'Write for Six Month Ago You'
I really enjoyed Adam Wathan’s take on that feeling of inferiority when [considering] publicly sharing your thoughts & perspective. From Episode 16 of the podcast Fits & Starts (ref):
The biggest piece of advice I could give for people who want to be public with opinions, but are afraid maybe their opinions are wrong or they’re going to get backlash, or whatever. I think we have a tendency to want to impress our peers. You want to put out opinions and ideas and content that make the people that you admire admire you. If I could write a blog post and have DHH be like, “This was really insightful, I learned a lot from this! Wow!” That’s like the ultimate, you know what I mean? But it’s hard to do that sort of thing because you’re constantly terrified. Instead what I think people should be focusing on is teaching the people that are coming up behind them. Instead of trying to impress your peers, just try to impress six month ago you. There’s a million other six month ago yous out there. It’s kind of unintuitive, but the things you should most likely be sharing or writing about are things that are not really even that interesting to you anymore because you feel like you’ve figured it out. Those are the things you have the best odds of being able to share in a way that you’re least likely to be wrong, because as soon as it’s uninteresting to you anymore then it’s not controversial to you anymore and you’re most like just right.
We need more people teaching what they learned yesterday. A lot of the time you’ll learn something and figure it out, and you sort of forget what it took to cross the bridge to get there. […]. What was that I was trying to learn and why was it hard for me to find this information? How can I create the bridge for someone else who was looking for what I was looking for?