Let me tell you about the messages I keep rewriting.
Since the book came out I have typed some version of the same short note many times. To people who have known me for decades. People who knew me long before any title.
The note says: I have made something, I am proud of it, I would like you to read it.
I type it. I read it back. It sounds like begging. I delete it.
Then I write a lighter one, with a joke somewhere in it, so that if they ignore it we can both pretend I was not really asking. I read that back. It is the coward's version of the first one. I delete that too.
What usually goes out in the end is a photograph of the cover and a line that asks for nothing at all.
I have run companies. I have made decisions that changed people's lives. And I cannot reliably send eleven plain words to a friend of thirty years.
I have been thinking about why, and I want to share it with you, because I suspect you have your own version of that deleted message.
For twenty-eight years the work asked for me. I never had to say pick mine. The results said it, the team said it, the thing we built said it better than I could. I called that integrity, and some of it was. But letting the work speak is also a very safe way to never be turned down. If you do not ask, nobody can say no. The work carries the risk. Your pride stays clean. And you get to call the whole arrangement dignity.
Take the results away and what is left is a man and a request. That is what a book does to you. There is no quarterly number walking into a friend's evening to make the case. There is only me, willing or unwilling to say: this matters to me, would you.
What I could not see for most of my life is this. The fear was never in the asking. It was in the answer.
Asking and being refused are two different fears. I spent decades treating them as one, which let me avoid both by never asking at all. I built a career that made sure I would never find out what I was worth to someone in real time, with nothing to hide behind.
I think many of us do this. We become very good at being chosen so we never have to ask to be chosen. We call it letting the work speak, staying humble, not being pushy. It is all of those things. It is also fear, wearing the good clothes.
I watched it for years in the most capable people I led. They waited to be noticed rather than ask for the raise, the role, the chance they had plainly earned. They called it patience. I admired it.
I am less sure now. Some of them are still waiting, doing excellent work in rooms that stopped looking a long time ago. The work was supposed to ask for them. One day the work went quiet, and nobody had learned to say the sentence out loud.
I do not want that to be the last thing my own career taught me. That is why I am writing to you about a deleted message instead of a leadership principle. The principle is easy. The message is the hard part, and the message is the whole point.
I am not writing with this solved. I still soften the ask. I still lead with a story and bury the request at the bottom. Part of that is the register I want, quiet, never a hard sell. But I have stopped telling myself it is only good taste. Underneath the taste is the same man who cannot send eleven words to an old friend.
If you are carrying a message you keep deleting, an ask you keep dressing up so it does not look like one, let me say the thing I am still trying to say to myself.
The no you are afraid of is survivable. What is harder to survive is a whole life spent making sure you never had to hear it, and calling that a life well managed.
There is a quieter cost I only see now. Every time you dress up an ask so it does not look like one, you also take away the other person's chance to say a real yes. They never get to choose to help you, because you never gave them a clear thing to help with. You decided, for them, that your ask would be a burden. That is not generosity. It is control, dressed as consideration. I did this to people for years and called it looking after them.
Once or twice I have managed to send the plain version. Nothing bad happened. The sky held. And each time I was left with the same uncomfortable question: what else have I not asked for, across an entire career, because I decided in advance what the answer would be?
Asking is the muscle I never trained. I am training it now, late, one uncomfortable sentence at a time.
So here is mine to you, without the joke to hide behind.
I wrote a book, as told to Priya Kumar. It is called The Next Mountain. If a stretch of your own climb has felt like the ones in it, I would be grateful if you read it.
That is the whole ask. It was harder to type than it should have been.
What is the message you keep deleting? And who, exactly, are you protecting by not sending it?
Until next week,
Avinash
The Next Mountain: Notes on Resilience, Leadership and Purpose, as told to Priya Kumar, is out now: https://amzn.in/d/00BvTihf. If it has meant something to you, a short review on Amazon helps another reader find it more than you would think. You can follow me on Amazon here: https://www.amazon.com/author/avinashkaul