“One Finger Cannot Lift a Pebble”: Why Asking for Help Matters

Transcript

Steve (00:00)

Well, welcome everybody, Teach Different Podcast. I have Dan with me. We’ve been doing the

last few podcasts together, and we’re picking back up with our meaningful routine that’s gonna

be at least one a week. That’s our goal. We don’t wait for New Year’s resolutions. We have so

much going on at Teach Different. When you’re doing so much, sometimes it’s hard to get to

everything. But the podcast has been around since 2020. And here we are. This is the most fun

or one of the most fun things about Teach Different, just having a conversation and you know,

sharing it with other listeners. And we love to have people weigh in. So let’s get going here. We

got Indigenous month coming up, in October. And we had, actually, a Hopi Indian proverb a

Show notes + transcript (Hopi Tribe).docx

couple weeks ago, I believe. And we have another one tonight. Some of the best quotes out

there of Native American people. And I’m just excited to read it. It’s so short and it’s very, very

thought-provoking and metaphorical.

Dan (01:18)

In our online community we have that monthly event where we’re gonna pick a quote from a

Native American and then use it as the basis of our community conversation. So that’s gonna

be really cool this month.

Steve (01:31)

Yep, that’s really what we’re looking to do with teachers, parents, anybody ready to try these

conversations. You have a community that you can join where you can have these

conversations more and more. And there’s so many resources in there for conversations. We

love modeling it. In the podcast, and that’s what we’re gonna do. So, our four moves are claim,

counterclaim, essential question, and storytelling. And we’re gonna try to incorporate all those to

model this for you right now. It used to be three steps, now it’s four moves because we added in

the storytelling part and the importance of bringing out experiences when you’re trying to

understand these brilliant quotes from these famous thinkers and these leaders and so here we

go. One finger cannot lift a pebble. One finger cannot lift a pebble. What does this mean?

Dan (02:36)

What a metaphor here. One finger cannot lift a pebble. So I’m going to go with an interpretation

of one person can’t accomplish a task to generalize this that an individual can’t be successful

alone. There has to be more people with them, supporting them to get a task done. I’ll start

there. That’s the first thing in my head. The value of having other people working with you to

accomplish some task.

Steve (03:24)

Okay, to accomplish a task, in this case, lifting a pebble. Yeah, I guess you personify it in a way.

One finger cannot lift a pebble. What was my first reaction? I actually thought about the truth of

that. I because I’ve never I I’ve never really…

Dan (03:51)

The literal truth.

Steve (03:52)

Yeah, like I was thinking of couldn’t I pick up a pebble with one finger if I absolutely had to? And

I realized that it wouldn’t, I mean, I could push it all the way to a to like a wall and then push it up

the wall. And then turn my finger underneath it so it’s resting on my finger, and then kind of hold

it up. And you could argue I picked it up, but I guess you not really. You just spent a lot of time

doing something that would have taken, you know, two seconds. My thought about this was, a

pebble is small, light, meaningless, or inconsequential. I don’t, I went immediately to that

because he didn’t say rock or boulder or lift up a chair. It was like a pebble. That’s what I read

Show notes + transcript (Hopi Tribe).docx

into this immediately was something that is small, so small, you still can’t pick it up without more

than one.

Dan (05:15)

And a pebble is round and smooth too. A pebble is round and smooth. I think that’s an important

part of this as well. Because if you imagine your finger trying to pick up something that’s round

and smooth, and it might be small, but I mean some pebbles are, then you just can’t do it. It’s

the futility. There’s something at the claim of this, and as I’m thinking about this, is the futility of

thinking that you can accomplish something with one thing. One finger.

Steve (05:50)

I was gonna go back to “you’re alone.” You can’t accomplish something alone. I did personify it

as well. I went to the people, to a person. You can’t accomplish something alone. You have to

have more than one. Now you of course could argue that we have more than one hand, we

have more than one finger. You know, so again, this is the metaphor part. What do you do with

this? It’s got us talking and thinking about something.

Dan (06:29)

So, depending on your interpretation, if I’m just working off my interpretation that you can’t do

something alone, you need support, you need other people to help you, you know, what are

some examples where that would be true in my life, where I couldn’t do something alone? The

sports analogy is always a good one. You can’t volleyball, you can’t do sports alone.

Steve (06:50)

Volleyball. You can’t hit it more than one time.

