id: afh title: Asking for Help previous: mfn next: ewt date: 2021-02-12 ---

## Asking for Help

In life, it is generally advisable to focus on our strengths and do our best to avoid our weaknesses. Focusing on strengths gives us the greatest return for our investment both in time and effort. Sometimes though, there is no option but to tackle a weakness when; it can't be worked around and is greatly hindering the rest of your work.

This is a difficult post for me to write. Like most people, I am very reluctant to admit my failures. It is very unpleasant to decide that enough is enough and I need to do something about it.

I am extremely stubborn, that can be good, can be bad, but it is at its worst when I convince myself that I need to do everything on my own. I have a history of being unwilling to ask for help. I can remember having trouble with history in high school and having to be forced by my parents to go talk to the teacher to get caught up. For some reason I have always felt that having to ask for help is failure. I know in my head that it is not but, the feeling still remains.

This has resulted in me spending extra time and effort on things that would have been significantly sped up by reaching out and getting other input. Honestly I think the worst case of this in terms of long term cost has been in the last few years.

There were a couple of points during my undergrad in chemistry that I wanted to teach myself how to code. I bought a book and took a couple of runs at learning C. Those that program know that C is not the most beginner friendly language and that was not helped at all by the fact that I was determined to learn it myself. I failed twice due to the frustration of stepping back for a few weeks when school got busy and having to almost start over each time. I left programming until after I graduated and got back into it with python as soon as I finished. I wonder how much further I would have been at that point had I asked the questions I had rather than stopping.

Python is much easier to work with and using a couple textbooks with projects and practice problems did give me a decent grounding and I was able to get good enough to really enjoy the process. As anyone who has learned a new skill will tell you there is often a period of rapid improvement followed by running into a wall. It took me maybe 6 months of playing around to run into that wall. Instead of looking for help from those with more experience I decided to pursue school again. This may sound like the right path to take and it is taking me where I want to go but it is both expensive and time consuming.

I have nothing against school, I think it is a fantastic experience and (especially for chemistry) was needed if I wanted to work in the field. It also forced me to improve my work ethic. I would likely make the same choice again (though knowing where I want to go career wise now I might just have gone with computer science right away). For my current Master’s degree and the prerequisites I needed, I don’t think I did it for the right reasons. I had the right work ethic, I knew academia and think I had learned the lessons that could only be learned through school.

From the beginning of taking the prerequisites to the end of my Master’s degree I will have spent 3 years and $30,000. This is for online school where I am mostly watching educational videos and reading class notes and textbooks. All things I could have done at home myself. What I was looking for was a little guidance to help me know what I needed to learn as opposed to just stumbling blindly. How else could I have gotten this guidance? I could have asked. I have friends that are software developers, there are whole subreddits dedicated to helping people learn how to program. Some users go as far as to personally chat with and mentor those of us that are learning. Often with courses, I work ahead and then have to wait for more to be uploaded or for the next semester to start. Even if I worked no faster but filled that time with more learning and practice supported by others, I would likely be at the same point now that I will be at the end of the degree.

I do wonder how much further I would be having learned the material this way instead. Would I have a job in the field already? What would I do with an extra $30,000 in my pocket? Within the closed environment of myself I try to do everything as efficiently as possible. But I ignored and have never taken advantage of the fact that being able to work with others is a force multiplier.

This idea is explored extremely well in a conversation between two characters in one of my favourite fantasy books. In The Wise Man’s Fear two characters have a conversation. One is the lord of a large portion of a kingdom (think one step down from king type). The other is a poor boy who is acting as minstrel/assistant who has made it to that point purely by his own skill and tenacity.

The conversation centers around the difference between granted and inherent power and which is the greatest of the two. Inherent power is within a person, things like the power of your mind or the strength of your body fall into this category. Inherent power can’t be taken away from you short of actual physical or mental harm but has a sharp limit. There is only so much one person can know, do and only so strong they can make their body. Granted power is the power granted to you though loyalty, cooperation, employment etc. It involves working with others so that the collective outcome is greater than that of any single member of the group.

Obviously the minstrel, who has only relied on himself for his entire life, believes that inherent power is greater. It is the safer of the two because it can’t be so quickly taken away. If you are always fearing loss then that might make sense. The lord is on the other side and states that granted power is greater due to its lack of limit. The example he uses is that even if you were very strong, in order to be stronger he could just go and get three friends to help him. There is no way that one person, even being extremely strong could be stronger than four.

I am not completely in one camp or another, there are obviously times when you can only rely on yourself but those are rarer and rarer these days. A balance of both relying on yourself and working with others is the ideal.

As I stated at the beginning it often pays off the most to capitalize on your strengths and try to avoid your weaknesses. This is only possible when you can cooperate with others who can cover for your weaknesses with their own strengths.

When working in a group setting on something that is not my own there is no sign of my aversion to ask for help. But for my personal challenges it comes in full force. In my own programming projects and learning I have not taken advantage of the fantastic community resources available online. However, In the past week I have: reached out, gotten help and project suggestions on my portfolio, found someone to try and do a project with cooperatively and, started to rekindle relationships with friends and acquaintances that have fallen away as I have moved around and circumstances have changed.

I am quite an introverted and solitary person. I have little network outside of family and a couple of friends. This makes finding opportunities and getting feedback much more difficult. Fixing this is one way of my making this year more about taking action as opposed to pure learning. So much of our success is dependent on others. The people that we know and care for, and who care for us, play such a huge role in our lives. This is both professionally and personally true. Making more friends and getting to know more people is always valuable and makes life better by being able to share it, get help and most importantly, being able to help others.

I feel like this last week has upped my productivity immensely and is one of the best investments of time that I have made. Productivity is so often about finding the bottlenecks, the individual things that are limiting us the most, and improving them. System optimization for any sort of system follows this same rule. A chemical reaction is limited in speed by the slowest step and that is where you want to focus your efforts to speed it up.

The bottleneck in my life is definitely social. I need to open up more and invest more time in reaching out from my few core relationships to build new ones.

Your problem may be something completely different, but everyone has one. What is your bottleneck and how might you be able to do something about it?

Thanks for reading.