Socien's Blog

I struggled for years before my breakthrough. I relied on various helpers to spring up. But I have also noticed that help, even when it is from a willing well-wisher, tends to be its major undoing. “Sabotage help” is the phrase used in this blog to refer to any form of help that ruins and delays success when helpers intend to uplift the recipients of their help. (I am not an expert. I recommend you consider hearing from experts).

Sabotage help:

• Is provided with good intentions and is not supposed to harm the recipient.
• Deverts you from or reduces your attention to what you want to do, what you have been doing and what you wish to do.
• Robs your freedom. Freedom is doing what you want at a time soothing to you, as long as it doesn’t harm anyone.
• Steals your precious non-renewable resource, that is time.

Take note:

It is important to value first the “help” you can give yourself than the “help” you can get from anyone or elsewhere. It is productive to earn through hard work something ten times less and limit your bills and afford your bills. It may damage your progress to wait for and rely on the promise and delivery of anything ten times bigger than what you can earn through your limited means.

Help can turn into “sabotage” only when it restricts your freedom and forces you into picking the helper’s choice over yours. Success will require that you have the freedom to do what you want before it can come your way. After all, if you do what they want, you will never have the chance to do what you want.

• Who are my favourite folks around me?

• Being a grown-up dependent, challenges and escape routes

• Qualities of a vision and a visionary

The art of helping; more time and less material items.

More than anything, to help a child grow gracefully you need to him or her your time. Modern parents make a mistake, or it is a glitch in them that keeps them occupied by work or modern technology. They give their kids iPads, money and expensive gifts. They forget that there is nothing more important than the gift of time. An hour of the parent’s physical presence matters more than an hour of the iPad’s availability to the kid.

This article focuses on grown-ups who need help. Just like kids, they need much more of the helper’s time than money first. I can help you better if, although busy, I let you join my drive to a weekend golf course refreshment and hear from your story. Rich people are busy. When I am rich, it will be harder for me to settle for your presentation and understand facts about your problem in an instant.

Big problems are understood over a long period. As your helper, I should rely more on observing you and your problem as much as I hear of it from you. You see, it is “sabotage” to give the wrong hand. So, before I give you a hand I should have known ‘which hand to give’.

• Why won’t rich relatives help you with capital? How to (or not) change their minds?

Most of us helpers think that helping is all about money. This mindset keeps those who have less money from ever helping. Those who are rich tunnel whom they help opposite the demands of the problems faced and opposite abstract plans laid out before help was sought. In the article with the link above, I gave an example of how my rich Uncle offered me a free ticket for my return to College. I knocked at his door asking for some help with hosting fees for this blog. He suggested that I needed an extra Degree certificate instead to hype my chances of finding a job.

A single semester at the College was seven times more expensive than what I was looking for. I had been attempting to come up with an earning blog for seven years without a breakthrough. The problem of mine had an abstract list of antidotes that were a product of my experience. But uncle chose to go south with his help. I wasn’t going to look for a job. I needed not one. Going to College again was going to distance myself from my passion for writing. However, I had promised myself to return to it after this third spell at College.

What I am calling sabotage help here comes from willing and committed helpers like my Uncle. These helpers are faithful and do not seek compensation or recognition. They are everything you can dream of, except that they don’t understand your problem. Sometimes their help may go south while you are pointing north. When in need of help, remember: It is not about them “affording and committed to help you”. It is about them willing to and committed to helping you according to what you and your problem should be addressed.

Sabotage help can happen when:

• The helper enforces his/her will, and is not willing to listen to any suggestions on how s/he should help from one s/he intends to help.
• The helper is not patient enough to listen and understand the story of one s/he intends to help.
• The recipient of help is desperate and can take any form of help, including sabotage help.
• The recipient of help is not good at explaining his problem until it is understood. Explaining is hard by default.

Explaining is hard by default. The helper and the recipient should meet between if the helper is to understand problem. The recipient must explain his story. The helper must listen and observe the story of the recipient.