Between Thoughts -Intellectual Musings

Self-made does not exist. Only in a Sinatra song does it.

I was reading a New York Times opinion piece on Angela Duckworth,  the psychologist behind Grit,  about the simple, difficult act of asking for help. It sent me back through my own record of the times I couldn’t do it. The time I believed asking would make me look weak. The time I did ask, and it was broadcast around the company as proof I’d been promoted too early, too soon, undeserving. The time I asked and was told even a child could have figured it out alone. And then the years after, when I simply stopped asking, which, it turns out, is not the solution either. I was still turning the article over in my mind, waiting to be served, when I greeted a stranger. “Ukukhala akusizi,” he said. Crying (Asking) doesn’t help. “Ukukhala kuyasiza,” I answered. It depends who you’re crying to,  but crying does help and do cry (ask). Ingane engakhali ifela embelekweni: the child who doesn’t cry dies on its mother’s back (womb).

The Note I Was Left With.
My brother took his own life. Before he did, he hanged his eight-year-old son, my nephew and then hanged himself. He had stopped asking for help. He felt like a burden, like he didn’t belong, like he was useless and  worthless. He did not ask. He is gone, and I am left holding a two-page suicide note. I am not writing this for sympathy. I am writing it because it is the most brutal proof I own of what happens at the far end of a life spent refusing to ask. At work, at home, in this hard thing called life, we have to build a muscle, the muscle of asking for help  and we have to accept what that muscle will sometimes cost us on the way to using it.

The Priest, the Levite, and the Samaritan.
In every life there are the Priests and the Levites,  holier-than-thou, self-righteous, who see you in the ditch and pass by on the other side. And there are the Samaritans, who stop, who bandage, who pay for your care, and who do not turn around to broadcast it on social media for the likes, at the expense of the person they claim to have helped.
Always remember: you, too, are capable of being the Priest and the Levite. Not just the Samaritan.
“The study explicitly looked at how situational pressure,  like being in a hurry,  overrides a person’s own values.”

The Good Samaritan Experiment (Princeton, 1973)

Researchers John Darley and Daniel Batson recruited forty seminary students and asked each to prepare a short talk. Half were assigned, deliberately, the Parable of the Good Samaritan itself,  the exact story about stopping for a stranger in need. Each student then had to walk to another building to deliver it. Some were told they had plenty of time. Some were told to head over, the assistant was ready. Some were told they were already late. On the way, every one of them passed an actor slumped in a doorway, coughing, groaning, clearly in distress.
The Results.
Low hurry: 63% stopped to help.
Medium hurry: 45% stopped to help.
High hurry: only 10% stopped? some stepped directly over the man.

What the students were thinking about,  even the Good Samaritan story itself, fresh in their minds,  mattered almost not at all. What mattered was the clock. Darley and Batson called it a narrowing of the cognitive map: when we are sufficiently rushed, we become temporarily blind to the people right in front of us.

Why Good People Walk Away
Psychologists name three mental barriers behind these failures to help:
Pluralistic ignorance — seeing a crowd not react, and concluding, wrongly, that it must not be an emergency.
Evaluation apprehension — the fear of looking foolish, of being judged, of intervening incorrectly in public.
Cognitive tunnel vision — the hurry factor: a brain locked onto a deadline physically screens out everything that isn’t the task.

The Illusion of Self-Sufficiency.
From early childhood, we carry what cognitive psychologists call the illusion of self-sufficiency,  a systematic underestimate of how much we owe our own competence to other people. In one experiment, two groups of children were given a machine they’d never seen. Left alone, almost none of the first group worked it out. The second group, who watched someone else use it first and picked up a few hints along the way, mostly succeeded. Afterwards, seventy percent of that second group,  the ones who’d been shown, insisted they would have figured it out on their own anyway. I did it my way, and I am self-made. It doesn’t exist. Only in a Sinatra song does it.

Ask for Help?

Six questions worth sitting with: Who to ask. Who not to ask. When to ask. When not to ask. Who to trust when you do ask, so it is never used against you. And how to ask, so the asking actually works.

High achievers rely on strategic help-seeking to override the illusion of self-sufficiency, not despite their competence but because of it. Asking for help is not the opposite of achievement,  in the research, it is one of the load-bearing mechanisms of it.

