Let’s talk about one of my dumbest weaknesses: the fear of asking for help.

It’s dumb but it’s also interesting because it has lots to do with power and politics.

Let’s start with an obvious observation: This phobia is primarily a male thing. Most of the men I know have it. Most women I’ve known don’t even understand it.

Like most men, I don’t even like to ask directions when I’m in an unfamiliar neighborhood. I’d rather drive around aimlessly until I happen to hit on the right way. Asking directions makes me feel submissive. And I don’t like to feel submissive because I live in a world where submitting is a disadvantage.

When you submit, you relinquish power. And power, in the competitive, male-dominated business world, is the most valuable currency.

A good resource on this subject is Deborah Tanner. She’s a psychologist who writes about how men and women communicate. Her books have titles like Why What I Said You Didn’t Listen to Because What You Said I Already Said Yesterday. I would be interested to hear what she has to say about asking for help. I’d bet she’d agree with me.

If you are a woman in business, you may not recognize that asking questions about what you’re doing is a double-bladed proposition. On the one hand, it may endear you to the men you work with because they will like the implicit flattery. On the other hand, the asking itself is an indication (to the “male” psyche) that you are at least momentarily willing to play a submissive role.

Put differently, you should recognize that each time you ask a question you may be giving away a little bit of power. If you ask enough questions, you risk giving up the standing you’ve worked so long to achieve.

I am speaking in broad strokes to make a point. There are questions that do not yield power. And there are times when you will give a little (by asking a submissive question) in order to give a man the power he needs. But to ask questions without realizing the effect is to put yourself in an unnecessarily weak position.

I’m working my way through this as I write. It’s not something I’ve already figured out. So bear with me if I move back and forth a bit.

Questioning Your Power… Powering Your Questions

We are talking about power, generally. And about how men deal with it, specifically.

Contrary to what some would have you believe, most men are not brutes that think simply and mostly with their penises. They can be (and usually are, in business situations at least) subtle and sophisticated creatures. This is certainly true when it comes to passing around power. It’s not just about grabbing and pushing. It’s not King of the Mountain.

It is not stretching the truth to say that most men want as much power as they can get. (This could be said of women too, but that’s for another essay.) But because men have long been the primary brokers of power, they have learned that it is difficult, if not impossible, to simply grab power as they go. They realize that they are competing in an arena where thousands, if not millions, of other men are doing the same thing.

When two competitive men meet for the first time, they rarely launch into head butting to see who is dominant. Instead, they engage in a “feeling out” discussion.

They are primarily interested in discovering each other’s strengths and weaknesses in many different areas: raw intelligence, emotional intelligence, analytic skills, speaking ability, charisma, humor, and, of course, money and toys and famous friends.

Like boxers in the first round, men will verbally jab and shift, feinting and parrying, trying to discover who is the better (a) businessman, (b) moneymaker, (c) athlete, (d) intellect, (e) talker, (f) comedian, etc. Their questions will be so casual (almost to the point of being banal) that a woman listening in might think nothing is being communicated at all.

My first real job was as “backseat wiper man” at the Rockville Center Car Wash on Long Island. I was 14 and happy with the $1.25 an hour they paid me. A couple of years later, when I had a summer job as a housepainter’s assistant in swank Hewlett Bay Harbor, I became an “entrepreneur.”

What happened was this. My friend Peter and I were scraping the shingles on a big yellow house when the lady of the house, a Mrs. Bernstein, came out and asked for Armando, our boss. Armando’s routine was to drop us off at the work site at 7:00 a.m. and disappear until 5 or 6 in the evening.

We were left to do the work, with virtually no experience and only Armando’s advice on watering down the paint and “dry rolling” the second coat to guide us. (Dry rolling is when your painter pretends to be giving you a second coat when, in fact, his roller is dry. This allows him to get the job done twice as fast and save a bundle on the cost of paint.)

“I’m onto your boss, Mrs. Bernstein said. “How much does that cheap bastard pay you?” We told her. She harrumphed and disappeared inside. When she came out, she announced, “I just fired that good-for-nothing. But if you know what’s good for you, you’ll be here Monday morning. I’ll pay you an extra dollar an hour to finish this job properly.”

The point of this little story is to illustrate how I accidentally started working for myself. (Some other time, I’ll tell you what happened when Armando discovered our duplicity.)

I just fell into it. And I loved it. I although I didn’t stay in the painting business very long, the experience of having my own business became a habit that continued, with a few brief exceptions, for the rest of my life.

