Ramit SethiRamit Sethi: The No-BS Guide to Living a Rich Life

One of My Themes This Year Is ‘Just Ask’

22 Feb 2026 · 2 min

Watch on YouTube

1:41

In this short YouTube monologue, personal finance coach Ramit Sethi introduces his annual theme, “Just Ask.” He explains how scrolling TikTok videos about asking and embracing failure reignited his habit of requesting things, even after earlier success made him stop. He shares a concrete example: after a sub‑par hotel stay in London, he asked the manager whether the same upgrade could be applied to a future stay in another country, and the manager obliged, delivering a valuable upgrade. Sethi uses this anecdote to illustrate the low‑cost, high‑impact potential of simply asking. He then challenges his Money Coaching audience to identify bold requests they can make throughout the year, suggesting that asking for five things a month could lead to a life‑changing outcome. He ends with a call for viewers to comment with their own “just ask” goals.

Chapters

To everybody in Money coaching, I want to share a new theme that I have for the year and that is Just Ask. I was watching TikTok, scrolling through it and I got inspired because there's a bunch of videos that are talking about just ask and line up the failures. If somebody says no big deal. And I remember when I was younger I used to have a Failures tab in my Gmail inbox and the more failures I got like 5 failures a month, 10 failures a month meaning I asked for something and somebody didn't respond or they just said no. I actually took it as a point of pride. As I got older and a little bit more successful, I stopped doing it. I don't know why, it's kind of just like I had other things to focus on. Maybe there was a little bit of I shouldn't have to ask anymore but I watched these TikTok videos and I got re inspired so I started asking. First thing we did was we had an experience in a hotel in London that wasn't great. Manager ended up saying, hey, if you come back here we'll give you some upgrade. Well, we're going to that hotel in a different country. And I said to my wife why don't we just ask them if the people in London will make the same offer in the other country? Kind of weird. Who would ask that? We did. The manager said give us a second. And the next day they came back and said we've upgraded you at the other hotel. Like whoa, that's actually worth a lot of money. And that's such a trivial example. But already in the first few days of January it got a set off that we are now going to ask so what are you going to ask for this year? Big, big powerful things that you can ask for. Imag imagine asking for five things a month and out of the course of 60 in the year one of them comes true, it could change your life. Let me know below in the comments.