The barriers between us and what we want are often entirely imagined. It is true: you can learn how to paint, change careers, write a paper or run a marathon. These things are hard, but we shouldn’t pretend that they are impossible. You can just do them.

But this mindset has a dangerous edge case: it can make you skip asking for permission precisely when you should ask. The anxiety you're overriding might be trying to tell you something important: that sometimes the fence is there for a reason.

Here are two illustrative examples from my life (with details changed to protect the privacy of those involved) that motivated my thinking:

1. A close friend in high school (we call him friend #1) was faced with the pressure of finding a date to the prom lest he look like a total loser. Under the pressure of desperately trying to find someone to go to prom with, he realized that there was nothing stopping him from asking the girl that he had liked for years. He realized he could “just do things.” The worst she could say is no!

   Friend #1 asked out his love interest and she said [...]

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