It was late in his career.

He’d abandoned the whole idea of a 45- or 50-minute therapeutic hour. We’d have these marathon two-hour sessions.

I think about him all the time. Irv saw me through one of the darkest chapters of my life.

I’ve been with my coach, Tama, now for more than 16 years. She’s helped me see the path when I couldn’t see it myself.

I’ve been lucky to have found wise guides across the decades. And I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have co-created the amazing life I’m blessed to have without them.

Turns out, all those years of getting help may have been one of the smartest things I ever did.

Psychologist and MacArthur Fellow, Angela Duckworth, knows something about grit.

She’s spent much of her career studying perseverance, passion and what allows people to achieve difficult things over long periods of time.

So you might expect her to celebrate the lone striver. The fiercely independent person who keeps grinding until the problem finally yields.

She doesn’t.

In a recent piece in the The New York Times, Duckworth writes that every high performer she has studied credits other people with helping them succeed. She points to research showing that knowing when to ask for help is itself an important part of achievement.

That’s worth paying attention to if you’re an entrepreneur or business professional.

Most successful people I know are pretty fiercely independent. They’re resourceful. They’re accustomed to figuring things out and staying with hard things long after other people might have quit.

That quality probably helped make them successful.

It can also become a problem.

There comes a point when self-reliance starts narrowing your field of vision. You get locked inside your own thinking. Assumptions begin to look like facts. Old patterns become difficult to see simply because you’ve been living with them for so long.

Duckworth points to what psychologists call the “illusion of self-sufficiency.” We tend to underestimate how much of what we know, and how much of what we’ve accomplished, came to us through other people.

I’ve certainly found that to be true.

The value of a good coach isn’t that they have all the answers. I’d be suspicious of one who thought they did.

The real value is perspective.

When you’re living inside a problem, it can be remarkably difficult to see it clearly. Someone standing outside the frame can notice things you’ve stopped noticing. They can help you question what you’ve quietly come to accept as fixed.

Sometimes all it takes is seeing the problem differently. That can be enough to change what happens next.

And asking for that kind of help doesn’t make you less independent.

If anything, it’s an assertion of agency. You’re deciding that your current way of seeing things isn’t the only one available to you, and that pride isn’t a particularly good reason to stay stuck.

Duckworth also notes that entrepreneurs tend to do better when they’re connected with other people who can help them learn, think through problems and avoid bad decisions.

None of this means handing your life over to somebody else.

The responsibility remains yours.

But the mythology of the self-made person has done us no favors. Nobody gets very far entirely on their own.

Irv helped me when I was lost.

Tama has helped me see possibilities I couldn’t see by myself.

And looking back across the years, I can see how much of my life has been shaped by people who were willing to walk alongside me for part of the journey.

Getting help isn’t a failure of grit.

Often, it’s what grit actually looks like.