Entrepreneurship Lesson #322: On Asking for Forgiveness, Rather than Permission

When you are growing up as a child, parents often try to reinforce the concept of permission. If you want something, you have to ask for it – politely. Only then, can you  actually get it.

The idea of good manners certainly makes sense when you’re a young child. But could it be that it’s actually preventing our progress later on in life – especially in the world of startups, when you’re trying to create something new or go against status quo?

Asking for Forgiveness, Rather than Permission

As we enter adult life, we come face-to-face with many layers of bureaucracy in the world. Especially, in the workplace, whether it’s within our own company, where we need to get permission from 3 different layers of management or with the people on the outside. We are conditioned to think that if we want something, we need to have somebody give us permission to do so.

However, working in a fast-paced startup environment begins to shift your mindset. More often than not, asking for permission just doesn’t get you anywhere. In the best case scenario, it leads to numerous delays. In the worst case scenario, if your request is just a little out of the ordinary, people will have a tendency to reject it by auto-pilot instead of taking the time to entertain it.

When working at Kiva.org – the world’s faster growing online non-profit – I really learned how this point is driven home . Their idea of enabling citizens in the developed countries to sponsor small entrepreneurs in the developing world was so outside the framework of anything else that existed at that time, that they had no precedent to follow and certainly nobody that would “give them official permission to proceed”.

They spent a significant chunk of time trying to get an answer from the SEC on whether they could move forward with their venture and nobody could give them a straight answer. Until one day that just decided to go for it and deal with the consequences later.

They ultimately did.

Although their path was not without challenges, if they waited for somebody to give them permission to operate, they may still have not launched. Or worse yet, somebody would’ve told them no.

What ended up happening in that situation – and in many others – when you just go through and it, the consequences are often less dramatic and long-lasting than you expect. Even if you get in trouble, the chances are that things will find a way of working out. And if you succeed with what you set out to do, you’ll find that a lot of the initial resistance and bureaucracy begins disappear, as people begin to believe more in your idea.

Ultimately, if you truly want to achieve something and believe that this is the right thing to do, you simply can’t afford to sit on the sidelines until someone “lets” you do it. Give yourself permission and go for it.