The Art of Asking: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help
We have a fucked-up relationship with artists. While artists are, on one hand, applauded for their awe-inspiring, life-changing works of art, they’re simultaneously eyed with suspicion, disdain, and other sentiments of the GET A JOB variety. Look at the media: we deify artists one second, demonize them the next. Artists internalize this and perpetu
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was essential to feel thankful for the few who stopped to watch or listen, instead of wasting energy on resenting the majority who passed me by.
Amanda Palmer • The Art of Asking: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help
Let me finish, clown. You can’t ever give people what they want. But you can give them something else. You can give them empathy. You can give them understanding. And that’s a lot, and enough to give.
Amanda Palmer • The Art of Asking: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help
The opposite of “Indian giver” would be something like “white man keeper”…that is, a person whose instinct is to remove property from circulation…The Indian giver (or the original one, at any rate) understood a cardinal property of the gift: whatever we have been given is supposed to be given away again, not kept…The only essential is this: The gif
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taking the definition of “Do It Yourself” literally, I completely fail. I have no interest in Doing It Myself. I’m much more interested in getting everybody to help me.
Amanda Palmer • The Art of Asking: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help
The whole point of being an artist, I thought, was to be connected to people. To make a family. A family you were with all the time, like it or not. This was the way we’d been doing it for years, whether or not we had an album or a tour to “promote.”
Amanda Palmer • The Art of Asking: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help
Minimal DIY doesn’t rely on trust; it relies on ingenuity. Maximal DIY relies on trust and ingenuity. You have to ask with enough grace and creativity to elicit a response, and you also have to trust the people you’re asking not to ruin your recording session, not to poison your food, not to bludgeon you with a hammer as you sit in their passenger
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And when you’re afraid of someone’s judgment, you can’t connect with them. You’re too preoccupied with the task of impressing them.
Amanda Palmer • The Art of Asking: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help
But within that exchange lies the hardest thing of all: To ask. Without shame. And to accept the help that people offer. Not to force them. Just to let them.