Long after the cold email that helped launch Healthy Detroit, Nicholas Mukhtar kept the same habit that started it: reaching out to people with far more standing than he had, on the assumption that most of them would simply ignore him rather than punish him for asking.
“My thing now is I’m trying to email one huge influencer every day,” Mukhtar said in a 2014 interview with Bamboo Detroit’s Brian Davis. “I email Elon Musk and all these guys. It’s amazing. The people actually will respond to you, if it’s just a one-liner. I asked them something simple: what’s your advice on this, how can you help me out with that.”
The habit extends into how Mukhtar evaluates any new opportunity, not just outreach to high-profile figures. “My default answer is yes, yes, yes, yes: how can we make this happen, how can we get this done,” he said. “Because a lot of people, if you approach it from the no mentality, you’ll just limit your creativity and limit the number of possibilities that you can have to actually do something.”
That default carries a specific cost calculation most business owners underweight. Saying no to an unfamiliar opportunity feels safe because the downside is invisible, but Mukhtar’s own early career suggests the more common mistake is dismissing opportunities before finding out what they actually require. A cold email costs almost nothing to send and almost nothing to have ignored. Treating every unfamiliar ask the same way, as a low-cost experiment rather than a request that needs to be pre-judged, is what let a 22-year-old with no formal standing build a relationship with a sitting U.S. Surgeon General.
For business owners hesitant to reach beyond their existing network, Mukhtar’s rule offers a simple test before declining anything: what does saying yes actually cost, separate from the fear of asking in the first place.
Nicholas Mukhtar applies the same math to opportunities that come to him, not just outreach he initiates. An unfamiliar request gets a provisional yes far more often than an outright no, on the theory that most opportunities reveal their actual cost only once someone has said yes and started looking closer.