The Backdoors.

Getting what you want without waiting for permission

Apr 21, 2023

I’ve rarely been selected for leadership positions. If I’m honest I remember being really annoyed by this growing up — couldn’t the coaches of my sports teams see my leadership potential?! I knew I would do a great job, but it felt like I was always waiting to get noticed. I waited to get chosen to be team captain and elected to student council… but at the end of the day none of those goals were really within my control and I was often left disappointed.

A harsh reality that I was lucky to learn young — you don’t get people’s attention or earn their trust by “having potential”. It’s no one’s job to dream up how you could bring value to a team or to identify you as someone special. Potential, even if you believe you have it, is by definition un-actioned: there is no visible evidence of what you can do for whoever is making decisions. The best way to prove you can do the thing is to just do it.

It’s very easy to fall into the trap of chasing permission — asking “How can I join the organizing team?” at an event you’re attending, thinking you need to apply and get accepted into a club before doing whatever it is that they gather to do, sending a resume to a company without selling them on how you specifically could add to the team by using prior evidence of your work.

It’s also really easy to fall into the trap of chasing validation — tailoring your hackathon project, business plan or film festival submission to score well on a rubric instead of what you’d believe in in a world free of artificial reward mechanisms.

These things look like initiative and can take you really far in life — but they precariously allow your success to be defined by a third-party decision-maker who is likely not all that invested in your personal trajectory. And who says the evaluators are even measuring the right things — what if their rubric is wrong?

Theoretically, in an alternate universe (and in reality, in this universe)1 — you could stop spending hours trying to convince others how passionate you are and instead just start doing the thing that got you so excited in the first place.

`You, sizing up the hoops you think you need to jump through.`

`You, getting hypnotized by the percieved effort of all the steps that come before actually doing the thing you want to do.`

`You, realizing the internet and Youtube are free, there are people you can ask for help, and you can get started NOW and learn the thing you wanted to learn without waiting for permission.`

It starts with “No”.

What I’ve learned is that creativity stems from constraints and hearing “no” is a catalyst for innovation — but only if you’re stubborn enough to figure out how to work around the system to still get what you want.

If you know you’ve got it — prove it. Even if you don’t know you’ve got it — GO FOR IT. Want to see a thing exist in the world? Go make it happen.

Flip the game — do the thing, show that you can provide so much value that they want you. And if they still don’t? That’s absolutely fine. You’re left with something awesome. People can’t prevent your dreams from coming true if your dreams were never contingent on their approval in the first place.

So what does that look like in practice? How do you chase goals where the act of pursuing them makes you better?

OK, What do I want?

I like to use the “OK, What do I want, How I’m going to get there” model (Shoutout to my mom and wherever she heard this).

Steps:
OK.
Write down where you are now. All your feelings and frustrations, the current state of you. This is your starting point.
What do I want?
Pause to think about what you want. No, what you actually want. Keep asking until you get to the root.
How I’m going to get there:
Put on your thinking cap and get creative. Is there a way to do the thing that doesn’t require someone to give you permission to do it?

Now let’s apply this to some test scenarios!

The Aspiring Student Leader
Say you’re frustrated with the student council at your school. You’re annoyed that adults call the shots, that it’s a popularity contest to see who wins the presidential position, and that no previous president has really done all that much to make the school a better place. The seemingly obvious route is to apply to be president, run a campaign, win the election, and then do everything a student council president might do but better (with the oversight of the adult administrators at your school of course).
What do you really want? To work with great people, to not be limited in what you can accomplish. To run events and fundraisers, to build inclusive spaces built on effort rather than popularity, where people can feel that their contributions matter and that they’re making a difference.

So how are you going to get there? You could jump through the hoops but that leaves a lot of factors up to chance. This may seem bold, but what if you just… made your own student council? Led a youth leadership organization outside of school that checked all the boxes with none of the downsides? It’s not necessarily a lower effort path but it may be… less painful? More effective?

This was my villain origin story with SVP Teens. What I didn’t know when I pursued this backdoor was that instead of just one school, I’d be able to work with 90 dedicated student leaders from 16 schools in the region. I didn’t predict that we would raise tens of thousands of dollars to grant to local charities, that new organizations would be founded from the connections made, that it would be a significant source of emotional support during a global pandemic, and that 3 years after my graduation the program would still have over 100 active members from schools across the district. I was fortunate to work with adults who enabled us instead of trying to shut us down, and didn’t have to wait for permission, waste time, or spend my emotional capacity running an election campaign to win votes. Starting with an Instagram account and an idea, I just went for it.

