How to ask for help from people who don't know you

No matter what you’re doing, from building a civilization on Mars to getting a summer internship, you will have to ask people for help. Yet, most people get this crucial skill wrong. They put themselves at the front of their request, when they should be putting the other person there. But isn’t getting help just charisma and luck? No, asking for help is a skill, not an attribute you are assigned at birth like green eyes.

How do you ask for help from people? There is only one principle. Put yourself in their mind. All good communication is grounded in an understanding of the reader’s mind. And so, I have some heuristics I would recommend when you ask for help from people you don’t know.

One heuristic to remember is that help is about people before it is about projects. When you ask for help from someone, their helping your project is predicated on them wanting to help you. So, you should make it clear that you are someone worth helping. One of the strongest ways to show that you’re worth helping is to demonstrate that you are a serious person. You might claim that you want to enter machine learning or learn to lift weights. Lots of people say that though, and the way you show that you’re serious is by showing proof of work. A trained model, a blog post that shows depth and thought and a vlog of your training are all ways to show that you are serious.

Another way is personal connection: you could say “Steve suggested I reach out” which situates you more warmly in their mind. But be careful here, because you’re borrowing against someone else’s credibility. If this person doesn’t like Steve, then this might hurt your credibility. Or, if you aren’t as good as Steve says, his credibility is hurt.

And finally, we get to institutional credibility. You could mention that you’re a student at some famous university, or work at a large corporation. This is the weakest because at best it proves you cleared a filter once, and nothing more. It also doesn’t situate you to them specifically and can feel like you’re signalling status. So use it sparingly and avoid making it your only source of credibility.

Once you have situated yourself (or not), the next step is to explain context. Before you ask them for help, you have to answer the question: what is going on here? If you have done the previous step well, you have borrowed their attention and you must spend it judiciously. Here, your description must be so short as to be unsummarizable. You are spending lent attention which is the most precious currency. To do this, think of what makes your context connect to things that they would already know. Do not explain to your elected representative the factionalism of your university club, but do explain how the club connects to their legislative priorities. Or when asking a scientist for an internship, don’t talk about how you’ve loved science since you were a child, but do talk about how you’ve implemented and extended their paper from 2023.

The next heuristic is to make your request easy to accept. Making something easy to accept largely is about reducing the cost of acceptance. One clear kind of cost is the magnitude. Do ask someone for twenty minutes of their time, but don’t ask them to read your five-hundred-page manuscript in a week. Another is to make it specific: asking for a resource to start with is better than “can I pick your brain?”. When you’ve made your request, make it low friction for them. If you’re asking for an introduction, write a blurb about yourself which they can forward. If you have a question, ask it in writing rather than over a call. And last on cost, make your ask bounded. Don’t ask for recurring obligations like being your mentor for your whole life, but do keep it limited to asking them to read a blog post. If that instance goes well, they’ll gladly read more.

My last heuristic is stranger: make it easy to say no. You might think that the worst outcome is a no, but the worst outcome is a pressured, begrudging yes. Your coercion will have poisoned your relationship with this person while you feel the false glow of a hard-won victory. A person who helps you with gritted teeth is one who will never help you again. And even then, the help will be a half-hearted effort to get rid of the obligation you manufactured. By contrast, help freely given is effortless, the way you’d hold the door open for someone. Help willingly given keeps your conscience clear, free from the burden of having pressured someone. And help, when given from the heart, is the foundation of a relationship where both of you contribute to what you’re building.

These are only heuristics. You can, when following the principle, reorder or drop them altogether. What matters is whether you’re thinking from the perspective of your reader. Except. Never lie. All your asks for help come from the person attached to them – you. And if your reader gets even a whiff of something off, then no request, no matter how small, specific, low-friction, and bounded, can get a yes.