Smart enough to be dumb
Jon Galloway touched on it in his blog post today:
The best way to learn is to "aspire to be the dumbest person in the room."
Being the smartest person in the room is comfortable - you can feel
smug and important as you deign to dole out information. It's also the
surest way to avoid learning anything. Surrounding yourself with people
who are better informed than you are is a great way to keep learning,
but it can take away your confidence in what you've got to say.
Wrong solutions:
- Keep quiet for fear of saying something stupid
- Keep quiet because all those other brilliant people will probably say it soon, and better
Solution:
- Don't write for your own ego, write to share information
- Accept
that publishing anything on the internet is one of the best ways to
invite constructive criticism for what you think you know
Ah, to invite criticism! To publicly lay intellectually prone with your fleshy bellyful of ideas exposed to the anonymous internet is an incredibly scary thing.
It takes a good deal of confidence to participate online.
On the old altnetconf list, Alex McMahon explains: He ranks participation online by confidence required
- Casual chat with close colleagues
- Meeting/workshop with close colleagues
- Meeting/workshop with unknowns
- Writing on internal blog
- Writing on internal blog and actually telling people about it and referring them to it
- Writing on internal wiki
- Releasing a 'proper' guidance document internally
- (4-7 on the internet)
So join a mailing list list, hang out on Twitter, write the blog and participate in the community. Another way to pitch in is to contribute to open source software. I've been working on codecampserver, and even though sometimes I feel I am "the dumbest person in the room" the learning experiences, contacts I've made and pure coding thrills have been invaluable.