
The Art of Asking: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help

You can give them understanding. Just tell the story. Tell it all. They’ll understand. He smiled at me. You’ll be fine.
Amanda Palmer • The Art of Asking: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help
You can’t give people what they want. But you can give them something else.
Amanda Palmer • The Art of Asking: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help
Our first job in life is to recognize the gifts we’ve already got, take the donuts that show up while we cultivate and use those gifts, and then turn around and share those gifts—sometimes in the form of money, sometimes time, sometimes love—back into the puzzle of the world.
Amanda Palmer • The Art of Asking: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help
And so you will take the coffee, because the truth of the matter is that your acceptance of the gift IS the gift. And if you’re not in a hurry, you will also draw the barista a picture, or draw a picture for his friend who’s a huge fan, or tell her about the Ben Folds song. And when he’s not looking, you leave a ten-dollar bill in the tip jar. Beca
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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.
Amanda Palmer • The Art of Asking: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help
The entertainment industry, reflecting the world at large, has been obsessed with the wrong question: how do we MAKE people pay for content? What if we started thinking about it the other way around: how do we LET people pay for content?
Amanda Palmer • The Art of Asking: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help
comment. If it helps, you can get specific here and think up something like: HEY DALAI LAMA! UR DUMB AS SHIT & UGLY & BALD & WHO DO U THINK U R TRYING TO FREE PEOPLE?? FUCK U Or, if that isn’t working for you, a subtler approach: Dear Dalai Lama. With all respect, I find your approach to peace highly problematic. If you would stop narci
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Here is one successful recipe I have used to deal with haters, trolling, bullying, and other manifestations of critical voices. We all have them. Take the scathing article, hurtful office gossip, or nasty online comment. Hold it in your mind. Now imagine the scathing article, hurtful office gossip, or nasty online comment being aimed at the Dalai L
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Wondering if this trend of empathy had gone too far? To erase the possibility of empathy is to erase the possibility of understanding. To erase the possibility of empathy is also to erase the possibility of art. Theater, fiction, horror stories, love stories. This is what art does. Good or bad, it imagines the insides, the heart of the other, wheth
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