20/40 - Outsourced Learning

One of the greatest gifts my parents ever gave me was when they told me, "If you see us doing something that you think we are doing well, learn from that and ask us more about it. If there is something that you want to learn but know we may not be the best at it, we'll help you find someone who is and have them teach you."

Looking back on this now as an adult, it takes a lot of humility to say "I don't know how to teach you how to do that." It takes a lot of love and generosity to say "I'll help you find someone who can teach you." And that is exactly what my parents did.

When I was entering my teenage years, I wanted to work out more and was trying to figure out what to do when I was at the rec center. My dad had a friend named Michael who was at the gym every morning at 5 am and wore muscle shirts every chance he could. So my dad asked Michael if he'd share some knowledge with me and he did. He gave me his old bodybuilding booklets. They helped, but I also got the idea that maybe they weren't for me when I read the part about eating cans of beans for multiple meals a day to bulk up.

I knew that the carburetor on my truck was in need of some TLC and didn't want to take it into the shop. I asked Dad if we could rebuild it and he said it was possible but that it would be better if his friend Jim helped me. Jim came over one Saturday and we spent the whole day taking the whole thing apart and cleaning each piece and then putting it back into the truck and seeing that things were running much smoother.

These are just a couple of examples, but the lesson learned was very clear: it is okay to not know how to do everything as long as you are humble enough to ask experts to help you when you come up against something that you don't know how to do.

But the extension that came later on that lesson was when I asked Dad why he never liked to work on cars and he said, "I'd rather spend that time with my family, so I just make sure that I make enough money to have someone else do that work so I can do what I actually like to do with my time."

If you ask Maddie now, there are very few things that I really want to spend my time doing if I don't have to and there is someone that I can pay to do it for me. It has been my unwavering luxury since moving to NYC to have someone else do my laundry. There is a laundry service on every block and even though I have a washer and dryer in the basement of our building, I refuse to do the laundry. I don't like remembering the timing, switching loads, or folding it. I don't care how much the cleaners charge me, it is worth every penny.