You're closer to the water than you think

None of us are as far from tragedy as we'd like to believe.

That’s been on my mind all weekend, watching the coverage of the dangerous flooding the Nor'easter brought to the Northeast. It sent me back to footage I've watched way too many times: the bridge in Nepal that was recently washed away, and the extraordinary rescue that followed.

The river rose past all reason, and a bridge that had stood for years was gone in seconds. It was strangers who went in after strangers.

That’s so real and surreal at the same time. An ordinary day can become the day everything changes. And when it does, most of what stands between a person and the water is whether someone reaches for them.

At first I kept that thought to myself, the way you do with something that feels too big to say out loud. I turned it into a quiet promise instead. Be a little more patient and a little quicker to help.

But then I thought about where nearly all of my ordinary days actually happen. Most of them happen at work, and the same truth runs underneath. We need each other far more than we let on, and somehow we can spend whole careers pretending we don't.

Some of us treat helping at work as a cost, as time you never get back and a quiet way of becoming the person everyone brings their problems to. So we get careful and wait to be asked. And when we do help, we help a little, with one eye always on what it might be costing us.

I understand that instinct. Heck, I've felt it myself. But I've come to think it has the math backward.

You've probably watched the two kinds of people this produces.

One keeps their head down and their help scarce, guarding a value nobody was trying to take from them in the first place. The other helps early, before anyone asks.

I worked with one of those second kinds years ago. She was a project manager, but back before AI could turn a rough idea into a slide, she was also a genuinely gifted graphic designer. You could hand her a concept so tangled you could barely explain it yourself, and she'd come back with a visual that did all the heavy lifting in the room. Nobody asked her to do this.

Design wasn't even her job.

She'd overhear you wrestling with a presentation and show up with a mockup, a little excited about it, as if you were the one doing her a favor.

It didn't take long before she was everyone's first call. Without ever seeming to try, she became the person everyone wanted in the room.

Then her own hard stretch came. Staffing gaps left her buried in project management work, and the people she'd made mockups for, in offices that weren't even hers, showed up without being asked. They split the load and helped her get through it, the same way she'd always helped them.

She hadn't been keeping score, but all those ordinary days had quietly built the line of hands, and when the water rose, it was already there.

The same generosity that made her everyone's first call could just as easily have made her the one weak point. What saved her was that the help ran both ways.

If you lead people, I think this stops being optional and becomes an essential part of the job.

The point isn't to be the plank everyone walks across.

It's to build the line of hands, so no single crossing ever depends on you alone. A team that only holds because one person keeps giving until they're hollow isn't strong, however steady it looks from the outside.

It's a bridge with one weak point, and if you're the one leading, you're usually standing right on it.

Let me be really honest about the fear underneath all of this, because I feel it as much as you might. You can give until there's nothing left of you. Adam Grant found that the givers who burn out are the selfless ones, the people who give past empty and come to resent the very people they meant to help.

The givers who last keep their own needs in view.

They protect their time and aim their help where it matters most. And they do the thing most of us quietly skip: ask for help as readily as they give it.

Helping more was never what burned anyone out. Helping in a way that erases you does.

When you lead, that runs downhill faster than you'd expect.

A leader who gives past empty doesn't only wear themselves out. They teach everyone watching that exhaustion is simply the price of good work, and it travels down the line. Even the bridge that carries everyone else has to be strong enough to hold its own weight.

So I've stopped asking whether I can afford to help. These days, I try to sit with a harder question instead.

On the day the water rises for me, whose hands will already be there?

A bridge can disappear in seconds. The hands that reach for you afterward take much longer to build.

They get built on ordinary days.

So I'm trying to help earlier, without waiting to be asked, and to ask for help sooner, which is still the harder half for me.

None of us are as far from the water as we'd like to believe. One day the person who needs a hand is you. Another day, it's me.

Thanks for reading. Be easy!

P.S. Nobody hands you a manual for being heard at work. So we started writing one. It's free, and it's yours if it helps.