Contributing to community with five minute favours

There’s two questions that have inspired this post. In no particular order:

What could someone do to help me if they had five minutes spare?

What could I do to help someone if I put aside five minutes today?

I’m writing this through the lens of a tech startup. And more specifically as a founder looking to contribute to the community that made it possible for me to create Corilla (a “GitHub for content teams” publishing tool loved by a community of technical writers and developers).

Five minute favours could apply to any community. My world view is that people are awesome and tend to do good things by nature. But our ability to ask for help is quite similar to our ability to take breaks from whatever thought or activity is occupying our attention at any given time.

Not to mention this whole social media thing that’s been built to eat up those five minute moments...

Stay focused… it’s a short post.

Just like mindfulness and gratitude, these things take effort to develop. But are amazing if we do so even on a very small scale. Imagine for just thirty actual seconds what your local tech community would be like if the majority of people in it paused even a few times a week to ask themselves these questions.

What can I ask for help for?

The “what” should be easy. It’s anything on our list that can solve a problem. Actually asking is the emotional hurdle, but we have the advantage of being able to engage our existing communities.

These might include contained networks like a co-working space or an accelerator alumni. Or a direct ask to our product’s users or customers. We could go wider and just ask publicly on a Facebook or Slack group or at the open mic portion of a community event.

The challenge is to learn to make clear bids for assistance while ignoring any fear of judgement. After all we know that embracing that intrinsic vulnerability that actually creates better connections.

What could I do to help someone?

On the other side we have opportunity to exercise our ability to help someone without worrying that their success might steal from ours (France 101), without thinking that a founder is getting “too big for their boots” (Australia 101) or without freezing to death (Finland 101).

How amazing would it be to see the impact of that becoming an embedded cultural practice?

This is what communities like TechStars advocate for with their #givefirst mentality. Fellow Aussie Aaron Birkby has been writing wonderfully about this lately, and it’s something I’ve been fortunate enough to witness my favourite people back in London practicing as a rule.

Hopefully I haven’t taken up more than five minutes of your time in reading this. So it seems appropriate to end by asking — what can I do to help you?

And what can you do right now to help someone in your community? You’ve got five minutes.

Thanks for reading. I’ve set myself a personal challenge of writing and publishing daily for the month of March. Partly as an exercise in lean writing and partly to explore the impact of contributing these quick and raw narratives. This was day one’s post — what did you think?