Are You Sure You Looked Everywhere?
Tips for getting resourceful and getting shit done when you're feeling stuck, stymied, or (let's face it) kinda lazy.
My gentle fucklings, lately I’ve been getting a lot of fan mail in the DM’s about my sixth book, Grow the Fuck Up.
Coincidence? Or just great placement at Target during back-to-school shopping season? We may never know.
Either way, since adulting is clearly in the air, today I’m sharing a modified excerpt from GTFU, all about a skill that separates Big Fucking Babies (BFBs) who give up easily—or never try at all, preferring to pawn off all responsibility on everyone else, at all times—from Total Fucking Grownups (TFGs), who are willing and able to put in the effort to figure shit out on their own.
It’s called being RESOURCEFUL.
The best part?
Even if you don’t need them, these tips are forwardable to anyone in your life who may: children, adult children, younger siblings, nieces, nephews, and niblings, ex-husbands, etc.—if you’ve got a BFB in your life, I’m here to help!
Are You Sure You Looked Everywhere?
Let’s begin with some real talk: in case you haven’t noticed, humanity is on the fucking precipice. (That was rhetorical; I’m sure you’ve noticed!)
Alas, it’s become increasingly clear that we humans have a lot of work ahead of us to stay solvent for the next twenty-five years, let alone another six million. Between ending fascism, reversing climate change, and managing, say, at least three more worldwide plagues in the meantime, Auntie Sarah’s retirement is looking mighty apocalyptic.
Oof.
And yet, still, every time my cold dead heart sees a news item about a teenager inventing a new method for cleaning up our oceans, I remember that this kind of change is possible, if we can ALL learn to be more resourceful.
(Fine, maybe not “all” of us. I’m giving Actual Babies a pass on going the extra mile; they’re busy racking up hard-earned wins like depth perception and chewing solid food. Nor do I begrudge a five-year-old throwing up their hands in defeat when the favorite pants that they only recently learned how to dress themselves in are nowhere to be found. Five-year-olds are not expected to understand the concepts of “looking in all the drawers” or “checking the laundry hamper.”1)
However, I will absolutely prevail upon my fellow adults to put in a bit more effort when it comes to things like “finding a solution” or “managing a crisis,” environmental or otherwise.
As in—
If you can’t find something, keep looking!
If you don’t know how to do something, learn!
If you’re not great at something, practice!
If something doesn’t go according to plan, try a different path to get the desired result!
Or, hey, take the result you did get, and make do with it!
I’m reminded of the time in 2003 or thereabouts when there was a murder in our apartment building on Halloween weekend.2
When my roommate Steve got home from work, the police wouldn’t let him inside, which meant he couldn’t change into his planned costume for the party we were all supposed to be going to that night.
So, he bellied up to the bar across the street and got creative.
Forty-five minutes and two beers later, Steve had stripped off his button-down, borrowed a marker from the bartender, written “I went down to Georgia and all I got was this lousy T-shirt” on his undershirt, fashioned two stubby devil horns out of cardboard Stella Artois promotional coasters, and affixed them to the cowboy hat he asked his girlfriend to bring along for him on her way to the party.
Now that’s resourceful. Be more like Steve, everybody!
(If you are too young, or perhaps too British, to get the joke—it was a riff on the Charlie Daniels Band Southern rock anthem “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” We all thought it was genius, but then, we’d also all had a few Stellas.)
But in all seriousness—digging deeper, thinking harder, and getting creative will serve you well in every aspect of adulting, from work to play.
To wit—
If you get assigned an unfamiliar task, like, say, taking the minutes for the weekly management meeting—and your first instinct is to freak out and think But I’ve never done that before, I don’t know how!—maybe just ask whoever used to take the minutes to send you the last month’s worth of files so you can get a feel for what it looks like? No need to reinvent the wheel when it’s sitting right there in a Word Doc.
If you want a brand-name gadget that you can’t afford, perhaps there’s a gently used one on eBay or Craigslist you could snag instead, if you’re willing to go online treasure-hunting? Or a cheaper version that you’d discover is just as highly rated, if you took some time to drill down into the online reviews? Or maybe you were hoping to get professional hair and makeup done before an event, but your budget won’t allow; you could look into junior stylists or students as a less expensive alternative.
