You Can Just Do Things

Why you don’t need permission to start

My cursor hovered over the "Publish" button. Can I really ship this art book out into the world without a legit publisher’s seal of approval? I pictured bookstores rejecting me, editors wielding red pens like high school math teacher. But then I remembered: I can just publish this myself.

I rallied friends to help. I borrowed their scanner, licensed a font, and asked one to edit my foreword. A few weeks later, I unboxed 300 copies in my living room. (The smell of fresh paper was as lovely as you think it is). I listed it on my website.

You can just do things.

The Permission Habit

School and work taught us to colour inside the lines, raise your hand, never improvise. Most of us were trained to ask for permission. But no one’s coming to grant it.

I thought things would be different at work. I tested those boundaries in an investment bank. (Great idea, I know). In Week One, I emailed my drafted article to an economist. My boss looked busy, so I thought that sending the draft to the economist would get the project moving faster. The next day, my boss said I should have emailed it to him first for approval instead of bypassing him.

In the corporate world, approval chains trump deadlines. From then on, I sent him every tiny draft, even if it meant clogging my boss’s inbox.

Why We Wait

Asking permission can feel safer than leaping without a net. It feels safe, like checking Google maps before driving to a new destination. We fear:

• Conflict: Will I look arrogant?

• Imperfection: What if it’s ugly?

• Rejection: Without a green light, is it worth it?

But what if we replaced worry with momentum?

What We Lose

Time is our most precious, non‑renewable resource. Every paused project chips away at curiosity and confidence.

I gave up writing educational blogs when I became a banking reporter. I convinced myself it was a “conflict of interest” to juggle both. In reality, I closed a door that was already paying me. I lost momentum for a phantom rule.

Sneaking in Small Starts

No launch plan? No problem. I figured out some solo projects that would have a zero crash radius.

• Substack essays: My upcoming book Bite-Sized Creativity began as weekly posts.

• Street photography: I carry my camera everywhere, no assignment required.

• Writing chops: I edited essays for online writing school, sharpening my craft.

Each tiny start felt trivial in isolation, but overtime, they stacked into real progress.

Tiny Starts, Big Shifts

In 2022, I gave myself a no-permission policy. If I wanted to do something, I was going to do the smallest version of it to get things up and running. A bite-sized experiment.

• One Substack essay led to a hundred more.

• One cold DM to a photographer led me to a mentorship.

• One LinkedIn message unlocked my current job.

This wouldn’t have happened if I had sought permission to write my thoughts online. Which I didn’t need to, but felt a niggling “omigosh-can-we-do-this” feeling anyways.

Over to You

So I’ll turn this over to you:

What’s one thing you can do this week without asking anyone?

You probably don’t need permission for it 😉

This is part of an essay series called Cheat on Your Job. Share your permission-slip moment in the comments, or lemme know what you’d like to read next!

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Update log:

• 🎨

  Michelle Elisabeth Varghese
  out of nowhere just wrote up this copy for my new landing page… what?! Check it out here: https://www.beckyisj.com/consulting

• 📩 I post quite a lot of random thoughts/project journals in my logs. I don’t email it to anyone in fear of spamming people, but as it turns out, you can opt in here.

• ✍🏼 …such as this "Prompt to Publish: Write with AI" course that I am putting together.

• 📖 Reading Moral Ambition (54% completed) by Rutger Bregman.

• 🎮 Playing Astro Bot again. I forgot I was like 2 levels away from completing the game. Why did I abandon it?

• 🏃‍♀️ Tapering down on training and just running. The biggest motivator is that I get to bring my tiny film camera out with me.

Book a call: Have a bite-sized creative project? Let’s give you a starting line boost a la Mario Kart - https://www.beckyisj.com/consulting

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