Summary of The Art of Asking
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help
Grand Central, 2014 more...
Never be afraid or ashamed to ask for help. Accepting help is a gift to the giver.
Recommendation
With this combination of autobiography and self-help manual, punk singer-songwriter Amanda Palmer expands on her popular 2013 TED Talk on “The Art of Asking.” Palmer has worked as a human statue, a performer and a singer. Each job helped her learn how to connect with others and ask for help. She covers life on the road in her art-punk band The Dresden Dolls, explains how crowdfunding makes it easier for artists to ask for help, and discusses her personal life, including her struggles with shame and her marriage to author Neil Gaiman. Palmer’s message of how to ask for help is the core of her text. But this manual, like her life, is chaotic. Her memoir sometimes seems like a stream-of-consciousness exercise and its confusion shrouds her heartfelt ideas about the need to escape shame and remorse. Still, getAbstract recommends Palmer’s tale of creative ambition and fearlessness to entrepreneurs, inventors and artists of all types.
In this summary, you will learn
- What singer-songwriter Amanda Palmer learned from her job as a living statue,
- How her band – The Dresden Dolls – fared,
- How to use the Internet to ask for help and
- How to recognize that accepting a gift gives to the giver.
Summary
About the Author
Blogger, singer and songwriter Amanda Palmer is half of the former punk-rock duo, The Dresden Dolls. Her 2013 TED Talk on “The Art of Asking” has garnered eight million views.
