He Is Like I Was

A new hire joined his group. When the new hire prepared reports, he treated the basis the manager liked as the rule: whenever a number looked bad, his first thought was whether there was another way to calculate it. He watched. Where the new hire drew his lines, he did not know; perhaps the new hire didn’t either. He saw only one thing that bothered him: go on like this, and the new hire will take the manager’s basis for the rule of the trade.

He found he cared. Not about the report — about the person. He wanted to help. This essay is about what that wanting to help is in someone who treats people as ends: where it comes from, how far it can go, and where it turns into its opposite.

His first thought, watching the new hire, was: he is like I was. It is the most natural thought and the one most likely to go wrong. He is like I was, so the road he has to walk is the road I walked; the way he is now is the way I was, not yet finished. Think that, and helping becomes simple: point out the road you took, and let him get to where you stand, faster.

Taking the road you walked as the road someone else must walk is what the framework calls colonization: putting one’s own ends in place of another person’s own law. It needs no force and no malice; what distinguishes it is not how hard the means are but what the act is. The opposite is to let someone grow from the inside out, which the framework calls cultivation.

So not colonising begins with three things. Do not see the new hire as an unfinished version of yourself: he is not your draft; he has his own law, even unformed, growing by his own logic, and when it is formed it may look nothing like yours. Do not make getting him to agree with you the point of helping him: he wanted the new hire to see the basis can’t be treated as a rule, and half of that could be for the new hire and half a wish to be proved right back then; once the second half gets in, whether the new hire agrees becomes the measure of success. The framework notes that it’s for your own good is cultivation’s most common self-justification and colonization’s most common disguise. And do not settle the account in thanks, obedience or joining: the check is not whether the other is satisfied — satisfaction can be arranged — but whether his own judgment stands more firmly. Someone truly cultivated finds it easier to say no to the person who cultivated him. If he can’t, it has become dependence, which is colonization in a mild form.

What Can Be Given

Not colonising is not giving nothing. What he can give comes in a few shapes. Presenting: he works his own way where the new hire can see — how he writes the basis note, what he writes when a number looks bad; whether the new hire looks, and what he makes of it, is the new hire’s business. Asking: who is this report for? — a question with no answer tucked inside, so the new hire can answer something he never thought of. Clarifying: the new hire says that’s the rule; he asks whose rule? — not to refute, but to help the new hire see his own words.

Thinking together: once, neither of them could settle a basis; he did not hand down a conclusion; the two of them listed every consequence they could think of and spent an afternoon on it. Providing conditions: he introduced the new hire to someone on the other team, so he could ask for himself how the data was used; he told the manager the new hire’s first-quarter reports could use two extra days.

What these share is helping someone see more clearly for himself — not rearranging what is in front of him so that he automatically picks what you wanted. One kind of help goes around a person; the other makes him stronger. And this is not a list of techniques. The same question can be a real question or a trap with a conclusion inside it: don’t you think this is wrong? The shape of a question is there; the meaning of one is gone. None of these owns anything in the other’s place. What the new hire takes away, and whether he owns it, is his own step.

Why He Cannot Not Think About It

Be clear about the moment in question: a person who, in this particular matter, really treats this person in front of him as an end. Having once acknowledged that others are ends is not the same as doing it in each matter. This section takes one step from that premise: in this matter, he really takes the new hire as an end.

A person who treats himself as an end lives by his own law and does his own things. Far enough along, he discovers that what his life points toward need not stop at himself. The author puts that in one sentence of his own — the meaning of a life lies outside that life — and marks it as his own saying, not a theorem anywhere in the framework: what a life points to need not be itself; meaning is not stored somewhere outside.

To take the new hire as an end is to acknowledge that his law is his, growing by his own logic — not by yours, and not by the manager’s. And not only to acknowledge it: how that law grows has actually entered his thinking this time. Landing on this person, that acknowledgment becomes a way of treating him: not deciding where his law grows, only giving it conditions to grow in. The framework says this is simply how someone who treats people as ends treats people. So in this matter, cultivation is the direction he faces.

Inwardly, this is a cannot-not. Whether the new hire’s law can grow — anyone standing here will think about it, and cannot treat it as none of his business. He can, in this matter, not stand here; he cannot stand here and cancel it. But thinking about it is not doing something this time. The capacity to cultivate differs from person to person; whether to cultivate this time, whether he is the one, and how, rest on judgment. He may say nothing, may wait, may judge that he is not the right person. And no action this time does not show he has stopped facing the new hire.

And nobody stands in this position all the time. Cultivation is a direction, not something done every moment. The demand is this high because the premise is that others are ends; nobody meets it moment by moment, but in the moment of standing here, that is how high it is. So three things do not stand in for one another: the direction cannot be actively cancelled; what to do this time is still his judgment; and no action this time does not, by itself, show which of the first two went wrong.

Leaving a Blank

The same acknowledgment, seen from the other side, stops him. If the new hire is an end, the new hire’s law is the new hire’s. He cannot legislate it, cannot walk up to that line in the new hire’s place. If what he is doing is getting the new hire to draw lines the way I do, it is not help; it is replacing the new hire’s law with his own. So outwardly cultivation can only be a direction, and it must leave a blank. What is left blank is not words — he can give his share in full: what he saw, what he thought, why he didn’t change it that time. What is left blank is the new hire’s share: whether to accept it, how to judge, whether to change, whether to go. He cannot fill that in. Filling it in is replacing.

Cultivation depends on three things: the other being willing to receive it, being suited to receive it, and the time being ripe. They are asked one matter at a time, and they sit on the new hire’s side; he cannot answer them in the new hire’s place. He can judge from clues, and he can ask.

