different kind of leadership that happens between the sidelines. It’s not about “do this” or “have you thought about it this way?”, but simply “follow me!”

Some people are more inclined toward one type of leadership or another. I often prefer the broad perspective of the sidelines, but I’m coming to recognize that perspective can come at the price of aloofness.

Luckily, I have an opportunity to spend a month on the field. And while I’d love to put a few points on the board, I’m most focused on simply staying on the field.

Calling plays takes courage, there’s no doubt about that. But if you’re in the play-calling business, it’s worth facing live contact sometimes, too.

(It’s also worth remembering that it’s called play. A lot of people play to win, thinking that will bring joy. But playing for joy might be an even bigger win.)

As a friend of mine likes to point out, there’s a paradox baked into encouraging people to level up: if the normal distribution holds — and there’s every reason to believe that it does — how can we go around asking people to level up?

I think it depends on what we mean by leveling up. The average is the average, and most of us are closer to it than we’d like to think. (Famously, most of us consider ourselves above-average.)

But that’s not the end of the story: to say “the average is the average” is to rule out any meaningful role for either free will or evolution, and I’m not willing to give up on those so easily.

In terms of free will, everyone has the choice to improve. Of course everyone’s individual choices are constrained by circumstance, but as long as you’re not in the gulag, you’ve got enough freedom to improve in some way. (Even if you are in the gulag, as people like Frankl and Solzhenitsyn showed, you can choose to preserve a degree of interior freedom.)

And the even better news is that a lot of individual choices will raise the societal average. Just look at today’s professional athletes versus those of a few decades ago for an extreme example: the average has gone way up.

Choice isn’t easy. Plenty of people don’t want to make a decision, take responsibility, or put themselves on the hook. But it is possible, and I don’t think we have to suspend the laws of nature to make things better.

In fact, if we’re listening to nature, it might be the only rational choice we’ve got.

Teachers, coaches, managers, and leaders of all kinds are in the business of getting other people to do things.

Assuming that they’re doing this for the right reasons, they have to manage a complex dance of styles and sources of power.

Some rely on position: you have to do what I say, because I’m in charge here.

Others rely on the process: this is the way it works here.

And some rely on permission: can I invite you to try something that might get you closer to your goals?

Position and processes matter, but permission is what really makes progress possible. Unlike the others, permission is earned, it’s personal, and it’s possible to evolve with the needs of a person or circumstance.

And that’s what really matters in the end, isn’t it? Even if you could compel people to jump through hoops, it doesn’t make sense to do that unless they’re jumping in the right direction.

You might as well try to make it clear what the other side could be getting.

Especially if you’re a little unusual.

It’s scary in the short run, since we all want to be liked and we all feel pressure to fit in.

But, in the long term, there’s not much joy for either side in contracting with the compliant version of a person determined to stand out.