Building the Habit of Asking for Advice Changed the Trajectory of My Career

I had grown up in Jodhpur in a household where asking for help had a specific cultural weight - where the ability to manage independently was respected and where the seeking of guidance, beyond what was necessary, suggested an insufficiency that one preferred not to broadcast.

I had absorbed this as a professional norm and had, across five years of working, been quietly proud of my ability to solve problems without requiring significant input from others.

At 27, working in product development, I was navigating a specific career decision that I had been turning over internally for several months without arriving at clarity. A senior colleague mentioned that she was meeting a former manager for coffee to think through a similar kind of decision, and the casualness with which she described seeking that input - as if it were simply what you did when you had an important question - was disorienting to me in a way that made me examine my own behaviour.

I had access to several people with more relevant experience than I had, and I had been using none of them because I had not thought of their knowledge as a resource I was entitled to draw on.

I sent three messages the following week - to a former manager, to a peer two years ahead of me in the same field, and to a senior person I had met at an industry event and stayed loosely in touch with. All three responded warmly.

All three provided perspectives that my own thinking had not generated. One of them connected me to someone who eventually became central to a significant career move I made at 28. The total time investment across the three conversations was about four hours.

The return on four hours of asking questions I had been not asking for years was not proportional. I built the habit from there - a monthly practice of seeking specific input from people with relevant experience on the questions I was actually working on.

The information I was looking for had been in other people's heads the whole time. I had been refusing to access it on the grounds that not needing it was a virtue.