Have you ever dealt with someone who eagerly asks for your advice but never acts on it? The kind of person, who ask for consultation on what they (not you) should eat for dinner? These people are called askholes. They are annoying. They are offensive, and holy hell, are they uninvestable.
Louis Rossman recently published a video about being investable. Not in terms of cash, but with time, effort, and energy from people who do not get an ROI from helping you. In Rossman’s video someone send sent him an email requesting help fixing a Mac Book. But it became clear that the person was going to ask for step one, follow up with step two, and so on until everything had been explained to him from the ground up.
This is not an example of someone who wants to invest, it’s an example of “scope creep” as Push ROI pointed out in a blog/video response to Rossman’s video. Saying,
“It’s also scope creep, where someone asks for an opinion, changes to a request for step-by-step training, and hard pivots asking you to just do it for them. Slowly boiling the frog, moving someone from what they were comfortable and willing to do into something to which they would not have agreed.
Most of us have been the immature person who has done this sort of thing, often unintentionally. But ideally, we grow out of it before we burn too many relationships and opportunities. Rossman did something that most people would not have, he responded to explain why the person’s email was rude.”
The two types of askhole, the scope creeper, and the advice ignore are both demoralizing to the people they seek advice from, and collectively, they are uninvestable askholes.