Everyone Finds Me Pleasant and Far Away
Beneath the Surface · By Ali Daudji ·
In 1737, a new member of the Pennsylvania Assembly stood up and gave a long speech arguing that Benjamin Franklin should lose his job. The job was clerk of the Assembly, a small post Franklin wanted to keep, partly for the pay, mostly because it kept him close to the members who handed out the colony's printing, the laws and the paper money. He kept it. The speaker was, Franklin wrote later, a gentleman of fortune and education who was clearly going to matter in that room for years. The two men did not speak.
What Franklin did next has been retold so often it has a name now, and the name has a whiff of the con about it. He refused, he says, to flatter the man or pay him any servile respect. Instead, having heard that the man's library contained what Franklin called a certain very scarce and curious book, he wrote him a note asking to borrow it for a few days. The book came immediately. Franklin sent it back about a week later with a second note, warm with thanks. The next time they met in the House, the man spoke to him, which he had never done before, and with great civility. They became friends.
Franklin, explaining himself, fell back on an old maxim he says he had learned somewhere: he that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged. Persuasion blogs teach this now as the Ben Franklin effect, a move you run on people you want to win over. Ask a small favor, and a small loyalty follows.
But stand in the other man's shoes for a minute, because I think the story belongs to him. He is rich and well positioned. He has been sharing a room with a successful printer he has decided to oppose, and he has found no door into the man's life that does not require backing down. What could he offer Franklin that Franklin would accept from an opponent? Praise would be surrender, a gift would be strategy. Then a note arrives asking for the one thing only he has. Not agreement. Not an apology. A book, for a few days. Now he has a place in Franklin's life he can accept without backing down an inch.
Everyone tells it as a persuasion story. I think it is a story about which direction closeness runs. We assume relationships are built out of what we give each other, and that asking is the imposition you keep to a minimum. The friendship did not begin when Franklin gave the man something. It began the day Franklin needed him.
Which brings me to a kind of person I know very well, because I am one. The person who never asks. We are wonderful, by the way. We arrive with the truck on moving day and remember the appointment and the allergy. Ask us what we need and you get nothing, honestly, I'm good. We are proud of being low maintenance, which we privately consider a form of politeness, and we say I didn't want to bother you, as if being unbotherable were a gift to anyone.
In 2008, two researchers, Francis Flynn and Vanessa Lake, published a series of studies in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology about what happens when people ask. Their subjects had to ask for small things, directions, a borrowed phone, donations to a charity run. Each subject first estimated how many strangers they would have to approach before enough said yes. Across the first three studies, people underrated the odds of a yes by as much as half. Subjects sent to borrow strangers' phones needed three yeses and figured that would take ten people. It took about six. The askers were consumed by what saying yes would cost the other person, the minutes and the imposition. The people being asked felt something the askers had discounted, the cost of refusing. It is hard to look someone in the eye and say no. We price the favor from the wrong side of the exchange, and we get the odds wrong by half.
A request carries information no favor can carry. It says there is an unfinished place in my life, and I have decided you are allowed to see it. The never-asker transmits the opposite. Years of I'm fine assemble into a picture, and the picture says sealed and complete.
You can admire a finished thing. It is very hard to belong to one.
Doing a favor warms the doer too, which is all the maxim was ever claiming. Every time I help you, something in me concludes that you must matter to me, and you matter a little more. Which means I have been running Franklin's trick on myself. All that helping attaches me to you. And by never letting you help me, I keep the same chemistry from ever running in your direction. I grow fonder of everyone. Everyone finds me pleasant and far away.
I know my own versions. Composing the text that asks for something, then deleting it and solving the problem alone, then mentioning it afterward as a story. The no worries if not attached to requests so small they barely exist. And every family crisis where I organize the help so thoroughly that there is no slot left for anyone to help me. It never felt like hiding while I was doing it. Consideration, I would have called it. But some of it was the fear of being someone who costs anything, which is another way of saying I wanted to be loved without the weight of being loved.
Some people's silence was built for them. If the help you accepted growing up was mentioned again later, at volume, in front of others, then never needing anything was intelligence, not pride. A reasonable person stops asking in a house where every favor gets repeated back at a worse moment. But habits outlive the houses they were learned in, and the caution that once protected you will, in kinder company, read as distance.
What undoes it is smaller than confession. Franklin's note asked for one book, for a few days, and named which one; ending the feud never came up. The smallness is the craft. A real request is specific enough to be granted inside an afternoon. Read this before I send it. Walk with me to the appointment I'm dreading. Show me how you make the rice. Each one tells the other person, more convincingly than any thank-you ever has, that they are trusted with the unfinished parts.
The maxim was right, and the persuasion blogs are right that it works. I think everyone has the story pointed the wrong way. Franklin got an ally. The other man got the better end, a friendship that lasted the rest of his life, and it would never have happened if Franklin had decided to win him over the ordinary way, with favors and charm. When I think about the story now I mostly think about him, the man with the library, how many doors in his life must have looked like walls, and how close he came, sitting a few feet from the friendship of his later years, to being merely respected.