Every day we face hundreds of decisions, often even unconsciously.
Faced with many of these decisions, we have to choose whether to get help from someone else and buy the "solutions" outside of us, or whether to go it alone, perhaps learning new things.
Let's try to better understand the difference between these two approaches starting from when we were kids and we had some "resources", made of knowledge, the money in our wallet, our time, our energies, our talents, our relationships. And we mastered some "processes", made up of skills, ways of thinking, our problem solving and team working skills, and so on.
In short, if the resources were the "what" we used to make ourselves, the "processes" were how we used the resources.
And we remember well that there were those of us who often had to deal with problems alone and those who were followed by very present parents, who drove them between sports and artistic activities and maybe helped them a lot even with homework, and so on.
And in this way, how much space was left for those kids to develop their own growth processes?
You see, it is not so much a theme of just providing the resources, and therefore the volleyball course and a means to go there for example, but of fostering learning processes: through that course, is the boy learning the value of teamwork? Of sociability? Of the preparation? Here, if we look back, they were probably the most engaging activities, which often seriously put us to the test, the ones that then made us grow and made us develop the processes that now allow us to realize ourselves in the world.
Those dynamics, which we may have observed in our youth and had to do with hurrying up in the face of increasingly complex problems, also apply in our present, both when we have the opportunity to learn something new rather than have someone else do it, both when we have to encourage the growth of a collaborator, a friend or a child.
In the first case, we will have to choose between make or buy, depending on whether the skill to be developed is more or less important to us. In the second case, when we favor someone else's development, we can choose whether to provide him with the solution or, rather, stimulate him with some good question, which never hurts, word of the coach!
If you are interested in learning more about the theme of make or buy, you can also read this interesting article by Boston Consulting Group.