Help with the flyers

A man in Assiut has opened a car wash on the road out of town, and he wants flyers. He takes a rough design to the print shop and asks for help making it look better. The printer is good at his job. He fixes the colours, enlarges the phone number, suggests heavier paper. The flyers come out handsome, and the car wash owner leaves pleased.

That is the help most of us go looking for. We have a plan, and we want someone skilled to help us carry it out. It is useful, it is pleasant, and it rarely changes very much.

There is another kind, and it is less comfortable to receive. A friend looks at the same rough design and asks who is going to read it. The drivers passing at speed? The neighbours who already know where he is? Then he asks where cars that need washing actually stand still for twenty minutes. The petrol station down the road, perhaps, or the taxi rank, or the mosque car park on a Friday. Maybe the answer is not flyers at all. Maybe it is an arrangement with the taxi drivers, or one large sign at the bend where traffic always slows.

That kind of help does not polish the plan. It questions it, and then stays long enough to build a better one together.

The first kind feels like progress because it agrees with us. The second feels like a setback for about an hour, and then turns out to be the most valuable thing anyone gave us that month.

Most of us walk straight into the print shop. It is worth knowing, before we ask, which of the two we are really hoping for.