Don’t cave in while you learn

The only way to learn something is by doing, and the only way to make your learning faster is by sharing what you learn. At every stage of our life we are learning something, our learning will never end. But we learn slow or even give up learning because we learn in private. We cave in ourselves with the fear of being judged if we fail to learn, if what we have learned so far is minute compared to our peers. The inspiration of this post comes from an article I read long ago, Learn in public by swyx.

No matter what you are learning, document your learning journey, and share it. No matter how much or how less you know, there will always be people who know lesser and will benefit from you. There will also be people who know a lot more and might get interested to guide you. Internet is full of interesting people always ready to help but unless you learn in public they do not know you exist.

While learning in public, or sharing your story, or open sourcing your code base, don’t worry about the numbers, the likes, the claps, the shares, the stars. If you write for the claps, you’ll be slowly pushed towards writing “claps worthy” articles and that may leave you with not a lot to write about.

It’s not about reaching millions of readers, it’s about documenting yourself, documenting your knowledge-base. Write for your future-self, you are going to be the biggest beneficiary of everything you share today.

If you feel you cannot write good content, don’t worry I have that feeling right now, while I am writing this post. You are not a novelist, you are someone trying to learn something, may be programming, may be drawing. If you feel uncomfortable, good. You are pushing yourself.

People think you suck? Good. You agree. Ask them to explain in detail, why you suck. Don’t pretend to know everything. You think they are wrong? Go ahead prove them wrong.

You can know a lot, but you can never know how much you don’t know.

When you share your journey, people will get inspired. People will reach you with the desire to learn, teach them. Teaching is the best way to learn.

At some point you will get support. People notice genuine learner. If you like someone’s work, don’t approach them and ask them to be your mentor. That’s not how it works, they are getting approached by many like you. Approach them with your work, pick up something they have dropped and complete it. If they are working on an open source project, contribute to that project. Show them you are genuine learner and you learn in public.

With so many people approaching them directly, why will they notice you? Because you learn in public. When they mentor you, they mentor more than one person, they mentor all your audience indirectly, and that is the best utilisation of their time and efforts. Eventually they will want to pay you for the work you do. A lot more than you think.

I got the opportunity to have a one to one talk with some of the amazing software engineers I admire, because I contributed to their open source projects.

Learn in public.

It makes you a fast learner.
It opens up the world of opportunities.
It puts you in a favourable situation and creates luck for you.