About Asking and Howard Roark

The Fickle Finger of Fate

It must be fate. No sooner did I schedule my first post in a new series about asking that I watched The Fountainhead for the first time. I had heard about both the book and the movie since my college years but had never actually managed to sit down and watch it. I don’t intend to review the movie here or to discuss the content in any detail other than to reflect on the philosophy and how it relates to asking.

Think Frank Lloyd Wright

Howard Roark, the protagonist in The Fountainhead is an architect, but not just any architect. He is a great architect, way far out of the league of ordinary architects plaguing New York City. As such, he is shunned by the mediocrities who run things so he goes off to work in a stone quarry in Connecticut where he falls in love……but I digress.

Don’t ask, Just tell!

The point of the movie is that great talent must not compromise with or capitulate to the thinking of the unwashed average-minded masses. He doesn’t ask for help. He doesn’t take help. And when you mess with him, he blows up a huge housing development…. I keep digressing.

Everybody an uncompromising genius?

It made me stop and thing about asking and compromising. First I tried to think of a world where everybody was Howard Roark, the uncompromising prima donna (or I suppose to be correct, primo don)?  Imagine if everybody were a genius with a perfect idea about what is right and they refused to compromise with anyone about making it happen. What if everyone said, “My way or the highway!”?  Sound great, doesn’t it?  That’s the world we all long for.

But what is your point?

Well, fortunately, The Fountainhead is fiction. Howard Roark is a caricature. The world is full of people with varied skills and abilities, passions and needs. We all need help because we don’t know everything or even what we don’t know. I do know that I am no Howard Roark. I suspect that you are no Howard Roark either and that you don’t even know a Howard Roark – or want to. I don’t want to be Howard Roark and I don’t believe that Howard Roark is a model for anyone today. I am admitting that I don’t know much or even what I don’t know. I don’t have a divine vision of how the world should operate and I don’t want to run the world. I am also pigheaded and proud and reluctant to admit how needy I am. It has to start with humility. Being transparent and admitting that I need help every day and in all kinds of ways has to be the first step. As I explore asking over the next weeks, please comment and make suggestions. What are your thoughts about asking and how have you benefited? What does asking mean to you?