Everybody knows that

Back in December last year, Matthew Turland published a blog post asking “Why aren’t you speaking?”

It made me think.

What I realised is that I always havehad this feeling that everybody already knows what I know.

Is that part of an impostor syndrome?

I don’t know. I really don’t feel like an impostor. I know what I know, I’m perfectly fine accepting that I don’t know everything… but then there’s this feeling that everybody else knows what I know. It’s a strange feeling, I’m not even sure if I can explain it properly.

This also led me to realise why I don’t blog more often. I like blogging. I like writing. I don’t consider myself being a good writer, but with English being my third language, mostly self-taught, I think I do quite alright.

It’s the same thing as with me not speaking at a conference or a user group — everybody knows that.

After doing some more thinking on this subject, there’s only one logical result — it is not possible for everyone to know what I already know. It’s just not possible.

I have learned, and still am learning from other people, by either reading their blogs, or hearing them talk, or looking at their answers on StackOverflow, or digging through their code on GitHub… Surely there are others out there that can learn a thing or two from me.

I also “agreed” with myself that not every blog post needs to be an essay, that it’s OK to publish a couple of short paragraphs, quickly writing down the things going around in my mind.

With those thoughts, with that kind of a mindset, I set out to start blogging again. Since December, since Matthew’s post, I blogged 20 times. I don’t think I have written so many posts in the past 4 years.

Oh, and I gave a talk at two different occasions as well.

Thanks Matthew.