The Determined Athlete
OK — I was trying out for a coach who had cut me from his team before, and feeling nervous that he would cut me again. Whether or not I deserved to be on the team, I didn’t want to leave it in his hands to decide if I got to play high level hockey in the upcoming year.

What did I want? To play on a high-level team, to play often, and to get better. None of these goals were contingent on playing for him specifically.
So how did I get there? The first coach did, in fact, end up cutting me. But since I had been proactive in my pursuit of a backdoor, I had reached out to the coach of a competing local team. This coach went above and beyond, coming to watch me try out in Waterloo before inviting me to his own tryouts.

The second coach ended up being the best coach I’ve ever had. When I pursued this backdoor, I didn’t know we’d still be in contact over 5 years later. I didn’t know that the team I’d join would be the first team I’d been on that felt like a family, or that I’d come to love hockey so much that despite living in another country I’d be taking a red-eye flight mid-coop term to play in Provincials one last time with this team. It started with an email and a “no”, but is without a doubt one of the best things that has happened to me.
The Eager Photographer
As a student, joining a club seems like the obvious way to do the things you love surrounded by great people. Many people that attend our events will ask “how can I get involved?!” and list the ways they’d love to help.

Many clubs and teams have formal application processes — at their most ridiculous, students will write essays upon essays, other students will spend hours parsing through applications, everyone spends significant amounts of time conducting and participating in interviews, there is secrecy and anxiety, and at the end of the day 92% of the candidates will get rejected. Unless the club is an “HR Club”, none of this excessive process is even remotely related to why people joined the club — yet recruitment and admissions seem to be where hours disproportionately go. It’s been too long since we questioned — who is actually benefiting from this system?

OK, I want to take photos for a club. What do I want? To take photos for a club. What’s the backdoor? Show up to an event, start taking photos. Send the photos.
Congratulations! You’ve just become an event photographer.

The absolute quickest way to get involved is to just do it — show up to events, put your skills to use, and make the organizers notice you. Don’t ask how you can help (people aren’t going to be creative for you) — just show them what you can do, and follow through with the execution. You want to run a dinner? Find funding, run it. So much can be accomplished when you stop waiting for the “go-ahead”. Just do it.

Consider yourself permissioned.

Everything that exists today began at ground zero with everyday people being stubborn in their belief that there was a better way to do things. Why not you?

The realization that there are no rules, there’s no script to follow and that you can kind of just do whatever you want with enough confidence and improvisation is a superpower that few people unlock. Once you do, the whole world opens up. If it helps you get what you originally wanted: it’s a backdoor; if it doesn’t, you’ve done things that are truly awesome and have personally levelled up along the way. Win-win.

By just going for it — building the thing, doing the job you always wanted to do — without waiting for permission, you’ll likely end up somewhere significantly better than you could have imagined. Embrace hearing “no” and keep thinking.

It takes a pause for reflection to figure out what you actually want, some creativity to figure out how to get there, and courage to stand alone with conviction, but you can do it.2 Whatever it is that you want, go chase it!3

Hoping that reading this makes something click for someone.4

Consider yourself permissioned5.

Joss 😎

Obviously there are financial, legal, etc. limitations to what you can just decide to do but most of the barriers that have held me back in life have been superficial.

I believe you can and you should too. You can do hard things.

Disclaimer: this strategy is ABSOLUTELY an example of playing the long game. High effort high reward.

Turns out "someone" might be me. Playing with the idea of taking my next internship period to go freestyle mode, have a sponge era, travel all over, read, write, become a technical weapon, and learn as much as I possibly can. It scares me to try to do something undefined (thank you to

Anson Yu

and

Jacky Zhao

for being my inspiration and biggest cheerleaders) — but in the spirit of “the backdoors” this might be an obvious solution to getting rejected from going on an exchange term and my constant effort to get internships in fun cities. Obviously there are some logistical details to be figured out but maybe I can just do what I want and move there without applying to 200+ jobs?!

Shoutout to

Lyn Stoler

for the line “Consider yourself permissioned”. I think about it often.