When You Want to Do Everything Yourself

Recently, I was watching one of my colleagues and noticed something interesting.

After he was promoted from Middle to Senior Engineer, he started working even more. I think he wanted to show that he was really ready for the new position and could handle any task.

He almost never asked for help. When a difficult task came up, he tried to solve it himself. If something needed to be designed from scratch, he also took care of it. Even when other people on the team could help, he preferred to try everything by himself first.

At first, it actually looked good. He was very responsible, worked hard, and always tried to do everything well.

But after a few months, I started to notice some changes.

He looked tired. Sometimes it was easy to see that he was very worried about work. Before, he often talked about his tasks with real interest. Later, work became more like a source of stress for him.

The most interesting thing was that everything looked fine from the outside. He continued working, finished his tasks, and did his job. But it was clear that it was becoming harder for him to keep the same energy.

One day, his manager asked him:

“Why don’t you communicate more with the team? Why don’t you ask for help?”

I think this question surprised him.

He was used to thinking that as a Senior Engineer, he should find solutions himself and handle difficult tasks on his own. Maybe he even thought that asking for help would make him look weak.

After that conversation, he started to change his approach a little.

He began discussing tasks with his colleagues more often. If he didn’t know the best way to do something, he could simply ask someone for their opinion. Sometimes he delegated part of the work instead of doing everything himself.

And slowly, it became clear that work was getting easier for him.

It turned out that everyone on the team had their own experience. One colleague could quickly find a technical solution, another could notice a problem that nobody had seen before, and a third could suggest a simpler way to do the same thing.

Sometimes, all you need is a ten-minute conversation with someone to understand something that you could have been thinking about for hours.

I often think about this story because the desire to do everything yourself doesn’t happen only at work.

Sometimes a person simply wants to be strong. They don’t want to bother anyone, they don’t want to show that something is difficult, so they continue to carry everything alone.

From the outside, such a person may look very confident and independent.

But inside, the story can be completely different.

• They are tired, but they keep working.
• Things are difficult, but they say everything is fine.
• They don’t know what to do next, but they still try to find the answer alone.

And probably the hardest thing is to notice this moment in time.

Because sometimes a person doesn’t need another piece of advice or another task.

Sometimes they just need someone nearby to ask: “Can I help you?”