Today in 5 minutes or less, you’ll learn how to leverage your network and acquaintances to help you land your next job – especially if you’re the type that “doesn’t like to ask for help.”

Plus, the best links and resources on remote work. You’ll learn:

• 🗺️ The easiest countries to work remotely from
• 🇰🇷 South Korea’s welcome mat for digital nomads
• 🔢 What roles are topping the remote side hustle charts?

Let’s jump in:

There’s one skill that’s earned me $35,000 per year in additional cash compensation for the past 3 years.

And it’s a skill anyone can build.

The skill? Asking for help.

In his book, High Performance Habits, Brendon Burchard shares this anecdote (bold mine):

Great. So asking for help leads to gains.

The problem?

When it comes to jobs and careers, most people are afraid to ask for help. 

When I first started digging into this with my clients, I thought:

“OK, so people don’t know how to ask. I’ll give them the scripts. I’ll just show them exactly what to say.” 

So I wrote out the word-for-word scripts. All they had to do was copy and paste.

And still they struggled.

More conversations later, and I finally realized: the how wasn’t the hard part.

The hard part was the long list of mental blockers stopping people from asking. It was the voice in the back of their minds saying things like:

• “I don’t want to bother people”
• “I shouldn’t have to ask for help”
• “Cold DMing feels weird and scammy”
• “I should be able to figure this out myself”
• “I won’t be able to add value back to this person”
• “I don’t want them to think this relationship is transactional”

I get it. The mental gymnastics I used to perform to avoid asking for help would put Simone Biles to shame.

But I realized that I needed to figure this out to reach my career goals. So I started testing different strategies and coping mechanisms.

Here are 6 revelations that made asking for help in my career easier:

1. Define the fear
2. Name the feel
3. Asking for help is normal
4. People want to help
5. Life is long
6. The cost is high

Let’s dig into each one.

1/ Define the fear

I started asking this question before sending an email:

“What’s the worst that could happen? What terrible catastrophe might happen after I politely ask for advice? 

• They could get annoyed
• They could think I’m stupid
• All of the above and they’d tell their friends

All possible. But if I was polite, it was pretty unlikely.

What was more likely?

I’d get no response. Which was the same outcome if I didn’t email at all. 

In other words, there was no downside. And on the upside: new relationships, more opportunities, and greater impact.

That’s a bet you should take every time.

2/ Name the feeling

Before asking for help, I’d always get the same twisty knots and unease in my stomach. My finger shook before hitting the “send” button.

Logically, I knew this didn’t make sense. There was no downside (see above!).

But I still couldn’t stop the feeling. I started giving the feeling a name: “Ace Merrill” (sounds silly, I know. Stick with me.)

Whenever Ace surfaced, I paused. I said: “It’s just Ace. This is what Ace does.” Acknowledging Ace helped me recognize it for what it was: a feeling, detached from reality.

I could feel the emotion… then take action anyway.

I kept doing this. Over time, Ace became quieter and quieter.

Until I couldn’t hear him at all.

3/ Asking for help is normal 

My friend, Sumeet, is a bodybuilder. One day I asked if we could work out together.

She started us out doing cable work. She stopped me while I was loading the weight.

“Do less, but go slower,” she said.

“Your muscle doesn’t know if it’s 20lbs or 200lbs. Your muscle only knows how hard it’s working. You can actually work harder with less weight, better form, and slower speed.”

(Later on, I learned this concept was called TUT, or time under tension.)

That one tip changed how I trained for the rest of my life.

Asking for help is normal. We do it all the time. We even pay for help: acting classes, art classes, sleep training, grocery delivery, SAT prep, etc.

Yet for some reason, asking for help with your job search or your career feels different.

It’s not.

Especially since…

4/ People want to help

Until you become as willing to ask for help as you are to give it, you are only working half the equation.

– Keith Ferrazi

People WANT to help.

They specifically want to help a certain type of person: someone who takes action.

So be that person.

Take their advice. Then tell them what happened.

(If you’re wondering how you “add value back to a person,” this is how. Take their advice and let them know what happened.)

People genuinely enjoy seeing their advice bear fruit.

5/ Life is long

“I don’t like to ask for help since there’s nothing I can do in return,” a client told me.

My response was simple.

“How do you know?”

Life is long.

How do you know where you’ll be a year from now? 5 years? 10 years?

“Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.”

– Bill Gates

6/ The cost is high

Every day you don’t ask for help, that’s another day you don’t:

• Learn what you need to learn
• Earn what you should earn
• Realize your potential

Days become a week. Weeks become months. And months become years.

The cost is higher than you think.

Conclusion

If you’re someone who’s “not good at asking for help,” then you have two choices:

1. Get good at asking
2. Get good at figuring everything out yourself

Both paths are viable. Both have a price.

Pick the price you’re willing to pay.

That’s a wrap. See you next week 👋