What Amanda Palmer Taught Me About Asking For Help
Asking powers everything.
It forms the foundation of mundane, day-today interactions like asking your friends what to eat for dinner tonight.
But if you think about it, it also frames more vulnerable situations like asking your significant other to lend you money.
Or your fans for a place to stay when you’re stranded in a foreign land.
In this book, Amanda Palmer is thoughtful, vulnerable and lays bare the inner workings of her brain as she finds her footing as a creative to eventually muster up the courage to ‘ask’.
She tackles the question: “why are we so afraid to ask others for help and admit that we need help?”
Summary:
With this book, we see Palmer’s adventures navigating the complex world of the music industry. She started off as a street performer, formed her theatre-cabaret piano-rock duo the Dresden Dolls and describes her adventures into building the extraordinary relationships she has with her fans.
Not everything she touches turns to gold, however. She describes the upheaval that she experienced during her forays into crowdfunding and the complex emotions she had to navigate.
Palmer constantly refers to several pivotal figures in her life; her now-husband Neil Gaiman, her friend Anthony and the relationship she has with her fans. She talks about empathy, connection, and vulnerability constantly, but is brave enough to admit that she herself has issues following her own insights.
Throughout the ups and downs of her life, she reflects on the art of asking for help and truly seeing people.
Is asking for help considered weak? What does it mean to build strong relationships with people and fans? Also, how does one navigate the complex world of a creative career?
What can we learn from the book for creatives and the artistic life? These are my 5 key takeaways:
1. The “Fraud Police” is a real thing and everyone suffers from it
“The Fraud Police are the imaginary, terrifying force of “real” grown-ups who you believe — at some subconscious level — are going to come knocking on your door in the middle of the night, saying: We’ve been watching you, and we have evidence that you have NO IDEA WHAT YOU’RE DOING.”
Every creative is(at least) acquainted with imposter syndrome: a toxic cocktail of self-doubt and embarrassment with just a hint of terror.
You start wondering:
Is this good enough?
“But I’m not writing like ((Insert famous person here))”
“Should I just give up and stick to my day job / get a real job?”
Sometimes, the Fraud Police can come from other, more well-intentioned people around you.
But more often than not it comes from yourself.
Well, if people like Amanda Palmer has to struggle with it, perhaps we’re not so alone as we think we are.
The only way around imposter syndrome is to tackle it head-on.
Embrace that you’ll be feeling like a fraud from time to time, grit your teeth and write through the emotions.
2. Listening is asking someone a question and actively listening for the answer.
“Not everybody wants to be looked at. Everybody wants to be seen.”
I absolutely adore Amanda Palmer’s relationship with her husband Neil Gaiman. In her account of getting him to open up about his personal life, she draws a startling conclusion:
Neil only told her so much about himself because she asked him and truly listened.
“You tricked me, I said. Why did you tell me so much about yourself when I first met you?”
Because you asked me, he said.
Asked you…what?
“How I was doing. About my life. Nobody else had ever asked me before”, he said.
Listening seems so simple, but do we practice it?
More importantly, do we practice it correctly?
When you ask a person a question, are you taking time to listen out for the answer or are you switched off; waiting for your turn to reply?
Do you take the time to listen?
3. Stop worrying and ask people for help
“From what I’ve seen, it isn’t so much the act of asking that paralyzes us — it’s what lies beneath: the fear of being vulnerable, the fear of rejection, the fear of looking needy or weak.”
This line rang true with me.
Perhaps we refuse help because we don’t want to be seen as weak. We don’t want to put our careers or wellbeing into the hands of another because we’re afraid they’ll hurt us or let us down.
But like making the first move to ask a girl out or taking a risk in any human interaction, we need to do something we’ve never done before to get something we’ve never gotten before.
It all boils down to being vulnerable.
And after you ask, make sure you take whatever help is offered.
4. Here is the correct attitude to deal with untrustworthy people
“Sometimes people will prove themselves untrustworthy. When that happens, the correct response is not: Fuck! I knew I couldn’t trust anybody! The correct response is: Some people just suck. Moving right along.”
5. Building relationships with your community is a slow process
Palmer’s close-knit relationships with her fans are exceptional.
Every budding entrepreneur and people looking to establish themselves should take note of her long, painstaking process.
She tells a story of how she was once stranded in Iceland, reached out to her extensive fanbase on Twitter for help.
Almost immediately, she had an offer from one of her fans to host and take care of her.
We look at this and envy.
I started wondering “How do you get something like this to help you so readily on cue?”
“Maybe it’s cos she’s a rock star”. — or so I thought.
The truth is — there was a lot of groundwork done to get to this stage. Palmer was authentic with her fans.
She cared for her fans. She engaged them on Twitter, openly shared what she was working on and made the fans an integral part of her artistic life.
People trusted her and saw she truly cared for them.
Ultimately, she gave lots of value to her fanbase before asking for something in return.
“All asking works like this. You must prepare the ground. If you’re going to be asking one day, you need someone to ask who is going to answer the call. So you tend to your relationships on a nonstop basis, you abide by the slow, ongoing task, going out there like a faithful farmer, landing on the unseeable bamboo shoot.”
With every tweet, blog post and outreach she does, she generates value and deepens existing connections with her fanbase.
As she readily admits, “the process can take years, even decades”.
I am reminded there are no quick fixes to a genuinely supportive community.
If you’re struggling with the act of vulnerability, this book is for you:
Amanda Palmer’s voice is entertaining, yet honest. I especially loved her insights into her relationships with Neil Gaiman — she is oh-so-human, with all the willingness to bare her thoughts and raw emotions on the page.
In a culture that praises the ‘self-made man’ and prioritizes self-reliance above all, this book shows us that there is another way to nurture our relationships; by relying on others.
