How to ask for help?
If you read Hard time job searching, you probably know that I felt really really discouraged after getting so close to finishing my job search journey. I temporarily lost my energy to continue, so I decided to take a break and listen to “How to Ask for Help” from buildspace. Well, I think I need help to figure out the next step.
After the 1 hr video, I realized, I might have great potential to receive help both from my personality and the way I’m living. Farza, the founder of BuildSpace, said he didn’t know what to do after graduation, so he started to write a newsletter for 4 years to share his ideas and what he was working on. Oh…I happen to have a newsletter, Esther is a confused human being. I wrote my ideas and what I’m working on here too.
He said someone would randomly reply to his newsletter and they somehow built a relationship over time from the beginning “lmk if you need help” to “How about I fly you to SF and build a company together?” Well…no one helps me yet, but many many people read and respond to my writing. What a coincidence…
He said that you need to set up a comfortable environment for people to help you because no one wants to hop on a call with a random person. It’s better to openly share about your learning and your struggle. Well…
My learning is here: Rethink the self-learning journey for a junior engineer
My struggle is here: Hard time job searching
Things are getting interesting…hmm…
There are some things that I learned from the talk
- Try something small you want to be good at and find a person who is 2–3 steps ahead. They are usually a dm away.
- Open yourself up for help, and let people track your journey easily. For instance, use a newsletter, a one-page “help me” doc, or a regular email update
- Don’t think of help as a one-off call but as a long-term relationship.
(x) “Let’s hop on a call…” (o) “How do you think about this Twitter?” and show them the results
- Help has many forms. Can be a mentor & mentee, partnerships, friends…
- Help should come naturally. It is usually like…it just kinda happens…
Okay okay, I know asking for help still sounds very scary, but if you look from Esther’s perspective, the question is: “How can we show people our learning, learn from them, and invite them to learn with us?”
Esther feels super painful to write a formal email like “I appreciate your experience…I want to learn from you….” But she is really good at throwing people questions and drawing.
So I’m thinking, how can I expand the definition of help, by helping experienced people to play with me? Here are several things I need help with at this moment.
- How to manage my finances and visa in San Francisco as an international?
- How to gain product-building experience?
- Combining the top two questions, how to find a good medium startup to work for?
- How to sharpen my consistency in my building? Nowadays, I build different things every day.
- How to prepare myself to build my own learning solutions?
They are all big questions in my mind that I haven’t been able to solve in the past years. Oh, oh, weirdo friends, I have new ideas. I’m going to start practicing asking for help 1 a day for the next 7 days. It can start super small like, “Can you help me watch my laptop when I go to the bathroom?” whatsoever. Today, I already asked for help with meeting a friend who knows how to do contract work to earn money for a coffee chat ✅
Since I’ve done rejection hunting, I don’t think it will be too scary, and I already know who will join haha! Is anyone down to play with me on this experiment?
