Entry № 21 · Plate xxi
On ActionGo after it. Ask for it. Step forward. Otherwise nothing moves.
Three small verbs do almost all the work of a life.
The explanation
If you do not go after what you want, you will not have it. If you do not ask, the answer is already no. If you do not step forward, you will be standing in the same place a year from now wondering why. Most of what we call luck is just someone who repeatedly did these three small, slightly uncomfortable things while everyone else waited.
The story
My friend Anya spent almost two years quietly obsessed with a company she wanted to work for. She read every blog post their engineers wrote. She refreshed the careers page most Sunday nights. She built small side projects using their tools. What she did not do — for twenty-two months — was talk to a single human being who worked there. She was waiting, she told me later, to feel 'ready.
' On a Tuesday in November, over a bad glass of wine, she gave up on the idea of ready and sent one short email to an engineer whose talks she admired: 'I don't want anything. I just wanted to ask what it's like to work on your team.' A one-hour reply came back before she went to bed. Coffee the following Monday. An informal interview the Thursday after.
A formal loop the week after that. An offer, ten days later, at a level she had not thought to hope for. In the twenty-eight days between that first email and the offer letter, she did not become a better engineer. She was exactly the same person she had been for the previous two years. The only thing that had changed was that she had, finally, asked. She keeps a Post-it on her monitor now that reads simply: go, ask, step.
