Asking Twice
No one can answer that for you.
You ask a friend whether you should take the job. She asks what you’re optimizing for. You don’t know. You ask another friend. He asks what you’d regret. You don’t know that either.
You’ve now asked four people. You haven’t talked to anyone who works there. You haven’t written down what you actually want. You’re collecting opinions because forming your own is uncomfortable.
This pattern is everywhere.
Someone asks how many hours of sleep they need. They’ve been tired for months. They’ve never tracked how they feel after six versus eight.
Someone asks what books to read to get better at writing. They wrote one thing last year.
A new manager asks how often to do 1:1s. Weekly? Biweekly? His skip-level asks: “What signal would tell you it’s working?” He wanted a rule. He needed an experiment.
A senior IC asks whether to go into management. Her advisor asks: “What have you tried?” Nothing. She wanted someone to predict her future before she’d collected any data.
The questions sound like curiosity. They’re avoidance. Asking is easier than trying. Rules are safer than judgment.
Approval-seeking dresses itself up as diligence: reading more, asking experts, following best practices. But the tell is simple: you’re asking the same category of question twice.
Asking once is learning. Never developing your own answer is dependency.
No one can tell you how many hours to sleep, what books to read, how often to meet, or what path to take. Only your context, your observation, and your willingness to be wrong will answer that.