Just Send the Message
My stupid internal resistance against asking for a chat over coffee
Don’t ever call me a self made man. It gives the wrong impression that we can do it alone. None of us can. The whole concept of the self made man or woman is a myth.
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Relationships run the world.
Behind each successful person, there are hundreds if not thousands of people who played some integral part.
Despite knowing this, why do I resist seeking help from others?
This commonly arises when I begin learning something new.
Whether it be studying during university, recruiting as a young professional, or, currently, learning product management, I intuitively resist not only cold messaging strangers, but also the very people in my network.
My mind immediately moves towards solitary research through reading and IRL trial and error. I tend to never ask someone for a chat over coffee.
Part of this stems from my familiarity with monk mode, in which I withdraw from external distractions and intensely focus on specific goals.
Having thrown myself into monk mode at many pivotal junctions and reaping extraordinary results, my mind has been wired to see monk mode as a requirement for progress.
It’s exhilarating and addicting. It produces the intense feeling of chasing goals: the feeling of being “self made”, even if that is certainly not the case.
To someone with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
To someone with a hammer who benefitted from treating everything as a nail in the past, everything most certainly looks like a nail now.
An additional unexpected side effect of monk mode has been a cultivated shyness and rationalization of my unimportance to others.
There’s this latent fear of being a burden on someone else and, in an attempt to be courteous, I avoid to reach out in the first place.
Even if I know that the fear is overblown and most definitely false (people I’m a burden to will just decline), I need to intensely psychologically flagellate myself to send a simple message.
To compound that fear is the framing of productivity as an individual solitary activity.
In monk mode, grinding alone is glorified: sitting in front of a computer and typing away while the rest of the world falls away as an afterthought.
Tired eyes and an overheated brain are hallmarks of a productive day.
Grabbing coffee with people doesn’t fit into the sweaty Rocky training montage narrative.
Chatting appears bourgeoisie—a leisure activity even if the discussions help achieve goals faster.
The subtle and longer time horizon of compounding relationships and advice fall flat against the tangible-ness of hours spent as input and code, emails, and text as output.
There really is no reason why I shouldn’t reach out to someone. There is literally nothing stopping me nor any consequences for doing so.
The absolute worst case scenario will just be rejection in the form of ghosting or someone actively saying no.
Just reach out and ask for a chat over coffee; I already lost the potential of being a self made man decades ago.