Don't Fear Creation: How Content Creation Could Make You a Better Developer
Table of contents
What drives a person to want to start a technical blog, a Twitter account, or a YouTube channel? After all, there are myriads of reasons not to:
- People could make fun of you. No one wants trolls in their social media feed, right?
- You could be wrong, and being wrong in public doesn't feel good.
- It takes work and a commitment of time. What's the worth of putting effort into something that I'm not going to see immediate results in?
And yet, here I am (and perhaps you are), joining many others in taking the time to shift from primarily being a consumer of information to contributing to the wealth of knowledge out there. But why should you and I do this? Let's think about it together.
We know the answer, right?
I'm at the beginning of my journey into Web Development. If you're in similar circumstances to mine, then you might be familiar with the usual advice you hear when it comes to increasing your chances of getting a job and growing as a developer:
- Learn in public. Put yourself out there and let others see you work out problems in a public/community context.
- Network with other people. Post your learning insights on Twitter, join a Discord community, attend meetups, etc.
- Create content. Start a blog, make YouTube videos, and teach the concepts you're learning to others, regardless of where you are.
All of the things mentioned above are good, but why is it so hard for us to do all of these things even when we know they’ll lead to good outcomes and opportunities? After all, aren’t there plenty of successful web and software developers who can attest to this?
It’s because doing hard things is uncomfortable, even if we know they’re well worth the effort. Not quite the epiphany, huh?
The Realization
We know these things. We already know that doing hard things is uncomfortable. We already know that for things that are worth attaining that it’s going to take hard work and effort, straining towards the goal.
But then, like me, you start to realize that you perhaps had a silly perspective when it came to interacting with people and information on the internet, that being: that you and I don't have anything interesting to contribute and that we should wait for someone else to execute our ideas for us.
Surely we can't join the group of people who seek to create value? And yet, if we believe that, we’d be wrong.
So, what do we do about this? How do we change?
The Change
The change is this: do what you're afraid to do to teach yourself that there are valuable lessons to learn from failure.
You're going to fail, both you and me. But failure is a precious resource, just as success is. We're going to make mistakes when we write a blog post (I'm sure I made plenty even as I write this, my first post); we're going to write crappy code, we're going to fail to understand concepts, we're going to fall flat at technical interviews. But that's okay.
We don't have to give into the temptation of caring so much about what the public’s perception of our well-intentioned thoughts are that that paralyzes us from providing value to others. We move forward, and we do the hard things anyway.
Conclusion
A wordy one, I know, but I hope I was able to encourage you to do the hard thing and put yourself out there a bit more. I mean, just take a look at my Twitter account. You're not going to see much on there because it took me a long time to work up the courage to be more visible on the internet and in the community.
And yet, here I am, and here you are, striving to become better writers, contributors, and developers, laboring to be more forward, even if it's by a little bit.
Let's encourage others to seek to provide value to others because all of our perspectives are worth hearing.
Follow me on Twitter and let me know what you think about the fear of contributing!