I Asked 2 Strangers For Help

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Why do people help each other when they don’t have to?

Not the contractual or reciprocal kind of help, where there’s an understood exchange even if nobody acknowledges it. The kind where someone with more than you, more credibility, more demands on their time, looks at your cold email and writes back with something real. I’ve been trying to find the right word for it. I landed on one you probably don’t hear much outside of church: Grace. The kind that arrives uninvited, costs the giver almost nothing, and somehow changes the math of your life moving forward.

Nate Sexton is one of the premier professional disc golfers in the world. I reached out to him on Instagram one day, kept it simple, didn’t expect much. He said yes. When I was building out Work, Unscripted he was one of the first people I thought about, and he said yes again. He came in and gave an interview that became the biggest episode the show has produced. He answered every email. He posted the episode on his own pages, which he didn’t need to do. But the part I keep sitting with is that he showed up fully, not the version of fully where someone is technically present but managing their image the whole time. He got curious about me and turned the conversation around. If you’ve ever been in a room with someone who has significantly more cultural weight than you and had them genuinely want to know your story, you know how disorienting that is.

Loung Ung was five years old when the Khmer Rouge took power in Cambodia. Her family was separated, her father was executed, she was trained as a child soldier. She survived and then she wrote about it in First They Killed My Father, which became a film, which became the thing most of the world knows her by. My family also survived what she survived. I grew up in Seattle with that history living on the underside of everything. When I decided to write my own memoir I made a list of authors I respected, did my internet detective work, found her email, and sent a cold message asking for five minutes of her time. She wrote back. Over the last eight months she has gotten on calls with me, and asked questions about the work I’m not ready for, which is exactly what the work needs. She does this asking for nothing.

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I’ve thought about why people do this long enough to have a few ideas. Generous people almost always remember a name, the specific person who showed up for them first. You can’t pay grace back to the person who gave it, so it moves forward instead. There’s also the asymmetry worth naming: an hour of Nate’s time costs him an hour, but for me it was a year of believing what I was building deserved to be taken seriously. And then there’s the thing I think is most underrated, which is genuine curiosity about other people. For some people the conversation itself is the reward.

Here’s what I want to be honest about though. When someone with that kind of earned credibility takes your work seriously, you have to start treating your work like it’s serious. That shift is not about them anymore. Loung taking my call means I can’t hide behind “it’s just something I’m working on.” Someone with her credential said this deserves the work. Now I have to act accordingly. That’s the gift inside the gift. Permission you didn’t know you needed to give yourself.

You probably already know someone who is a little earlier in something than you, someone whose email is sitting in a folder you’ll get to eventually. The real response, the one that actually engages with what they’re doing and costs you twenty minutes, could be a year of momentum for them.

You don’t have to have survived the Khmer Rouge to do that. You just have to have walked a road that someone else is still on.