Why It Matters?
The efficiency paradox — low performers delay help-seeking to protect the ego; high performers treat it as an optimisation tool that saves time and cuts error rates.
The helper’s high — people consistently overestimate how burdened a helper will feel, and underestimate how glad they’ll be to be asked. Helping triggers its own reward and deepens the bond between the two of you.
The Benjamin Franklin effect — ask someone for a favour and their own mind, resolving the dissonance of having helped you, concludes you must be worth the trouble. They end up liking you more, not less, for the asking.

Who to Ask?
Domain experts with an instrumental focus,  people who don’t just hand you the answer, but scaffold the process so you can do it again without them.
Psychologically safe peers,  in Amy Edmondson’s language, environments where vulnerability is normalised rather than penalised.
A mix of strong and weak ties,  close family and friends carry you emotionally; Granovetter’s weak ties, the acquaintances and distant colleagues, are statistically better at solving a structural problem or opening a door you can’t see yet.

Who Not to Ask?
Zero-sum competitors,  anyone whose own standing is threatened by your advancement.
Chronic “executive” givers, the well-meaning person who takes the whole task off your hands and, without meaning to, teaches you to stay helpless.
Low-trust, low-empathy operators, anyone more prone to filing your vulnerability away as leverage for later.

When to Ask?
After productive struggle, once you’ve mapped exactly what you know and exactly where you’re stuck, but before panic shuts your working memory down.
Immediately, on anything irreversible,  medical, legal, structural, a major ethical call. The research on high-stakes decisions is unambiguous: get the formal, early consultation. Do not trial-and-error your way through a decision you can’t undo.

When Not to Ask?
Before you’ve done the basic diagnostic work yourself,  asking too early reads as a lack of conscientiousness, and it spends social capital you didn’t need to spend.
Inside an environment with no psychological safety and no institutional backing,  where not-knowing gets weaponised at review time. There, use documentation and anonymous or external resources first.

Who to Trust?
Knowing who won’t use your vulnerability against you is its own discipline. The organisational-trust literature (Mayer, Davis, and Schoorman) reduces it to three pillars:

Ability: The competence to actually give aid,  not just goodwill, but the skill to help.
Benovelence: Alignment of mutual welfare,  they want good for you, not power over you.
Intergrity: A consistent moral code,  what they do when no one is watching matches what they say.

Trust people with a track record of protecting others’ vulnerabilities over their own glory. Trust people whose success is structurally tied to yours,  an aligned manager, a real mentor, a genuine partner. And trust people with a demonstrated allergy to office politics, whose ethics don’t bend with the room.

How to Ask?.  SMART Help-Seeking
A Framework Worth Using
1. Instrumental, not executive. Not “can you do this for me” but “I’ve tried X and Y and I’m stuck at Z,  walk me through how you’d think about it.”
2. Be specific. “I’m totally lost, help me” asks for an open-ended time commitment and makes people back away. Narrow the ask.
3. Leave an exit. “No pressure if you don’t have the bandwidth” paradoxically raises the odds someone says yes.
4. Ask in person, or by voice. Face-to-face and synchronous requests succeed at many times the rate of the same request by text or email.

Men Need to Learn to Ask
The gender gap here is not folklore. Across academic, professional, physical-health, and psychological domains, women consistently report more willingness and more favourable attitudes toward asking for help than men  and the gap is structural, tied to gender roles, not biology.
Addis and Mahalik’s foundational meta-analysis found men, across every age, ethnicity, and nationality studied, seek help at meaningfully lower rates than women. Even where the intention to seek help narrows once a problem is diagnosed, men face a much higher structural wall to admitting the problem exists at all.

Traditional male socialisation prizes self-reliance and stoicism to the point where, in behavioural studies, men default to “working it out alone” even in scenarios that plainly need outside expertise,  because admitting a gap in knowledge reads, to many men, as a direct hit to status. And the gap doesn’t close with seniority. As women rise through organisations, their strategic use of help-seeking tends to increase. For many men, rising in rank inflates the illusion of self-sufficiency instead,  the higher the chair, the harder it becomes to say I don’t know.

Making It Cool Again
Let us make “please help me” cool again. Let a man be a fool for two seconds and wise for the rest of his life. My brother didn’t ask. He believed, by the end, that he was a burden, that he didn’t belong, that he was worthless  and he took his son with him rather than leave him behind in a world he no longer trusted himself, or anyone else, to help him survive in. I carry his note so that someone else doesn’t have to write one of their own.

Ask. Ask badly, ask specifically, ask the wrong person once and the right person next time,  but ask. Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu: a person is a person through other people. None of us was ever meant to carry it alone.

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Dr. Mzamo Masito

Between Thoughts – Intellectual Musings

Where the uncomfortable questions get a seat at the table.