Nicholas Mukhtar was 22, with no nonprofit, no professional network and no formal standing, when he decided the fastest way to get a Detroit public health idea in front of the federal government was to email the U.S. Surgeon General directly.
“I actually started this by just sending an email to the U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. Benjamin,” Mukhtar said in a 2014 interview with Bamboo Detroit’s Brian Davis for the “Detroit Is for Doers” series. He had come across the National Prevention Strategy, a federal framework released in 2011 under Surgeon General Regina Benjamin’s direction, and saw an opening for Detroit to position itself as a model city before anywhere else claimed the label. Benjamin, the 18th U.S. Surgeon General, wasn’t an obvious target for a cold email from an unknown 22-year-old, which is part of what makes Mukhtar’s decision to send it notable rather than routine.
The email carried real risk of going nowhere, and Mukhtar says he treated that risk as the entire point rather than a reason to hesitate. “The absolute worst that could have happened is she didn’t respond, and I would have found something else to do,” he said. “But she did.” Detroit went on to become one of three cities nationally featured in the Surgeon General’s report to the President and Congress, and the pitch that started with an unsolicited email became Healthy Detroit, the nonprofit Mukhtar would go on to run for several years.
“That’s like the big thing that I keep promoting to people over and over again,” Mukhtar said. “Just be fearless. You really have absolutely nothing to lose.”
The story reads less like a calculated growth strategy than an acknowledgment that most outreach costs almost nothing to attempt and almost nothing to have rejected. Cold emails to other high-profile figures occasionally got responses too, suggesting the email to Dr. Benjamin wasn’t a one-time stroke of luck so much as the first test of a habit Mukhtar kept using.
The email left out any element of connections or insider access, because there weren’t any. What made it work was the fact that Mukhtar asked at all, at a moment when almost anyone in his position would have assumed the answer was already no.
For business owners weighing whether a specific outreach is worth attempting, the calculation Nicholas Mukhtar made is worth borrowing directly: the downside of asking and getting ignored is almost always smaller than it feels in advance, while the upside of a single yes can outweigh years of more conventional effort. The email to Dr. Benjamin cost him a few minutes to write. It ended up shaping the next decade of his career.