The stories that are told about entrepreneurs are about men and women with dreams. People who imagine building and selling better mousetraps, who risk all their money and time to make those dreams come true.

My story is not nearly as dramatic. And that’s probably why it’s seldom told. But it’s not a bad way to begin.

What Peter and I did, unwittingly, was to start a business by “knocking off” the business we worked for.

And this is not a terrible idea. (Well, that depends on how you do it.) In fact, it’s probably the easiest and surest way to become an entrepreneur. And I’ll bet it’s the most common way as well. Way more common than having the dream.

AH had done amazing things while working for MM, a competitor of ours. And he did just as well when he came to work for us. He built his part of our company from less than $50 million to more than $100 million in less than two years.

I asked him why he had been willing to jump ship. In my experience, superstars like AH are hard to recruit because they are well rewarded where they’re at. And, indeed, he had been well paid. (More than he initially made with us.) But he was frustrated by MM’s tendency to micromanage him, even after it was clear he didn’t need help.

As it turned out, AH wasn’t the only good employee we got from this man. Soon after AH came to us, MM’s business took a dip. The stress of that intensified his micromanaging. And that drove away more good people – people he needed to turn the business around. His business could have survived the dip and started growing again. Instead, it kept shrinking and eventually went bankrupt.

The tendency to micromanage is usually related to a CEO’s unwillingness to give his superstars the space, the responsibility, and the authority they need to do their jobs. If you ask micromanagers why they keep looking over their employees’ shoulders, they’ll give you the same answer: “I have to make sure the work is done right.”

Sometimes that’s a valid reason. But only for a brief period of time when a key employee is learning a critically important skill. More often, it’s because of the CEO’s own insecurities and feelings of inadequacy. (Which is more common than you might think.)

Micromanagement is a problem that seriously limits a CEO’s ability to grow his company. And it’s not always because he is psychologically unwilling to let go. It could be because he can’t.

This is very common in the fashion industry. It is very common in the health industry. And it is very common in the information publishing industry. It happens when the CEO is so talented at one part of the business that the product or service becomes associated with him. He becomes the brand. And the business cannot grow beyond him.

If you have this problem, or see it start to develop, there is only one way to solve it. You have to spend the time and energy to hire really hardworking, ambitious and talented people. And you must trust them to grow parts of your business independently of you, your ideals, and your expectations.

If you are a marketing genius, hire a marketing person who is as good as or better than you at some aspect of marketing. Then let him develop that part of your business without getting you involved.

Likewise, if you are the product expert – even the name on the product – hire someone who is as good as or better than you at product development. Then let him develop products that have nothing to do with your name or brand.

Or you can have your cake and eat it too… by doing what James Patterson does.

James Patterson is the most prolific author of all time. His books have sold over 300 million copies. He was the first to sell over a million e-books. He topped Forbes’s list of the highest-paid authors for the third consecutive year with an income of $95 million. His total income for the decade was estimated at $700 million.

You reach for the mug and knock it over. Hot coffee washes over your laptop.

You arrive home and realize you’ve left your bag, with all your IDs, on the subway.

Your doctor reads your EKG and says, “Hmm. I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

Life dishes out disasters, big and small. How we react to them says much about our character and our ability to enjoy a happy, successful life.

If I can’t find my wallet, I’m prone to think it’s been swiped by someone who’s going to steal my identity and empty my bank accounts.

Waiting for the results of any sort of medical test, I imagine the worst.

That, for some reason, is how I’m wired.

My wife, K, is the opposite. She’s a natural optimist. And when people like me have a worst-case scenario in our head, optimists like K will tell us not to worry about it. They’ll remind us, quite correctly, that there’s a good chance something less than the worst will occur.

But such advice is useless. For us, life is a very scary movie. Not thinking about the worst that can happen is not an option.

However, it is possible to develop mental habits that’ll help us overcome our fears and respond to crises – real or imagined – in a positive way.

Recently, my nephew got into some trouble at school and told me it had really messed him up. He couldn’t sleep, couldn’t study, could barely eat, etc.

Knowing what I knew about the situation, I believed he was overreacting. But I knew that telling him not to worry would be useless – even counter-productive because fear and anxiety are deeply planted emotions that can’t be commanded away.

It would also have been useless for me to try to convince him that his worst fears are imaginary. They are real to him and there is always a possibility that they will come true.

So I told him to do what I do whenever I am extremely anxious. I do what I call making friends with the devil.

