Is it OK to ask a fellow creator for free help?

Where is the line between exploitation and generosity?

Is it ever OK to ask a professional creator for help for free?

In the second half of our life, we tend to be in two contrasting positions.  We have accumulated wisdom and skill through hard work and sometimes via the experience of discrimination or disadvantage.  We know what our time is worth in monetary terms given our seniority.  Yet, we are also starting afresh, using newfound time to learn new skills and feeling like a rank beginner in a mysterious world where others have success but the way to achieve our own remains unclear. That dichotomy can be an uncomfortable experience. We have a lot of help to give, but we also feel we need to ask for help ourselves.

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

Society has changed since we started out – whenever that was. It is a contradictory society now.  The internet started as a predominantly free place to write, read and show visual work and make connections and quickly became monetised. Now it’s a mishmash of creativity for the love of it, content marketing from small creative businesses and big brands jostling for our attention and money. Writers who once would have been remote names on book spines have made themselves accessible via direct messaging systems. Artists whose work would have been seen only in galleries, entirely separated from the makers themselves, now willingly send you free videos of them working in their homes. Yet we decry the lack of privacy that the ‘big companies’ give us. Blogs scream the morality of creators being paid for their work and then offer free content in a funnel marketing model. It’s sometimes confusing to know where boundaries lie. It’s sometimes confusing to know where to set them.

The world around the internet has also changed, though not as much as many of us might wish. Whilst there is much work to be done (and in some respects and in some countries, progress is being alarmingly undone) there has still been change in how we perceive issues such as gender and representation of particular groups. There are different generational aspirations about what ‘work’ should constitute. The pandemic changed our sense of what a ‘workplace’ should look like with some people wedded to home offices and some insisting their employees commute to the city. Hobbies became side hustles, then became an expectation of a self-made career then became resentment and frustration that the world still doesn’t always support that dream, despite selling it at every opportunity.

The self-help/ professional-helper world (to which I contribute) has grown and so has the number of people teaching that with the right mindset and hard work, we can make a paying career out of any activity we love to do. Hope and yearning have, in some cases, become a belief in an entitlement to earn well via creativity, despite economic realities. The flip side of that can be a sense of being unfairly shut out if a career doesn’t take off, no matter how hard a person tries, which then grows to envy of those who are financially successful. The envy leads to a sense that the successful creator is hoarding knowledge that ought to be shared freely so everyone can succeed. That of course sits uncomfortably with the successful one who actually shares the same belief as the unsuccessful one that they should make money from their creativity. Yet, simultaneously, other self-help workers focus on personal worth as an innate quality unrelated to work, social behaviour or achievement and often linked to living simply and with generosity.

It is in the middle of this confusing melée of opinions and realities about money, identity, work, and worth that I have been repeatedly confronted with the question recently: is it ever OK to ask a professional for help for free?

As you will see, boundaries will become an important part of my thought on this topic so let me set some parameters here. I’m not writing today about a situation where someone – individual or company - asks for your time or work for free so they can make a profit out of it. I’m not talking about being asked to work for exposure or to attend time-consuming beauty parades.  Nor am I talking about the kind of swings and roundabouts type of favours we ask of friends. I’m talking about the situation where someone considers you have wisdom, skills, or a position they aspire to, you consider those attributes how you make your living or life, and they ask you for help for free.

Is it acceptable to make such requests ourselves? What kind of response do we want to give when we receive them?

Of course, even in that scenario context varies, so let me give you some anonymised examples that have crossed my path recently, either happening to me or others:

·      A long-lost relative who pays you no attention for years rings because he needs your professional advice.

·      A reader of your Substack subscribes for a modest fee then hopes that that you will spend time read their own writing and commenting on it although you offer paid editorial services.

·      A colleague of a spouse admires your art then asks you precisely how you made it, the implication being that she wishes to do the same.

·      A stranger sees your mentoring website and emails twice asking for one piece of specific information each time to help their own career decisions.

·      You run a membership-based organisation with a fee to join and a set criteria for membership. Services you offer are limited to that group. You are asked for detailed help and guidance over a number of calls and emails as to how that person can gain the qualifications necessary to join.

·      You volunteer in an organisation in one role using your professional skills. You are sent a spreadsheet asking you to sign up for tasks relating to a different role you have not agreed to take on.

·      You have an online acquaintance bordering on friendship with whom you have an easy and happy ‘scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’ relationship. You offer each other professional advice as and when you both need a sounding board and have done for years. That person then suddenly asks for free help with a project that would take you weeks of your time and require taking on some legal liability.

In each of those situations, I reacted differently to the person to whom it happened or to the person to whom I told the story of being asked myself. Sometimes I was the more accepting, easily generous one, sometimes the one with the resentment. I’m not writing an essay here about how we should respond– that’s a decision for you as you encounter these types of requests. I am interested in how we come to our conclusions and how aware we are of them, in particular, how aware we are that the other person might not be inappropriately disrespecting us so much as living under a different set of equally valid beliefs.

Is asking a relative you haven’t spoken to for years for advice, a gross cheek based on a desire to get something for nothing? Or is an act that comes from a belief in the fact that family – even those who live at a distance– is a fundamental communal safety net in times of trouble given we live in a dog-eat-dog individualist and capitalist society? Is it disrespect for a profession or bewilderment with knowing how to access that profession?