Dan (06:58)

You know, a group project at school, you can’t do it alone. It requires the efforts and energies of

multiple people to do it. You can’t lift the pebble. You can’t finish the project. You can’t conduct a

good experiment alone by yourself without the help and support of other people. I mean, I would

say most of the things that we do in life have a kind of interdependence where we have to rely

on people, like and we can’t do things alone.

Steve (07:39)

Yeah. So you and you took like one finger to mean alone. That’s what someone is when they’re

alone. They’re one. They’re outside of the whole, the group. In this case, one finger is alone,

you know, from the hand. Like the hand has five fingers, and those are useful. You know, that

was one of the main developments in our development as humans. What do they call it?

detachable thumbs or or the thumb is like a really important part of our development. If you don’t

have a thumb, it’s hard to, you know, you could pick up a pebble, but the thumb makes it just

possible to do so much.

Dan (08:27)

Show notes + transcript (Hopi Tribe).docx

Yeah, you need help. You need the help of multiple things, in this case fingers, to pick

something up.

Steve (08:33)

Okay. To do work, you need to think of it as multiple things acting on something. You need to be

resourceful. You can’t think of it as something that you can do with just one thing.

Dan (08:51)

Let’s make this more practical for people though. Like what would be examples where that is

true, where that’s the case? Someone who’s graduating from high school, let’s say, and they’re

getting a job, they need the help of maybe multiple people in order to help them be successful

getting a job. They have to rely on friends. They have to rely on family. They have to be

courageous themselves. It’s not one thing. It’s not, they’re not doing it alone. There has to be a

multi-force effort towards something. I’m trying to just bring an example that would make this…

Steve (09:29)

Just growing up, yeah. I mean, we come out of the womb. Like you need people immediately

for your survival. If there were twenty people in a room right now having a conversation, I’ll bet

you we would have twenty different reads on this.

Dan (09:48)

Yeah.

Steve (09:49)

You know, and I like the smoothness of the pebble. I do like that and what that might mean.

Because you can pick up a leaf because it’s not round and smooth. You can kind of get under it

and you can pick it up. So there are certain things that you can lift with one finger. But not a

pebble. So maybe an essential question might be what are some things you can do alone that

you don’t need anyone else for? What things should you do alone when you shouldn’t be relying

on others? Because if you rely on others, you’re not going to get the value out of the task, out of

the activity. You know, I’m flirting a little bit with the counterclaim here, maybe.

Dan (10:45)

No. Yeah, yeah, we kind of we it’s interesting we did the essential question, which really feeds

into the counterclaim, which I think is that doing things alone sometimes is more doable, more

possible, more realistic.

Steve (11:09)

Well, an example. I mean, sports analogies are so great. Because some sports are conducive to

individual greatness and taking over games. You know, basketball, Michael Jordan taking over

a game. But even in games that he took over, he wasn’t the only person out there. You know,

there was someone in his ear, and you know, maybe at a certain point. It needed to be him, but

I’d say sports is the b the easiest analogy to this. When should you do something and not be

thinking of the rest of the world and other people? You know, what kinds of things can you pick

Show notes + transcript (Hopi Tribe).docx

up with one finger? Where if you tried to bring in like your other hand or your entire hand, it

wouldn’t help. You know, when is using one finger exactly what you should do?

Dan (12:15)

Right. And again, that we’re speaking in metaphors here. I know you’re being very tangible with

actual fingers. And I think that this, at least I’m interpreting this as much more abstract and

metaphorical, that it’s doing things as an ind doing things alone as an individual is a futile

exercise in life. You can’t do it. You can’t lift the pebble with one finger. You have to figure out a

way to do it that involves other people. Again, the metaphor, other people. gosh, I just thought of

an, back to the claim. I thought of an example where if you let’s say you have a drug problem or

a gambling problem or Anxiety or a mental health issue or whatever. The way to think about it

is: you know, you can’t lift a pebble with one finger. You have to figure out ways to get help and

have multiple people help you through something. If you think of it as a singular project to be

done alone, it’s going to be a futile exercise. So train your mind to think of interdependence and

help. I don’t know. This is how I would go with this. I would be so curious as to what kids would

do with this metaphor.

Steve (13:45)

I do like that. I like the interdependence, like building the habit of not thinking that you’re doing it

alone. Because it creates the wrong understanding of who you are and the value that you’re

providing and the things that you’re doing if you’re thinking you’re the only one doing it. I thought

of another aspect to this, a pebble, and I alluded to this earlier, a pebble is small. When you say

one finger cannot lift a pebble, it really is telling us that you need more, you need more. No

matter how small the task, you have to remember that you know you can’t do it alone. You can’t

do it with just one thing. You have to think, you know, holistically and comprehensively about

something.

