By T. Alexander Puutio Ph.D.
Humanity has institutionalized itself to the point where we seek permission for our lives where none is actually needed.
As early as kindergarten, the structure of society takes control over our trajectories, carefully curating our experiences and shepherding us toward whatever paths are considered “productive” at any given time. Rarely, if ever, are we encouraged to explore the infinite ways that human flourishing could arise.
We spend our formative years chasing rubrics and solving problems with predetermined answers in institutions in which we represent a statistic, not an individual. For these institutions, the unspoken goal is to prepare us to spend the rest of our lives chasing a variety of performance metrics in the workplace in return for a salary and the occasional promotion.
Most of us learn early in life how dangerous veering off the prescribed path can be. The surest way to succeed is not to stand out but to play by the unwritten rules that govern how careers move forward, and many of us absorb this lesson way before formal education even begins.
One of the most self-limiting beliefs we carry is that our progress depends on the permission of gatekeepers that hold the keys to our own becoming.
The open horizons of childhood
Ask a kindergartener what they want to be when they grow up, and they’ll rattle off a list: astronaut, ballerina, paleontologist, dinosaur rancher, ideally all at once while eating a triple-decker ice cream with a cherry on top.
The world feels wide open to them because the invisible rules set hasn’t yet been inscribed into their grey matter as it has in ours.
Their imagination, far from being a liability, is a form of play that allows them to stretch into possibilities, most of which seem naive to us but all of which show how far the human mind reaches when it is allowed to roam free.
Developmental psychology shows us this vividly: Young children consistently report more unconventional aspirations, which decline as schooling progresses and conformity pressures rise (Hartung, Porfeli & Vondracek, 2005). The more we internalize what the world expects, the more the boundaries of our future self shrink.
When we reach adulthood, most of us have learned a sobering lesson that makes our childhood dreams seem outright naïve: You can’t just become things.
Not only do we think we need 10,000 hours of practice before any skill even matters, but we also feel we need permission from a parade of gatekeepers at each stage. Recruiters, bosses, editors, publishers, all must grant us access before we can even show our best work.
And the worst thing about it is that the adults aren’t entirely wrong about it.
A culture of seeking permission
Admissions is a perfect example of the gatekeeping in action.
If a child wanted to grow up and become a dinosaur expert, their interest in the topic alone would not be even close to enough. They’d need admission to a selective university, followed by approval from grant committees, peer reviewers, faculty boards, and professional societies to qualify them as an expert in the field.
Our aptitude for formalization is how our societies have managed to advance to where they are. By professionalizing fields, we’ve created institutions that ensure quality, safeguard standards, and protect us from charlatans. Medicine, engineering, law, and science all depend on gatekeepers to maintain rigor. These structures have lifted life expectancy, put rockets into orbit, and built bridges that don’t collapse.
But in the process of building guardrails, we’ve often missed the spirit that first animated these pursuits. The joy of discovery and sheer creativity existed long before credentials did, and the frameworks we’ve built were meant to channel human curiosity, not contain it.
And yet, too often they end up doing exactly that. The secret no hiring manager or grants administrator will tell you is that none of this means you can’t start living the life you want today.
The permission illusion
Psychologists call this learned helplessness, a mindset in which people underestimate their freedom to act, even when no one is stopping them (Seligman, 1975). Social scientists studying organizational behavior see a similar phenomenon, in which employees often avoid taking initiative because they assume they lack authority, even in environments that explicitly encourage it (Morrison & Milliken, 2000).
Whether it’s dogs and electric shocks in cages or employees in drab cubicles, the net effect is the same: We internalize the presence of gatekeepers so thoroughly that we stop testing doors to begin with. Sometimes we even pre-reject ourselves before anyone else has a chance to cope with it all.
Angela Duckworth, author of Grit, has a simple exercise she asks of her students: Identify the hard thing they are avoiding. Almost always, the gatekeeper is us, and the quiet voice inside saying that we don’t have permission to try.
The need for permission, in the end, is nothing but an illusion, and it’s one we enforce ourselves.
Permission is optional. Thriving is the reward we should go after
If you love dinosaurs, you don’t need a formal degree to find fossilized T. rex teeth at Hell Creek in Montana or to admire the ancient tracks of Edmontosaurus in Colorado’s Picketwire Canyonlands.
You don’t need a grant maker’s permission to spend weekends at dig sites, attend amateur paleontology groups, or write your own analyses online. Academic journals themselves, when properly double-blinded, care little about your credentials—just what you dug up from the ground and what you have to say about it.
Yes, the official path makes things easier, but it is never the only path. This is particularly true once we start chasing thriving, instead of mere striving.
The problem is that we confuse the easy, gatekeeper-approved way with the only way. And in that confusion, we lose something fundamental about human life: namely, the capacity to explore simply because curiosity calls us there.
So here’s my invitation to you, and it begins with an observation: Our time on this planet is short. The rules of society may be useful, but they are not binding laws on your curiosity. Seeking permission is optional, while the path to flourishing is open, always.
References
Hartung, P. J., Porfeli, E. J., & Vondracek, F. W. (2005). Child vocational development: A review and reconsideration. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 66(3), 385–419.
Morrison, E. W., & Milliken, F. J. (2000). Organizational silence: A barrier to change and development in a pluralistic world. The Academy of Management Review, 25(4), 706–725.
Seligman, M. E. P. (1975). Helplessness: On depression, development, and death. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman.
T. Alexander Puutio, Ph.D., teaches at Harvard and is an organizational performance expert exploring how people and organizations flourish through curiosity, range, and purposeful leadership.