Is asking for an explanation of a technique a lazy shortcut to take something from you that you worked hard to learn for yourself? Or is it based on respect and a curious desire to learn? Is it a risk that they might steal your customers and individuality or an opportunity for you to teach and create a legacy?

Is giving pieces of information away or reading work for free a good marketing technique; a ‘loss leader’, or an opportunity to court a new potential client relationship? Or is it allowing yourself to be exploited in a world in which one gender is often asked to work for free? Is reading the work of another writer ‘unpaid work’ or is it ‘paying forward’ help you received in the past, an opportunity to be a kingmaker?

Is being asked to volunteer a cheeky assumption, a give-an-inch-take-a-mile situation? Or is it a genuine administrative mistake, or just a take-it-or-leave-it offer of an opportunity to have more of the benefits of volunteering you already like to have?

The answers we give will depend on our personal values about work, money, gender, group membership and so forth. It matters how much we depend financially on our creativity. We will likely give different answers at different times depending on how much we are in an abundance or scarcity mindset, how much we have given and received ourselves in recent times, and what our time and financial wealth is at any given time. How the person frames their request will influence our instinctive response. Our personal biases mean that who it is that is asking may also alter our views, even if we don’t realise it. Our own experiences of receiving or being denied help will come into play.

What’s interesting in this situation is how being asked, or observing the reactions of others to being asked is an opportunity to stop and interrogate these attitudes behind our instinctive responses.

Are they true? If they served me once, do they still do so? Do they come from fear or trust? Where did I learn this belief? Does it really apply in this particular situation? Am I reacting to the world as I believe it is or the world as I wish to create it? Am I pretending that I am reacting from a good principle when really I’m using that to mask a fear?

My own view, today at least, for what it is worth, is that it’s always acceptable to ask me – respectfully - for free help. It is not realistic, however, to assume or expect that I can help or that you have a right to my help. I don’t want to live in a world where our desire to make money from creativity is so dominant that there is no room for humanity and generosity, one where we are so concerned about our own self-worth and the value of our labour that we forget to attend to the worth of others and the value of community. I don’t want a society where we all scrabble to do it by ourselves, where everything is about the dollar and there is no easing of the climb, no hand reaching back to pull another up the scree slopes.  I don’t want to deny myself the pleasure of giving, the expansion of my world becoming about yours too. I know well the worth of my time and work and I value the freedom to knowingly give away that full value when I choose to.

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

At the same time, there are boundaries. None of us are bottomless pots. I’m comfortable saying, No, I’m sorry I can’t.  Or saying, I can’t but I know someone who can. Or, I can’t read it all, but here’s my impression of the first paragraph, I do hope that helps. Or to say here’s the place that taught me what I know today or here is where I teach these skills and I’d love to have you as a student. Or just thank you for the offer but no, I don’t want to.  In the past when the number of requests was overwhelming me, I’ve used a kind auto response explaining the capacity I did have. When what is in the pot is limited, we have to choose in which direction to allow the contents to flow. Interrogating how and when we do that is also worth our reflection time. That said, I do believe that if we never give out, we never have the opportunity to be refilled, and so we suffer the scarcity of having only stagnant resources. We cannot give more than we have but if we do not give, we do not ourselves receive.

The inspiration to write this today came from seeing what to me at first came across as a self-righteous, entitled post. It was – to my eyes - a public decrying that someone had hoped for help for minuscule payment. It was said that the asker hadn’t even specifically asked for help for free. It seemed that the poster was whipping the making of one small mistaken hope into a whole shebang about structural inequalities relating to gender. That to me seemed harsh, unkind, ungenerous and over the top. It annoyed me.

But then I very quickly realised that I was – as we do from time to time – doing exactly what so annoyed me in others. I was responding solely taking into account what seemed important to me.  Reacting from my own starting point, making assumptions. Maybe the writer had very different experiences of gender discrimination to me, was in a different financial position, and had different views of what writing, work, and pay meant to her. That didn’t make her wrong, it made her different from me.  It meant I could stop and learn about myself by contrasting myself to her instead of judging her. Plus she knew facts I didn’t. She – appropriately - didn’t disclose the whole conversation – I was reacting viscerally, to partial information.)

The point is not whether she is right and I am wrong, or vice versa.  The small point is that it caused me to ask myself what I believed that caused me to react that way.

 The bigger point is that the whole creative life is to live by questions, to observe and adapt, to learn new things, and to confirm the core old things.  Living creatively is to embrace individuality, to raise awareness and curiosity, not to hammer home self-invented dogmas. It is to provoke - self and others - to see things differently. Being a creator is not just about making stuff for money, it’s about exposing our individual views of the world for examination, about championing or at least respecting the views and expression of others without seeking to punish them for how they see the world, how they move in it.

The person who annoys us by asking or opining also has a different starting point, one to which we may vehemently disagree, one to which we need not conform, one which we may wish to persuade away from, but one which they have reasons to occupy. It is a starting point which many other people will likely also occupy. It would save me a whole load of burdensome resentment if I just evaluated requests for help or other people’s writing on that basis and chose the kindest way to respond or not. If I sought to respond, engage, and debate rather than correct, expose or object.

So all that said. Can I ask you a favour for free? When I forget – yet again, as no doubt I will, for I am flawed and human - to behave the way I mean to, can you please remind me to do so? For the creative life is also about trial and error, about serial attempts so manifest our intentions and doing so with whatever help others have the capacity to offer.

L’ shalom,

Helen