The art of knowing

It may seem obvious, but doing so is very unusual and usually has an unexpectedly positive response. Jobs learned it With 12 years, Altman cost a few more years.

There are those who will never learn The art of knowing.

HP? I need your help

With only 12 years, Steve Jobs had nothing better to do with his free time than to build his own frequency counter. However, in 1967, the necessary components to build this device were not in any store and only had access to them the large technology companies.

Far from throwing the towel due to the lack of pieces, the preteen Jobs had the audacity to call the office Bill Hewlett, Hewlett-Packard co-founder (HP), and directly ask for the components.

As Steve Jobs himself remembered In an interview 1994, Bill Hewlett responded to his surprised call. “I said ‘Hello, my name is Steve Jobs, I am 12 years old, I study at the institute, I am doing a frequency meter and I am missing some pieces, and I wondered if you had plenty of spare parts that I could use,’ he laughed, he gave me the pieces and offered me a summer job mounting frequencimeters in the HP mounting chain. I was in paradise,” Jobs confessed in the video.

This early experience not only provided Jobs experience and technical knowledge, he also confirmed that ask for things what do you need can take you to get them. “I never found anyone who didn’t want to help me if I asked for it,” Jobs recalled.

Sam Altman’s secret: ask for what he needs

Another example of success is Sam Altman, which after many years in the trench of the startups, began to create OpenAi. In his Interview for Bill Gates Podcast Unconfuse meAltman shared one of his most tips important to achieve success: “Ask for whatever you want.”

Altman already shared this Council in his popular Decalogue for success “How to Be Successful” he published in 2019 in his personal blog. According to the founding millionaire of Openai, “you will not normally get it, often the rejection will be painful. But when this works, it does so surprisingly well,” he said.

As Altman himself explained, the secret of this method is that it implies overcoming the fear of expressing your desires openly and directly for fear of rejection or seem insistent, thus self -limiting the success options.

Why work for help

Although it may seem simple, the disposition of Jobs and Altman to ask for help has psychological roots in which the belief of that oneself have to solve all your problems.

A study From the University of Columbia, he studied this psychological block to ask for help, and the researchers concluded that people tend to underestimate the probability (50%) that others access their direct requests for help. Is what is known as Substimation bias.

According to this study, help applicants tended to focus more on the instrumental costs of aid, that is, the effort that implies helping, without taking into account The social cost of refusing -the discomfort of saying “no” -, of the person who receives the petition.

Social psychologist Heidi Grant Halvorsson, in her book ‘Reinforcements: How to get people to help you ‘He explains that a application for clear, specific help and does not put the other person in an awkward position is more likely to be successful.

Wayne Baker research, a professor at the University of Michigan, suggests that between 75% and 90% of the aid provided in the work environment begins with a simple request and people who ask for help at work are seen as more competent, no less, as many believe. These people improve their skills and knowledge with what they learned from their classmates.

“Most people are willing to even help strangers if they ask for it. The problem is that most people do not ask for what Professor Baker said in An interview for the podcast of Harvard Business Review.

Amanda Palmer, author of ‘The art of asking‘, argued in his Ted Talk That we all have the right to ask for what we need. According to the singer and writer, denying someone that right can have negative consequences in their well -being and in their interpersonal relationships.

Already be face to facethrough a phone call like Steve Jobs made to Bill Hewlett, an email or a crowdfunding campaign, the key is in overcome fear of rejection and dare to ask What you need.

In Xataka | In 2005, Steve Jobs revealed in Stanford the keys to his success. Two decades later, Sam Altman has traced his speech

Image | AppleFlickr (Techcrunch), Unspash (Rémi Walle)