You can tell how well an audience liked your speech if, as you walk back from the podium, you look at those seated at the end of the aisles. If you’ve done well, most of them will be looking at you, smiling. If you’ve done poorly, they’ll look away, like a jury does to the accused when they return with a guilty verdict.

There were about 400 people in attendance. Mostly older folks. They were there to learn “how to create a $10 million portfolio.” In his introduction, the emcee had told them that the speakers were going to give them a bunch of “million-dollar ideas.”

Not surprisingly, they were visibly disappointed by what I had to say.

What I said was something I’ve been saying for as long as I’ve been writing about building wealth: Unless you have at least 30 years for compound interest to work its magic, you are not going to become wealthy by investing in stocks.

Here’s how I put it many years ago:

The investment business – and in that I include brokerages, private bankers, and insurance agents, as well as investment publications – is a huge and hugely profitable industry that provides a generally useful service. But it is populated with smart, ambitious people who promote one teensy-weensy lie.

The lie is that you can grow wealthy in less than 30 years by investing in stocks and bonds.

 It’s not a big, black lie. There is plenty of evidence that strategic investing can provide returns that exceed costs (brokerage fees, management fees, subscription fees, etc.) and even produce positive returns after inflation. But for that to work, you need time.

Say you start with $50,000. And you follow a tax-deferred investment strategy that has been proven to deliver 10% annually, year after year.

At the end of 10 years, your $50,000 will have increased to $129,687. At the end of 20 years, it will have grown to $336,375. And at the end of 30 years, it will be $872,470.

$872,470 will give you $87,200 of income for 10 years, which might come to about $65,000 after taxes. That’s okay. But it’s hardly wealthy.

Besides, you probably don’t have 30 years to wait before you would want to begin spending that income.

So what’s an earnest wealth seeker to do?

For most people, next to the fear of dying, public speaking is their greatest fear. And what’s more difficult than giving a long speech?

Giving a short one!

“It’s such a little thing,” you tell yourself. “It should be easy.”

Problem is, with a briefer presentation – whether spoken or written – you have less time/space to make your point. (I’m reminded of the quip attributed to Mark Twain, among others: “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”)

 So next time you have to write a short-but-important letter… or make a persuasive business pitch… or deliver a brief wedding speech or eulogy, consider the following advice:

 From the guy who has coached thousands of TED Talk presenters:

1. Restrict your talk to one idea.
2. Begin with a statement – a single sentence or two – that arouses curiosity. (This is important. Listen to some TED Talks and you will see that this is commonly done and done effectively.)
3. Build your idea one clearly defined step after another. (This is very, very important. I don’t do it very well, but I am working on it.)

Gary North, an economist, Christian philosopher and good writer whom I’ve known for 30 years, once gave me life-changing advice.

We were talking about our careers. Our backgrounds and lifestyles are very different. We dress differently, speak differently, and even think differently. But somehow we’ve stayed connected through a common devotion to trying to figure things out.

I’d been troubled by some of the advertising copy I’d been writing. It was working very well and making my client a great deal of money, but I felt the message was wrong. I was worried that I was promoting a wrong way of looking at the world. Oddly it was a Weltanschauung that Gary’s conservative and religious mind embraced.

I expected Gary to persuade me that I was in fact spreading the good word. I might have even been hoping he would do so to ease my conscience. But instead he said something very simple that shook my soul. He said, “Mark. If you want to have a life of spiritual peace – and it’s clear that you do – you should never do anything for money that you wouldn’t want to do for free if you were rich and didn’t need money.”

This was more than 20 years ago. And I’ve thought of it a thousand times since then. I am still sometimes troubled by what the ideas and sentiments advertised by my clients and/or by my own businesses. But nowadays when I do I can at least recognize the issue and make my opinion known. And as for my own writing, I’ve never written anything since that I didn’t believe and wouldn’t be happy to say for free.

I don’t talk to Gary any more. Nothing happened. We were never close friends and our careers just gradually drifted apart and his reputation as a financial analyst and prognosticator was temporarily diminished after he jumped neck deep into the YK2 Panic – the fairly widely held belief back then that the worldwide economy was going to be thrown into chaos as the digital calendars clicked into the second millennium.

He was wrong about that but he’d been right about so many more important things that I was disappointed when he seemed to disappear from my reading view. Happily about ten years ago I discovered he was writing a weekly blog: Dr. Gary North’s Weekly Tip, which I read regularly.

The profound, life-changing advice is not there (perhaps he’s publishing that elsewhere) but the blog is very good at giving smaller, very practical tips on living more simply and sensibly.

