All of us are fundamentally ignorant of other people’s plans. We just can’t really tell whether others might say yes or no because we don’t have access to their projects and visions. We are attempting to overcome our lack of data by foreclosing in a pessimistic direction. But we should, instead, simply try to get more data – by asking. We should respond to ignorance with curiosity, not despair.

We should remember too that we can survive a ‘no’. From a distance, we feel it would be a catastrophe if it were a ‘no’. From close up, we can be sure we’d shrug it off in three hours. We are big people now. Of course, as small children, we were very vulnerable and perhaps adults said ‘no’ to us at key moments and it hurt. And now we’re trying not to get hurt again. But the mind is slow to realise the time. We’ve grown. We’re perhaps six feet tall. We have a bank account, perhaps a car, maybe children of our own. We can survive a ‘no’.

And in any case, not asking is not cost free. We are avoiding the pain of rejection; but we are settling for something that is more insidious and troubling: a lack of opportunity. Not asking life for something means implicitly asking it for something else, failure from the outset. And this is especially sad because life is so very short. What we should really be scared of is not a ‘no’, but of reaching our deathbeds unfulfilled. We should ask.

-Alain de Botton