Make it easier for people to help you

This is a tiny thought that has been in the back of my mind for years now. I think it is an incredibly simple concept with a huge potential to get any person to improve their lives and careers.

Throughout my career, I’m very grateful to have had incredibly smart people helping me out and I could learn a LOT from them.

Asking for help, though, is not something that comes naturally to some people and I like to think that asking for help is a skill.

Just like any skill, any person can master the ability of asking for help and unblocking a huge potential to get valuable information from smart people.

Let’s break this down into 3 simple steps:

1 — Give enough context when asking for help

Let’s take a look at this example:

Person 1: Can someone help me with this thingy?

And another one for comparison:

Person 2: Can someone help me with this thingy?

TL;DR: I’m trying to do X but Y is not working out for me. Can someone give me a hand?

Full context:

I’m working at X, which is part of the project Y. Part of the task involves getting Z done, which is exactly the piece I am having issues with.

I have tried already:

Option A: Didn’t work because this and that…

Option B: Didn’t work because this and that and that…

Option C: Could not test it because this and that.

After testing those options and reading through the documentation, I am now blocked and not sure yet how to move forward. I would appreciate if any of you had some clues on how to proceed.

Thank you!

Now, which person do you think will get a faster reply and will work their way out of the issue faster?

Certainly Person 2 for a few reasons:

• There is already a lot of context in the message. Someone familiar with that might easily reply with valuable information.
• It shows that Person 2 is already very organized and helping this person could be very simple and fast.

The issues I see with the approach from Person 1:

• It creates friction to get help. It requires at least another reply to get the full context, so it needs one more interaction. Something like “I need help”, “Sure, what’s up?”, “Oh, I’m having this and that issue”. See? It takes longer and does not work in favor of asynchronous communication.
• It may give the impression that you are not so well organized, which may give the impression that you don’t value and respect your coworkers time.

In summary, in our busy day to day work, if you can reduce the friction you create for people to help you, you’ll get better and faster answers and therefore you have better changes at excelling at what you do.

The most valuable lesson in this step is:

• Make sure you value and respect your coworkers time.
• Asynchronous communication is key, specially in a remote work environment. Giving the full context will ensure people can respond efficiently, even if they work in different timezones.

2 —Be proactive in asking for feedback

Sometimes, specially when we create things, we may be afraid of asking for feedback, dreading that people might find problems in our so-precious sollution.

Not asking for feedback is something that can delay your career improvement for a few reasons:

• People might not proatively give you feedback. Giving feedback is hard. It requires attention, empathy, time and a lot more. If you don’t ask, people might simply not tell you something is wrong.
• If you don’t ask for feedback, you’ll miss valuable insights from people that are possibly more experienced than you, and/or have different perspectives. Can you image the amount of issues that early feedback can save you from in the future?

3 — Be polite and light-hearted

One thing to bear in mind is that other people are living their own live, managing their own problems.

The best thing I can recommend is that the best way to ask for help is to:

• Be polite. Don’t assume that other people HAVE to help you. They might be dealing with other issues or not be available at the moment for any reason.
• Be light-hearted: Life is hard enough. Why not write some upbeat messages that will lighten the mood and make the interaction a lot easier?

One last trick when asking for help

If you are asking for help to an experienced person, they might be tempted to give you a LOT of context and a lot of information.

That’s because experienced people don’t want to steer you in the wrong direction. Also, they understand they previous experience might have worked for certain problems, but they understand there is no silver bullet. No solution will solve all sorts of issues.

What to do in this case then?

Ask: If you had these parameters, what would you do in this situation?

This is simple question that can have marvelous results. That answer will push the person to think about how they would solve it themselves, using all their previous experience.

You certainly don’t need to follow the recommendation exactly, but their answer might open your mind to ask better questions and understand their reasoning.

This question might also tap in their innarticulate knowledge:

“We know more than we’re able to explain that we know. And I call this inarticulate knowledge — the knowledge that I’m not able to articulate to somebody. And I have inarticulate knowledge about a lot of things, including other people. I could have tacit knowledge of why I trust somebody that I couldn’t explain to you. If you asked me to give you specific things, I wouldn’t be able to point to that, “Oh, there’s that one time when we were hanging out together,” because it’s probably not any one particular thing. It’s probably a series of things, call it a gut feeling. I just have that. And I have the same thing for mistrust. Right? And I think that this kind of tacit knowledge and articulate knowledge is undervalued in our society. It’s undervalued because we always want to be able to explain the science and give the hard reasons for it. But a lot of life doesn’t work like that.”

Entrepreneur, author, and educator Luke Burgis joins me for a deep dive on the René Girard and mimetic desire, different forms of knowing, and living a meaningful life. (read the transcript)

Conclusion

Life is complicated. The more we can learn from other people, more mistakes we’ll avoid in our future.

There are simple ways to ask for help in a way that significantly improves your chances of getting that life changing information you are looking for.

I hope you liked this tiny thought, please reach out if you have any questions or insights in the subject.

Thank you for reading!