The Single Best Life Advice

A friend asked me yesterday: “You write motivational columns; what’s your single best piece of advice for life?”

So I thought and realized I personally didn’t have one. But I also remembered something I once read from someone who did, that someone being Steve Jobs, and how true I found his to be. This is the story, below:

There is one single thing that “separates the people that do things from the people that just dream about them.”

It isn't their intelligence, their work ethic, or their financial means. It's something much more simple...

When Jobs was only 12 years old, he opened the phone book and placed a call to Bill Hewlett (the co-founder of Hewlett-Packard). On the call, Jobs asked if Bill happened to have any spare computer parts he could have for a project he was working on––building a frequency counter.

Not only did Bill have the parts, he gave Steve a job that summer working on the assembly line at his company. To quote Jobs, "I was in heaven."

So what did Jobs do that was so special? (Besides calling the co-founder of a computer company when he was just 12 years old.)

He asked.

Yep, that's all. So many of us are held back by our own self-doubt or unwillingness to ask that opportunities we never even know are available pass us by.

A simple question I've used for years that has served me well: “Will I be any worse off than am I now by asking for this opportunity?” If the answer is no—which I'd argue it almost always is—then you've got nothing to lose.

If you're too afraid to ask, you're too afraid to fail. And without failure, you'll never grow. Just take action. Just ask.

What holds us back? It’s in the last sentence. We fear rejection. We fear the word “no.” For me, for much of my life, my mind came up with the singular worst possible reason why—and it always had to do with my perceived inadequacies. Not the nearly infinite reasons why the person you are asking might just not be able to deliver. Which is what holds most of us back—evolution has given us a negativity bias to keep us alive that we do not need anymore. What if Bill Hewlett simply had not had the spare parts that day? What if Jobs has internalized this as, “I don’t like this loser kid, so I won’t give him what he wants,” and that had become the belief system of Jobs?

It’s almost never about you—that word “no.” Don’t over-interpret. Just ask. You may be amazed where a simple “yes” leads you.

We are our own griefs. We are our own happinesses. We are our own remedies.

– Mike Spivey