Here’s an example from last Friday, September 8^th:

Over the years, I’ve learned a lot about direct-response (DR) marketing. In particular, how to be successful as a publisher of financial information. When I’m talking about the business to new employees (and even old-timers when they seem adrift), these are the important points I try to make:

1. DR publishers are different than literary publishers. Literary publishers are small businesses that target a tiny microcosm of readers, the academics and critics that determine literary prizes. On the contrary, DR publishers are large businesses that build their reputation (and profits) by discovering best-selling writers/analysts.

2. The job of financial writers is not to be smarter or righter than the rest of the pack. (A futile endeavor.) Their job is to write best-selling newsletters, blogs, and special reports. They should strive for big ideas that can make a big impact on their readers. Ideas that are just beyond the conversation of popular financial pundits.

3. In conveying their ideas, financial writers have a responsibility to make those ideas accessible to the average reader. The easiest way to do that is by using the online FK readability tool and keeping their score below 7.5.

Like every great performance artist, great interviewers make the interview look easy. Unfortunately, the apparent ease of what they do encourages too many unskilled and unimaginative sorts to start their own interview podcasts. (At last count, I heard there were more than 250,000 of them. And that’s just in English. Worldwide, there could be millions.)

Doing an interview podcast makes a lot of sense when you are starting out to establish yourself in your field. You need only a few hundred dollars’ worth of equipment and a list of people that have agreed to talk to you for some length of time.

If your interview subject is an expert in your field or has accomplished something impressive, the interview itself – you’d think – would be a good one. Your audience, having subscribed to your podcast because of a shared interest in that field should be captivated by what he says.

But the fact is that most interviews with experts are deadly dull.

Why so dull?

I believe it is because the interviewers ask the same obvious questions the expert has been asked over and over again. So what you get are answers that he has given at every previous interview. He himself is tired of saying the same things, and that fatigue is evident.

Some podcasts are dedicated to celebrity interviews – with movie stars or professional athletes or well-known gurus. You’d think that these interviews would be automatically interesting. But, again, most of them are not. Still, fans are usually willing to wade through the stuff they’ve heard again and again in hopes of catching the rare statement that is new and fresh and allows them to know this fantasy person a little better.

Political interviews? They are even worse than expert and celebrity interviews. You know ahead of time that the questions will almost never be answered directly. What you get instead are prefabricated comments whose only purpose is to sell whatever idea the politician is selling that day.

There are exceptions. There are a handful of people that know how to make an interview come alive.

I’m thinking of Howard Stern, in particular, which may surprise you. If you don’t listen to his show, you probably assume he’s still the shock jock he was 20 years ago. But he’s matured in many ways and has become very skillful.

More about Howard Stern – and how he does what he does – in a minute. But first, let me tell you why I’ve never done a podcast…

When I was writing Early to Rise, I had a large readership – almost a million people at one time. Because of the size of that audience, podcasting would have made good sense. And I was urged to do it many times.

But I knew that in order to draw attention to my podcast in the sea of other podcasts, it would have to be both good and distinct. I had some ideas about how to make it distinct. But the “good” part meant a serious commitment of time.

For every minute of taped podcast, I figured I’d have to put in at least four minutes of research. This meant that a weekly hour-long podcast would require four hours of research plus two or three hours of actual recording and another hour or so of editing. The equivalent of an entire 8- to 10-hour day.

So I backed away. And every time someone suggests that I do a podcast, I remind myself: “If you aren’t willing to do the work, the product – your product – will be shit.”

This brings us back to Howard Stern.

Despite how casual his demeanor and spontaneous his remarks seem to be, his interviews are evidently the result of a great deal of preparation.

Keep in mind that Howard’s been in the radio business for more than 40 years. He began interviewing celebrities maybe 30 years ago. For the first 10 years or so he didn’t do many interviews because people refused to be on his show. And with good reason. His interviews back then were primarily about embarrassing the guest.

It wasn’t a smart political move. It was a very dumb business strategy. Most importantly, it wasn’t funny.

Over the years, he’s taken a different approach. Now, it seems to be about getting his guests to talk more openly and freely about themselves than they have ever done in public before.

And his interviews are very, very good. IMO, Howard Stern is light years ahead of late-night hosts like Jimmy Kimmel, better than syndicated pros like Larry King, and equal to the great Charlie Rose.

