You remember the drill: a group of students from your school are going to leave school and visit someplace, and you've got to take home a permission slip for your parents to sign. The school couldn't just pull you out of your regular routine and take you someplace. They had to get the okay from your folks.

At other times, if you wanted to do something, you had to raise your hand and ask the teacher if it was okay, like whether you could go to the bathroom or speak. (You know, because otherwise kids would be peeing and speaking out of turn with reckless abandon, and we wouldn't want that.)

Most of us were raised on asking for the okay from someone else. It's instilled in us. And we're all very comfortable with it, because when something goes wrong, we have someone with whom we can share the blame. (For instance, I'm pretty sure those permissions slips partially served as legal waivers.)

In our adult years, we don't take home permission slips or have to raise our hands. Instead, we ask for a paycheck.

"That sounds like a good idea," we say. "Are you willing to pay me to do that?"

"I don't know if I should major in that. Will I be able to find a job?"

Or: "Maybe I shouldn't be doing this. I might get fired."

However it looks, there's always the same underlying cause: a nagging fear that we're going something we're not supposed to do, and we're looking for someone to tell us we're aren't wrong. That it's okay. That we should keep doing what we're doing.

Television usually doesn't judge the viewer. This is why it's so tremendously popular.

Life is too short to sit around waiting for someone, or some other external force of nature, to validate your plans. If you can't get past that, pretend you've got a permission slip and that I just signed it. You have my blessing to try, to fail, to try again, and repeat until you succeed.

Not that you needed it.