Some people are open enough to approach someone more trustworthy and ask things, be it an opportunity, opinion, favors, help with decision making. Unless you ask you don’t know whether you will be helped or not. Humans have a tendency to help and they will help almost all the time till it costs them something significant.
On the other hand, the reason we don’t ask is our inhibitions, self-containment, introverted nature, or bias. Almost every time we don’t ask, it’s replaced with assumptions. Assumptions are your thoughts played loud in your mind by yourself with words like “I think”, “perhaps”, “maybe” etc. It’s your brain convincing you for your own guess. Questions are also a very powerful way of building interpersonal bonding.
You don’t ask you don’t get! This largely comes from my experience of running a company for the past 7 years that people just don’t open up, they don’t ask even when asking a simple question could solve things in a straightforward manner. There could be many reasons for not asking a question but I feel the biggest reason is that most don’t know how advantageous a good question or asking can be to them.
Listening is an art for sure but asking the right question is more artistic!
