An Ask Too Far

We said earlier that the playing field for the artist or entrepreneur is not level. Obstacles, often in the form of people seeking their own ends at your expense, are everywhere.

Can you defend your time to work?

Can you teach yourself to say no?

There are people out there who are what I call social sociopaths. They’re not actual murderers or criminals but, for whatever reasons of character or upbringing, they are utterly without empathy. They have no sense of the value of another person’s time or hard-won skill or painfully-earned reputation.

If you’ve got something and they can use it, they want it. They want it now. They want it free. And they want it again and again.

Three days ago I got an e-mail from a guy asking me for thirty free copies of The War of Art. There’s another person who, because of a colleague-in-common, I’ve said a courteous no to more than once. He doesn’t stop. Each ask is followed by another ask. The most recent was an ask to read his book. “It won’t be a problem,” he assured me. “It’ll only take three hours.”

Three hours?

When you respond to an ask from one of these sociopaths, don’t expect gratitude. Instead the initial ask is succeeded by a follow-up ask, and if you’re dumb enough to respond to that, a third ask will appear hot on its heels. Another guy contacted me out of the blue; I did a long interview for him, wrote a foreword for his book and turned him on to my agent. Finally he started asking for favors for his friends.

This was an ask too far. When I said no, he wrote back: “I always knew you were a Hollywood asshole.”

Dude! I don’t live anywhere near Hollywood.

The post An Ask Too Far first appeared on Steven Pressfield.