You need help.

Ok, you’re awesome and you know it, (at least when you’re in a good mood). It seems like people just know to ask you for help or information, because if you don’t know the answer, you know how to find it. Maybe it’s always been that way. Friends, family, classmates, coworkers, have looked to you to save them when they’ve thrown their hands up. Those people have done you a huge favor. They’ve trained you to be self-sufficient, which is critical if you want to do anything worth doing, including starting and running your own business. But, in your role as the perennial go-to person, you may have developed a blind spot to an important truth that, without correction, will dilute and limit your ability to be awesome and do big things. The truth is: you need help. Lots of it.

Self-sufficiency teaches you to indulge pride in your abilities. Appreciating the things you can do is fine, but when your identity is too tied up in what you are capable of, it can make asking for help when you need it feel like failure. That’s crap. You don’t have to prove the worth of your abilities in every challenge you meet. Give someone else an opportunity to shine. They may have a lot more practice at tackling that type of challenge than you do, and they’re probably happy to help. Benefit from their experience and find a way to compensate them for their effort.

It can be hard to rely on other people when you’re good at figuring things out for yourself. But it’s absolutely imperative if you want to make an impact. You are one person, with a sustainable max of twenty conscious hours in a day. Even if you have the capacity to master anything, it’s dreadfully inefficient to be your own resident expert on everything. You’ll end up spending more time finding information than applying it. That’s acceptable if you’re pursuing a hobby, but if you are trying to make something meaningful, you need to commit as much time as you can to creating value.

So go get help. You need it.