Willing. The new hire has not come to ask. That does not mean he doesn’t want to hear, nor that he does. He can ask: want to hear why I didn’t change it that time? He holds a sentence in the new hire’s year-end review; whether the question carries a cost for the new hire is not his to decide. What he can do is not add the cost: if the new hire says no, accept it for real, and give nothing less afterwards. Suited. Even if the new hire wants to hear, what he wants to give may not be what the new hire needs. The new hire’s situation may differ; what he needs may not be a line at all, but first to learn who the report is for. The right answer given to someone asking a different question is still given wrong. Timely. Last week the new hire was criticised in front of everyone over a basis; this week he is protecting himself, and everything sounds like blame. Say it now and it won’t go in — not because he doesn’t want it, but because he has no room for it at the moment.

Get the time, the person or the manner wrong, and cultivation can turn into a kind of colonization: reaching into the other’s share, however gentle the means, is still colonization. Given wrongly but without reaching into the new hire’s share, and taken back as soon as he points it out, without blaming him or asking him to agree — that is a cultivation that didn’t work. What has reached in does not un-happen by being taken back. Pressing on after being wrong is where he stops being in cultivation at all.

Too much and too little are both failures. Reaching into the new hire’s share is too much. Misjudging the new hire as unwilling when he was circling round to ask — twice — and taking it as idle chatter, until the new hire settles on the manager’s basis as the rule of the trade: that is too little. So is judging that he should give, and still not giving. Not giving is not, in advance, the safer side; which side carries more risk is judged in the matter itself. Nor is this halving everything: his own share can be given in full; only the new hire’s is left. When unsure, he need not pick a side for himself — he can ask first, and truly accept a no.

Two Things That Stay When He Does Not Cultivate

Whether he can cultivate this new hire is also his own judgment. Another older colleague may be better with new people, or may judge he can’t either. Two people can judge differently and both be right, since each judges himself and this new hire. Judging that you cannot cultivate someone is not a verdict on him — not that he is bad, not that he is slow — and a smaller capacity does not mean treating him less as an end. There is one easy slide: I can’t cultivate him may be I don’t want to under another name. That needs looking back; the sentence itself he does not say falsely.

Not cultivating is not doing nothing. Two things cannot be cancelled whether the three conditions line up or not, whether he can cultivate or not. One: do not legislate for the new hire. Don’t fix his report behind his back; don’t decide for him whether he keeps this job; don’t draw his line in your head and wait for him to arrive at it by himself. Two: do not close his roads. If he wants to refuse, to change his mind, to leave, to change direction — none of those doors can be shut; and don’t use a sentence in his review to buy his agreement. When the manager asks how the new hire is doing, answering with the facts, from his place in the group, is not closing a road.

The three conditions govern cultivation; these two are the edge of not colonising. Cultivation can fail to happen; not colonising never fails to apply. Some other things also do not wait on cultivation’s conditions: if the new hire’s basis would hurt another team, it gets reported, without waiting for the new hire to be ready; what his job already covers, he covers; if someone is about to be hurt, protect them first. Each has its own grounds, and none is an occasion to draw the new hire’s line for him. Add one for himself: don’t burn himself out for this one person; what he gives when worn out comes out warped. Waiting is not inaction. The most important thing he can prepare is this: let the new hire know he can come and ask, and that if he asks, he’ll be told.

He Came to Ask, Later

Later the new hire came. What he asked was not should that basis change? but why didn’t you change it back then, and why did you tell? The three lined up: he came, it was his own question, and he could hear. He answered — his own thinking, what he struck out and what he left, why that day he could not not tell the team. He did not say what the new hire should do. Where the new hire’s line fell afterwards was the new hire’s. Having given, he stepped back.

Years later the new hire was doing well, and someone said: he’s one you brought up. Half of that is true — he gave conditions. But how the new hire came to read reports was owned by the new hire’s own law. Whatever another person gets from me, once owned by his own law, is his; it does not become a constituting I did for him. That settles only one thing — who constituted what. Credit, authorship and proceeds have their own accounts. It doesn’t stop him being glad for the new hire, or deny the part he really played. It refuses one sentence: I provided conditions, so the step by which he became himself was mine. And the new hire asking less, drawing lines unlike his: that is not failure — and he can’t use it to declare success either.

At home there is the same thing, harder to see. His daughter studied architecture and now designs at a practice. When she chose her course, he pushed — he had wanted to study architecture when he was young and never did. In her second year she wanted to switch; he didn’t like it, said what he thought, and left it to her. She didn’t switch. Now he tells people: I brought her down that road. Did he push her for her, or to settle something of his own? He can’t tell; that kind of not-knowing is real and waits for looking back. But two things stand without waiting for motives to clear: he did not set that road as her law — switching or not was hers; and he shut none of her doors — not with tuition, not with his face. That she is an architect now was owned by her law. He pushed; that is true. Pushing is not walking the step for her.

And the one who cultivates can be cultivated. The new hire’s question — why didn’t you change it, and why did you tell? — took him an afternoon to answer, and several days afterwards to think about: whether that year’s caring was his, he had never asked himself before. Another time the new hire said his basis notes were too long; nobody reading the report would finish them. He thought about it; the new hire was right; he shortened them. Who gives conditions to whom is not fixed on one side.

Why does someone who won’t legislate for others still think about whether another’s law can grow — and why must that thinking never become something imposed? Traced to the end, both questions have one answer: in this matter, he acknowledged this person is an end. That one acknowledgment pushes him to look toward the new hire and stops him from imposing. The push and the stop are not two rules; they are two faces of one thing. So there is no rule for when to step in and when to step back — nor any need for one. There is only a person who, in a matter, has acknowledged another as an end, and then judges, time after time, for himself.