Asking for Help in The Self-Serve Web

Am I the only one who feels like I have no reason not to be 100% self-enabled and self-sufficient in the world of AI?

The proliferation and abundance of tools, content, and resources available to us on the internet is making it increasingly hard to justify asking for help.

I keep thinking: "there has to be a self-serve solution for this."

followed by: "and I must be out of it for not knowing what it is."

Resourcefulness in a world of abundant resources is becoming an implicit expectation.

While the self-serve internet is theoretically enabling us to be more competent than ever before, our inability to leverage it all leaves us feeling more incompetent than ever before.

That being said, this feeling is valid in narrative only. Having all of the resources at our disposal does not mean that we have the capacity to leverage it all.

The limitation is no longer the access to knowledge, skill, or logic, but rather our time, focus, and attention. We remain bounded by physical constraints, and what we decide to allocate our human resources to remains an economic decision we have to make.

Yes, you can be a design-engineer-salesperson-financier, but can you really be the best at each of these things, and reliably? Maybe. But most likely, you would do all of these things, and settle for “good enough”.

The self-serve internet is definitely an empowering enabler, but should not be perceived as a replacement for asking for help and working with others.

We need more humans to be able to scale our capacity and take advantage of all of what is available to us. We also need to collaborate with each other to leverage each other’s unique comparative advantages.

Assuming we should do everything ourselves because we have the resources to do so is missing the point.

The more interesting question will not be what are all of the things I can do? but rather, what are the things I can do more of and better?

and ask for help to fulfill the rest.