Today you, tomorrow me
Helping those who ask for help
May 12, 2015
During my time in Phase 0 I have answered a lot of questions from my cohort. "Today you, tomorrow me" is a little mantra that describes my point of view on asking for help. Today one of my compadres has a question that I can answer. Tomorrow they will be able to help me when I'm confused.
This mantra came from a story I read on Reddit. A guy broke down on the side of the road and a family of Mexican immigrants stopped and helped him out. They didn't speak much English but were overwhelmingly helpful to the guy. At the end, the guy who received all the help tried to pay the family, but the father simply said: "Today you, tomorrow me".
It has stuck with me ever since.
It all starts with asking for help.
During one of my pairing sessions I got to talking with a partner who had seen one of our cohort mates post one of our challenges to Stack Overflow verbatim.
This blew me away. We have so many resources to ask for help and this person still didn't feel confident enough to ask within our own group. They wanted to stay relatively anonymous and get answers from outsiders.
That bummed me out, but I try to see things from their perspective. Maybe it was late in the week and they couldn't find anyone to pair. Maybe they had asked their accountability group but no one responded immediately, and they needed to finish the challenge ASAP.
I know I'll be asking for help and making sure I formulate my questions to make it easy on the person giving the help.
Calming down and asking the clearest question possible is key. I popped into office hours once during Phase 0 and I was bombarded with a question that I was not prepared for. The asker was talking a mile a minute. He was just too manic and excited to clearly express his thoughts.
It was a great lesson to learn and example not to follow. Our guide was able to come in, slow him down and get him to where he needed to go.