If you have trouble understanding the directions that came with your IKEA bedroom furniture, I guarantee there is a YouTube video that’ll show you how to put together the MALM or the TYSSEDAL—and you can pause it as often as necessary to mutter “Fuck!” and look around for the teeny-tiny wooden dowels you spilled all over the floor.
If your stupid feral cat lunges at you and breaks your hand while you’re on deadline and you don’t have time to wait eight hours to be seen at the clinic, you could fashion yourself a splint out of two emery boards and a bandana and keep on typing. (In my defense, at the time I thought it was just a sprain. I wouldn’t always advocate for at-home medical intervention in lieu of an X-ray, but it did tide me over in a pinch.)
And then you’ve got the whole “saving humanity” angle, which totally slaps:
You—YOU!—could be the totally resourceful Total Fucking Grownup who figures out, via online research and creativity, how to turn your own little household fifty percent greener. How cool is that?
Or, if you don’t have the power to get something done by yourself, you could be the neighborhood hero who organizes a block party/fundraising event to raise money for a candidate who has the clout to take your collective values to the next level.
Your contributions do not need to be prohibitively ambitious. The important thing is that with all resourceful TFG hands on deck, they’ll add up!
(And when it comes to “potable water” and “livable temperatures,” each of us striving for our personal grownup best sure beats the alternative.3)
Finally, here’s one last tip for bringing out your resourceful best: a little game that makes adulting less daunting and more fun—just by acting like you did when you were a carefree kiddo.
Make-believe and make it work: an exercise
The next time you’re tempted to just give up (or wait for someone else to solve your problem…again), try playing a quick game of Mister Rogers-approved “Make-Believe.”
Pretend you’re an intrepid explorer, a brilliant scientist, or a dogged journalist—someone who revels in making discoveries, experimenting with solutions, and pursuing leads at every opportunity.
I mean, would Lewis and Clark let a little uncharted territory get in their way? (Or again, for my Brits, would Ernest Shackleton peace out and leave the Endurance crew to fend for themselves?)
Would future Nobel Prize winner Dorothy Hodgkin give up on isolating the molecular structure of insulin, paving the way for it to be mass-produced for the treatment of diabetes, because it was “too hard?”
Would Ronan Farrow be like “Nah, I guess I'll never know?”
(Hint: Nope!)
Those Total Fucking Grownups would attack an assignment or problem with ALL of the resources at their disposal, and then some.
And you can do the same, by donning your make-believe thinking cap and asking yourself questions like these:
Have I tried everything?
Where could I find more info?
What’s the best I can do with what I’ve got?
Even if you don’t triumph in the end (hey, we can’t all be Nobel Laureates), here’s an added bonus:
Thinking more and pushing harder in search of solutions NOW means that, over time, you’ll amass an arsenal of knowledge and skills that will make your life easier IN THE FUTURE.
Furniture building, finger splinting, emergency Halloween costumes: it’s all there for the taking, you glorious grownup, you!
Plus:
In addition to getting shit done for YOURSELF, being resourceful makes you look like a Total Fucking Grownup in the eyes of EVERYONE ELSE.
Which is super helpful if you want to get treated like an adult—instead of like one of those BFBs who get on people’s nerves because they’re always asking questions they could easily Google the answers to.
Just sayin’.
Alright, that’s all for this week.
FYI: I’m approaching my one-year Substack-iversary in October, and some changes are brewing for the NFG Newsletter…so watch this space, and meanwhile, keep on giving fewer, better fucks and living your best life!
I believe in you.
Shout-out to my forty-seven-year-old husband, who has never met a junk drawer he could find the bottle opener in. Love you babe!
Ah, Times Square in the early aughts.
Although if any billionaire CEOs are reading this, please feel free to do A LOT FUCKING MORE in re: funding alternative energy, lowering health care costs, lifting families out of poverty, shoring up infrastructure, and maybe focusing less on “tourist travel to the moon” and more on “making the planet we have more safe, affordable, and long-term inhabitable.” You know, for starters.
Lovely call to creativity and taking responsibility.
Big amen to that point 3 footnote. Guys: DO FUCKING MORE!!!