You don't need to be an expert to write

Matthias Ott's recent article on writing caught my attention:

You might not work for the Apples, Googles, or Microsofts out there. You might not speak at meetups or conferences or publish articles at one of the online magazines everyone is reading. You might even think that what you are struggling with every day isn’t worth sharing at all. Who wants to read about your boring day-to-day stuff, right?

Well, I do...

Back when I started my blog, I wrote a lot about coffee and the IndieWeb. At the time, I was only just getting started in both of those interests. Writing helped me communicate some of my thoughts and what was mentioned in some blog posts became longer discussions. People have introduced me to others as a "blogger" at events this year. I have never even thought about that until now. I digress. My point is that I was still learning at the time. I wrote and learned.

The voices telling me "James, you don't know enough about this to write" and "James, this idea isn't interesting enough" and all of their variations have come back recently, perhaps because I haven't been blogging a lot over the last few months. This is a hard mindset out of which to break. Reading Matthias' words reminded me that while I may not be an expert, I can at least start discussions by writing my thoughts on something on this website. In fact, I did this two days ago when I blogged about distributed social polling using IndieWeb technologies. Those discussions may even make their way into another blog post. The fact that a blog post incited discussions which begets another blog post is interesting.

I guess I need to work on building back my confidence in writing again. I'll do that through practice.

Now go read Matthias' blog post in full.

Tagged in writing.