Success requires trust—there’s no way around it.

“If you want something done, do it yourself”, some say. There’s wisdom in this; nobody’s ever going to care about your business (or you) as much as their own; that’s just honest.

So delegation is critial; learning to let others handle the things you cannot do, or more often, cannot make time to do, so you can do what’s important.

It’s harder than it looks.

The first obstacle: admitting there isn’t time. You have to be honest about what is and isn’t possible; this is my biggest hangup, as a deeply optimistic person—I can always work one more hour on the weekend, or another 30 minutes if I get out of bed earlier. Until you’ve worked 80 hours/week for years, and face the real possibility of losing your friends, and your marriage.

What’s even harder, is that commitment capacity isn’t static—it’s ever-changing, a function of children, health, and other commitments. In my 20s, I could work until 9 or 10pm without consequence; these days, I read to my kids before bed. So getting this right requires not just honesty, but the discipline for periodic re-evaluation, making changes based on what is and isn’t working.

The second obstacle: letting go of perfectionism. The store-bought cake won’t live up to the one you make at home; the contractor won’t do the job as well as you could on the weekend. Nobody can plan your kid’s party as well as you. The question: at what cost? Thousands of dollars (often the easiest to bear)? Your weekend? Your marriage or your sanity? Avoiding this trap, again, requires honesty—about the cost of “doing it right”, and whether every price is worth paying. And the grace to forgive—yourself—when things aren’t perfect.

A third obstacle: trust. I see this often in immigrant communities (e.g. Oakland Chinatown, my home); trust just isn’t as fast when someone doesn’t look, think, speak, or act like you; conversely, it’s in exactly these closed communities where the worst scams, the Madoffs, are perpetuated by the attitude of “only trust your own”. It’s always harder letting someone else handle something important, when you can’t help feeling they’ve got their hands in your pockets. My father really struggles with trust, I believe in part due to his upbringing among immigrants in Chicago Heights, Illinois.

And yet, the African proverb is true: “If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.” Going alone means: never reaching scale, never being the best at anything, never having weekends. It means doing your own taxes, watching your own children during the day, never getting proper healthcare, home-schooling your kids, never letting a contractor inside your house. And definitely never getting married.

If you want to go far, you have to trust.