The Kickstarter Diaries 10: Asking for Help

The latest episode in my tragicomic behind-the-scenes account of life in a crowdfunding campaign.

 

If there was one lesson write large and often in the invisible-but-not-unspoken curriculum of my early years, it was Don’t ask for help.

At school it was a sign of weakness, even of failure, to ask a teacher for help; to ask a fellow-student for help had the same taint, and was also uncomfortably close to cheating. At home, my mother, struggling to raise four children, was, let’s say, a strong proponent of self-reliance among her offspring. “Oh, you are helpless,” she would say in exasperation if we couldn’t work something out for ourselves, and came to her.

Unlike today’s students, reportedly only too eager to turn to AI, the importance of All My Own Work was so great it spilled over into everyday life, everyday issues. It never occurred to me to talk to my friends about the usual problems of adolescence: they remained like a toxic inner fog until some new issue came along to dispel and replace them.

This state of affairs continued, more or less intact, for, oh, fifty years. Three things brought it to an end.

The first was hitchhiking. In 1998 I hitchhiked around North America, reprising the trip I had taken 25 years before when I first came to the continent. Hitchhiking is all about allowing yourself to be vulnerable, asking for help on the open road. Everywhere I went, people were kind. (You can read about it HERE.)

The second was my initial Kickstarter campaign, fifteen years ago. There was no getting around it: I was asking people for help. At first it seemed like cheating. Shouldn’t I be able to solve this by myself? It also seemed presumptuous. Who was I to claim that what I was doing was important enough for anyone else to take notice of it, let alone to back me with actual money? When people said, Yeah, what you’re doing is really cool/interesting/important, here’s ten bucks, it was a radical shift in many, many dimensions. It’s barely an exaggeration to say that campaign changed not only my life, but me as a person.

The third was my belated use of social media, around 2016, and the fact that I used it, very consciously, as a research tool.

My thinking went like this. There were virtually no generally-available research materials (books, articles, etc) about endangered alphabets, and I myself knew nothing, or next to nothing. But out there must be people, even if only one in a million, or one on the planet, who did. This fact kept getting proven over and over, and it changed my entire view of asking for help. At college I had been trained to act as though I knew everything, and certainly to pretend I knew more than I did; now I had to do the exact opposite, to lead with my questions, the gaps in my knowledge, to make no secret of my ignorance–and my gratitude. And strangers appeared out of nowhere to help.

Only now, looking back over my entire life, can I see how stifling, how catastrophically isolating it is to feel you can’t or shouldn’t ask for help, and how it cuts you off from one of the most powerful emotional dynamics in existence: the exchange of kindness and gratitude. I would never have thought that people would help me so much; I would never have anticipated the effect that my gratitude would have on everything I do.

Admittedly, the Kickstarter Month is unusually intense, and during this campaign I do as much asking for help and express as much gratitude as in the rest of the year put together, probably. But that intensity works both ways: for all the stress of not knowing if I’ll meet the goal, there’s the reward of so many people saying, We love what you do. Keep it up, whether or not they can actually pledge money. If everyone heard that every so often, the world would be a much, much better place.

Kindness teaches and encourages gratitude; gratitude teaches and encourages kindness.

Thank you. Thank you all.

My Kickstarter page is HERE. Thanks again.

Tim