Sterling's Truths for Life #37

Explanation

I prefer this formulation to the “teach a man to fish” thing, but it’s the same principle. The problem with teaching a man to fish is that until you turn him loose to do it himself, he doesn’t know how to fish. Also, I hate fishing and…

Tim Lockwood: “Not every sardine was meant to swim, son.”
Flint Lockwood: “I don’t understand fishing metaphors!”

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs (2009)

This can come up in a variety of contexts. When I was a systems administrator, there were some problems I did not solve. The job of a sysadmin is to answer every question with “no.” Then, when someone asks “why not?” you make them explain what they need and to justify why it’s his problem. A sysadmin has too many daily tasks to solve everyone’s problem and if he did, no one would learn how to use computers or software because computers and software suck to use. (That’s why AI is so popular. Finally, the machine has a chance of understanding what I actually want! Oh, dang, the AI hallucinated the wrong answer again.)

To this day, part of why I’m slow to fix tech problems of my family members is because I don’t want to have to do it for them every time for the rest of my life. They have to learn how to do it themselves… (And I’m lazy. And I hate computers and my extensive knowledge of them is like a slow working poison and I die a little inside every time I have to help someone with a computing problem.)

With children, it is absolutely essential that at some point you stop helping them with everything they need to do when they go to live on their own. You must, at some point before they turn eighteen, refuse to cook for them and make them do it. You must refuse to wash and fold their clothes and make them do it. You must refuse to give them money and make them earn it. Part of the reason so many young men continue to live at home is because their parents never had the fortitude to do this despite the inevitable complaints and whining.

So if I am helping someone with a problem, making them solve their own problem is very often better and more useful than me showing them how and doing it for them. If you want my help, beware. I might choose not to with the intentional hope of encouraging you to become a stronger and better and more knowledgeable person.