Earning Permission

One thing we get better at everyday: Ignoring interruptions.

The advertisement in the men’s stall in the bathroom. Don’t even see it.
The popup on the website. Quick, find the X to make it go away.
The billboard. Blind to it.
The commercial on Spotify. Turn the volume down for 30 seconds.
The junk mail. Straight to the trash.

Occasionally, though, something captures our attention. It’s usually deliberate. Usually personalized. Most often recommended by a friend. Seldom is it generic or over-glamorized or part of a $100 million ad campaign by a multinational corporation. It cut through the noise because you allowed it to.

If it worked that one time, you give it another try. Another listen. Another look. In other words, you give it permission to interrupt you again. And over time, your permission grows, your noise-pollution filter is down, and you trust the message, the image, the information, the thing.

But you get to this point because, and only because you were not overly-interrupted, overly-annoyed, overly-marketed to, overly-sold, but instead because you encountered precision, beauty, creativity, or eloquence (or all of them).

Apply this to your message, your craft, your thing you put into the world:

The opposite of permission in an age of way-too-much information is not rejection.

The opposite of permission is getting ignored.

And the only way to avoid getting ignored is not persistence but precision,
not force but eloquence,
not more volume but more beauty, more truth, more honesty.
Over and over again.

And then the one person that gives you permission will encourage another person to give you permission.

Now you have two.