I’ve noticed certain things that he does so consistently I’d call them conscious interviewing techniques:

In 2011, after having experienced several bouts of mild-to-moderate depression, I was sure I understood it. And I was confident I knew how to beat it. My theory was that it was essentially a malady of egocentricity – i.e., of thinking too much about yourself.

So I wrote an essay laying out my suggestions for anyone suffering from “the blues”:

1. First, do NOT complain about your problems. Instead, write them down. Then review them, noting which are external (“My company is downsizing”) and which are internal (“I’m afraid I’ll be fired”).
2. Try to accept the external factors you can’t control, and think about ways to resolve your internal issues.
3. Smile 25 times in a mirror.
4. Take a long walk, trying to think of nothing.
5. Count your blessings. Write them down. Read them aloud.
6. Do something that requires your full attention – like practicing a challenging piece of music or playing chess.
7. Imagine your funeral. Imagine what you want people to be saying about you. Start doing the things you want to be remembered for.
8. Do something kind or beneficial for someone else.

That was written before I had my first experience with serious depression. Before I realized the huge difference between feeling sad (even very, very sad) and being clinically depressed.

I still believe that egocentricity is a common problem. But I no longer believe that those eight suggestions can work – at all – for deep depression. They may be helpful when you are sad or even moderately depressed. But they won’t work if you are seriously depressed. When you are that low, you won’t have the mental energy to get out of bed, let alone take charge of your thoughts and feelings.

That doesn’t mean you can’t do anything to help yourself. Here are just a few of the things that work for me:

• Be aware of your breathing. Try to breath slowly and deeply, bringing oxygen into your body and brain.
• Keep telling yourself that the depression is temporary. That, eventually, it will pass.
• Notice that the psychic pain you are feeling is not consistent but rises and falls throughout the day. When you are low, know that your mood will rise, if just a little, in a few hours.
• If possible, take a cold shower. As cold and as long as you can stand it. This will give you a temporary lift – from 15 minutes to an hour.
• If you can do it, very demanding physical exercise should help.
• Don’t feel bad about how much you want to sleep. Deep depression exhausts the body, just as any physical disease does. You need lots of rest.

After my third serious episode of deep depression in 2011, I wrote an in-depth essay about my experience with depression and the system I developed to overcome it. If you think it might be helpful for you or someone you know, I’ve reproduced it below…

How I Learned to Deal With Chronic Depression

By Mark Morgan Ford

Most people know little to nothing about mental illness. Ask 10 lay people the difference between psychosis and neurosis and just one or two would be able to give you the right answer. But there are two types of mental illness that most people think they understand but don’t. I’m talking about depression and anxiety.

Before I suffered from clinical depression and anxiety, I believed I understood those terms. Depression was feeling really bad about something. Anxiety was worrying about things you probably shouldn’t.

I thought of them not as mental illnesses but as mental weaknesses.

Depression was caused primarily by paying too much attention to yourself and your own problems. My solution, therefore, was to pay attention to other things.

Anxiety was caused by fearing things you shouldn’t. So my solution was exposure therapy.

But about five years ago, I experienced anxiety and depression at a rather severe level. And that made me realize that there is a difference between the natural depression and anxiety we feel when our brains are “healthy” and the deep depression and panic-level anxiety we feel when our brains are not.

Clinical (or deep) depression is a neurological malady, not mental weakness. It may be triggered by thoughts or memories or feelings. But the extreme pain you experience is the result of what is happening in your brain.

There is plenty of scientific evidence to support this. But two things really convinced me:

1. My bouts of deep depression sometimes came out of the blue, without triggers. I had no troubles. Nothing to worry about. Everything was fine.
2. The thoughts that occasionally triggered a deep descent had no effect whatsoever on me when I was not already depressed.

I endured my first bouts of depression without telling anyone, staying in bed for days and pretending I was physically sick. I did that because I believed my severely negative thoughts and feelings were caused by a weakness of my mind.

But then I came out of the closet to an increasingly wider group of people – my family, close friends and colleagues. I also decided to treat my depression like the illness it is, and began working with a psychiatrist and a psychologist on several therapies that had the potential to heal me.

So I could have a better understanding of what works for me and what doesn’t, I kept a detailed daily journal of not just my thoughts and feelings, but also of everything I was doing in terms of eating, sleeping, smoking, medications, etc.

By reviewing that journal over a two-month period, I was able to create a 10-point system that ranked the “level” of my mental health. Level 1 represented extreme pain and the nearly total inability to function. Level 10 represented euphoria.

In reviewing and refining this system I noticed several interesting things: