You only learn when you reflect.

Early in your career, the majority of problems you work on are difficult because they are new for you. You’ve never done it before, and it’s challenging to do good work on problems you’ve never encountered before. However, the good news is that there are other folks on your team who’ve done it before and are already experienced with its in’s and out’s.

Even for garden-variety challenges, it’s easy to spend a disproportionate amount of energy trying to work through the problem before asking for help. Worki...