Short motivational monologue by Dr. Aziz urging listeners to stop waiting for external permission to act, speak up, or set boundaries; frames the problem as deference to parents, supervisors, or other authority figures and challenges the audience to consider how long they will defer their life to others.
Whose permission are you waiting for? Most nice people I talk to are waiting for someone else to give them permission to speak up for themselves, to say no. If you need to disagree with somebody, if you need to just go after what you want in life and not be so afraid of being judged, being criticized by other people, what are you waiting for? Whose permission? And when I ask people this and they think about it first, they're like, I don't know. I just don't feel like I'm the one who gets to steer my life. I don't get to choose. Someone else determines if it's right or wrong, good or bad for me. But if you dig a little bit, you just might start to find, is it my mom or my dad, my family, my career people, my supervisors, my boss, some authority figure, a teacher who gets to determine and give you permission in your life? And the second question I have for you that I'll leave you with is, how long are you going to defer your life to that person?
