You Are the Solution to a Problem That No Longer Exists

Creating From the Future

We make the mistake of thinking if we only got now what we needed then that everything would be okay.

W e make the mistake of thinking if we only got now what we needed then that everything would be okay. But no amount of what we needed then will fix what was never broken. The solution was there all along: to let ourselves be ourselves in the world.

It’s late at night after a long day of work. I’m sitting in the office with a friend and co-worker. We share tales about our past, talk about our fathers.

There’s a lull in the conversation. He looks at me and says, “You know, your father is dead.”

“Huh? I know.”

“No,” he says, “You don’t understand. Your father is dead.”

“What?” I say. “I know. He died in 1976.”

“You’re not listening,” he said. “Your father is dead.”

I look at him with a blank stare.

“You don’t have to try to make him proud of you anymore.”

You are still trying to solve the unsolvable problem of your past. And it keeps you from creating what you truly want.

What problem are you trying to solve?

At the deepest level, it’s what I call The Love Threshold. You learned at a very early age to become something you’re not in order to be loved.

You created strategies to keep yourself safe because it wasn’t safe to follow your essence, your natural way of being in the world that’s valuable without any real thought or effect on your part. You had to protect yourself. You had to hide your pain. You learned to look out for yourself, to look good in front of others, to be on the lookout for what you needed before someone else got it.

Above all, you learned how to survive.

Self-interest, status-seeking, scarcity, and survival.

All of us learned these lessons early in life. If you were fortunate enough to have parents who tried to teach you something different, you learned them from your teachers and friends (and television, magazines, the internet…). It’s the invisible soup we simmer in, the hidden curriculum we are all taught.

It started when you were a kid.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be an artist and a writer.

My father didn’t value either of those things. I’m not faulting my father. He didn’t understand art and writing. He worked for the Fuller Brush company, selling industrial cleaning supplies (I didn’t understand industrial cleaning supplies). He was always encouraging me to learn something practical. He would say, “How are you going to make money as an artist and a writer?”

For a long time — even long after he died — I continued to do his work for him. I would ask myself, “How am I going to make money as an artist and a writer?”

And so, to be loved by my father, I didn’t make art, and I didn’t write. I did things that didn’t have anything to do with who I was. I learned how to sell. I thought that would make him proud of me (the good thing is, I learned how to sell).

I also became a rebel. Rebellion is a great place to hide your pain. The strategy is simple: Pretend you don’t want love. Pretend it doesn’t hurt.

All of this meant that I went on a long detour in my life before I could come back to myself and create a form that matches my essence.

I don’t need my father’s love now. The irony is, I always had it.

Being the solution to a problem that no longer exists creates a tension between creating from the past and creating from the future.

You’re still trying to survive something that happened to you in the past, instead of creating something out of the future, out of future possibilities, creating something congruent with your essence.

If you ask someone what they want, what their B is, the thing they say they want to create [see The Key to Extraordinary Leadership (and Coaching)], many people will give you a B that they think would solve a problem they had that no longer exists. If you really get them dreaming, they’ll give you a B they believe will solve the problem that no longer exists once and for all.

But it won’t.

You want to create from the future. To create from the future, you need to do the work of unraveling your outworn strategies for staying safe.

The decisions you made to survive served you when you made them. You’re here. You made it. But even though your decisions served you, they may or may not have been true. And even if they were true then, they may or may not be true now (and most likely, they’re not true).

They’re obsolete. You’ve outgrown them. You don’t need to be afraid to express an opinion that somebody else might not like. You’re still going to eat dinner. You’re no longer in danger of not surviving.

The problem you’re solving may never have existed.

A sad reality of human relationships is that they’re fraught with disconnects (what my beloved, Michèle Taipale, calls perplexities).

When you have a disconnect, you make up a story. And then you have to protect yourself from the story you made up.

You develop a limp from the imaginary pebble in your shoe.

And before you know it, you’ve become a miniature version of what you were meant to be.

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