Dan (14:51)

And the counter claim is, some things you have to do alone.

Steve (14:55)

Well it seems like everything. I mean not everything, but it seems like most things you do alone.

And you also should want to be efficient with what you’re doing. You don’t want to break, think

of the group project back at school, right? Everybody’s getting a grade, four people in the team,

three people don’t want to do anything, two people don’t want to do anything, let’s say, one

person will do everything, and one person’s kind of in the middle. You know, what do you do

with that situation? You do it alone. Like if you’re worried about your grade and no one else is

worried about their grade, they’re gonna bring you, they’re gonna hurt you. Sometimes it hurts

you to be thinking always of inclusion and other people, and not you know, having an

independent existence.

Dan (15:55)

Right. It takes patience. It takes patience to allow other people to come in and help. You want to

do it the easy way and just rely on yourself. You know, there’s all kinds of spin-offs now as you

Show notes + transcript (Hopi Tribe).docx

dig deeper in this. You can talk about the trust for other people. You know, what are the, how

about this question. What are the barriers that we put up when we try to accomplish things in life

and we can’t rely, you know, and we struggle relying on other people? Why is that a barrier for

us? How is it a barrier?

Steve (16:30)

It drives you insane when you take on all the burdens and you know you don’t know how to ask

for help. I would blame myself on that one. I’m not really good at asking for help. And it is a little

bit of a pride thing. And that’s not really good because if you need help, you should ask for it? Is

that true? If you need help, you should ask for it. How should you know when you should ask for

help?

Dan (17:02)

Yeah, a lot of people struggle asking for help. Some people it’s a pride thing, other people it’s

just habitual, they’re just used to doing everything alone, some people it’s a trust issue. They

don’t trust other people’s capacity to do things. Interesting, so trust again back to trust could

come into this. We got some essential questions in there, definitely.

Steve (17:26)

Also, what this is saying, which would be a claim, is that we’re not as strong as we think we are.

Dan (17:37)

And we’re not as capable. Maybe to spin off here, not as capable as we think we are. We’re

overconfident. How about that? What if overconfidence is kind of the theme here?

Steve (17:50)

Right.

Dan (17:52)

Stop with the overconfidence, have a little humility. Some things just aren’t possible. You gotta

accept it. Be humble.

Steve (18:01)

I mean another direction you could go is say, be smart. Use two fingers. The Native Americans,

it’s almost like their quotes are they’re just deliberately ambiguous, but they speak to something.

It’s like they’re communicating in code.

Dan (18:27)

Right, and you said deliberately ambiguous. One way to think about that is that life is

ambiguous. These quotes really reflect the ambiguity of life. So they’re very authentic in that

way. They’re they’re not they’re not saying actually there’s a clear idea here and we’re just going

to be deliberately ambiguous about something. It’s literally a portrayal of the confusion and

uncertainty of life, which is what makes them just beautiful. Native American quotes are

incredible.

Show notes + transcript (Hopi Tribe).docx

Steve (19:03)

They are beautiful. This one I want more people with this. You know? I’d love to have more

people, more perspectives on this. And that’s what’s so nice about a conversation. We wouldn’t,

you know, you and I went back and forth and we’re brothers, you know, so we kind of think the

same already. And it was already layered. You know, can you imagine just having people of

different ages, different demographics just talking about this in a safe environment? What would

come out of this? I mean, I’d love to talk to a Native American about this. They’re powerful. One

finger cannot lift a pebble. I feel like this is an open ended podcast. I hope everyone can tolerate

that for today. this is what we got.

Dan (19:58)

This is a good one to use if you want something to splinter in a lot of different directions. that’s

how I would use this one.

Steve (20:07)

And sit with this one. Let silence reign in a conversation like this. Because you’re gonna have

people that will say this over and over again. One finger cannot lift a pebble. Okay, I get it. You

need two fingers to pick up a pebble. What’s the point? Let silence go. You know, and again,

really quick, a nice thing about the resources we have for these conversations is we have some

storytelling prompts, we call them in the community, you can get some ideas for how to spur a

conversation and get people really thinking about it, even though they might not have started

with thinking about it in the in the you know the the right way. So that’s something to think about.

I love Native American quotes. Thanks for being here for the Teach Different podcast. We will

be back, definitely next week, if not before. Take care.

Dan (21:12)

All right, take care, everybody.