That person you admire has an inbox. Your message could be the one that starts something.

Distance makes people seem unreachable, and the internet is very good at making distance feel like a wall. Under the profile there is an ordinary person who checks messages, gets bored, and occasionally replies to someone who wrote something interesting. The barrier is mostly your own sense of standing.

Write to one person whose work you admire and make it short and specific: what you learned from them and one real question. Ask nothing large. Most will not answer, one might, and the one who does can change what the next year looks like.