Without Worrying About the Consequences

What the sentence actually says

Make it clear. Not a hint, not a hope that someone guesses. Say it plainly enough that nobody has to interpret you.

What you want and don't want. Both halves. Most of us are good at one and bad at the other.

Say it. Out loud, to the person it concerns. A want you keep to yourself is a wish, and wishes do not get answered.

Without worrying about the consequences. This is the part that makes people flinch. He did not say there would be none. He said do not let the worrying decide.

The consequences are coming either way. The only question is whether fear got a vote before they arrived.

It helps to know who was talking. I have three other lines of my father's in the quote corner. Discipline is doing what you promise yourself you will do; responsibility is doing what you promise others you will do. All good people have the same religion; it's the bad ones who don't. Read alone, this advice sounds like a license. Read next to the rest of him, it is permission.

Good people. They are the only ones who need it.

The first objection: in the wrong hands this is dangerous. But people who hurt others are not held back by consequences, so telling them this changes nothing. Good people mistake a heavy conscience for wisdom, and call the silence being considerate. Most of it is fear with good manners.

The advice lands on people who will use it well, and who will not use it at all until someone gives them permission. That is what the text was: permission, passed to my kids the way my father once passed it to me.

Who the advice reaches, and who it does not:

Why the worry usually wins

It is not weakness. It is wiring. Kahneman and Tversky showed that a loss feels about twice as heavy as a gain the same size, so what you might lose lands with double weight before you have thought at all.

Then there is regret. Gilovich and Medvec found that, over a lifetime, about three to one, the regrets are for things not done. What you did, you fixed. What you did not do is still sitting there.

The two kinds of regret, over time:

In 1994 a thirty-year-old on Wall Street asked which he would regret more at eighty: trying to sell books on the internet and failing, or never trying. He quit and started Amazon, and he calls it his regret minimization framework. My father got it into one sentence, and the occasion was a boy and a dog.

Two of the people behind the numbers:

Three people who lived this way

Advice is abstract until you watch someone live it: three people who said what needed saying, real consequences waiting. Two were rewarded. One was not. I include him on purpose.

All three pushed the envelope: the range a plane has actually been flown and proven safe, which grows only when a pilot flies past its edge on purpose. Nobody has ever pushed an envelope from the middle.

The envelope, and how it grows:

A hundred ways to say hold back

Think before you speak. Don't burn bridges. Read the room. Each is useful now and then; together they are a brake with no gas pedal. The cost is invisible: you never see the company not started, or the friendship gone quiet because nobody called first.

Dreamers need to be told to dream. It is the hardest advice there is, because everything pulls the other way. Roosevelt said it best, in Paris in 1910: credit belongs to the man in the arena, marred by dust and sweat and blood, who dares greatly. The critic does not count.

English has a hundred phrases for holding back and about one for going ahead. My father gave me a second one.

Where the advice stops, and how I use it

Every good piece of advice has an edge. Want is not feel like. It does not cover cruelty, or what you would be ashamed of later. My father also gave me the line about responsibility, doing what you promise others. The advice does not take away what happens after; it takes away the paralysis before.

So here is how I use it. Say the true thing, kindly if you can, plainly if you cannot. Do the bold thing, carefully and prepared. When the worry shows up, treat it like weather: real, worth a coat, not a reason to stay home.

Three questions I ask before holding back. Not before acting. Before holding back.

What he was really saying

I have not always taken this advice, and I know which of my regrets are which: the ones from speaking are small and healed, the ones from staying quiet are still open.

My father was not telling anyone to be careless. He was saying that a boy could be trusted with his own wants, and that the worry he would feel later was not conscience, just fear in good clothes. That is the kind of thing you can only say about someone you believe in, so I passed it on to my own kids.

Make it clear what you want and don't want. Say it. The consequences will come either way. Let them find you having spoken.

Every study named here carries the finding I took from it, so you can check me. Every photograph carries the credit its license requires.