Share, Scale, Grow!

In this post, I'll share the steps I took in writing and speaking and how they contributed to my personal growth. By the end, I hope you'll understand that writing, speaking, contributing to open source, and putting yourself out there, presents asymmetric opportunities with low downside and disproportionate upside. Engaging in these activities isn't just about expressing thoughts; done properly, it requires extensive research, reading, learning, and facing criticism. It also requires courage to put oneself out there and write on a topic. However, the rewards are worth it.

The journey begins with sharing, and effective sharing requires a broad audience. That always leads to personal growth, albeit usually delayed (which may appear disconnected). If this resonates with you, keep reading.

Share

Creating content takes time and effort. And when this content is shaped by real-world experiences, the effort goes up a notch. But why keep such valuable insights to ourselves? In the ever-changing world of IT, sharing what you know when it's most relevant can make the most difference.

Why Sharing Matters?
- Peer Enablement: as technology keeps changing, sharing clear and relevant content is a straightforward way to keep everyone updated.
- Thought Leadership: Completing a project or finding a solution feels good. But in a world filled with so much information, it's also important to share our approaches and successes in a down-to-earth way.

- Closure and a note to future self: most often, I write and tweet for myself. My posts are notes I can look up, and tweets are bookmarks to search. If they help somebody, that is a bonus. By writing it down, I can move on, and empty my head for new things! 

Creating and sharing content isn't just about telling others what we know. It's about our professional duty to help everyone else grow and believing that what we learn can benefit many.

Scale

Sharing is just the beginning. The real magic happens when we scale our content to reach a broader audience. Sharing or publishing through writing, webinars, or public speaking is a powerful way to distribute our knowledge and experiences to many. It's a bit like magic – a mix of teleportation and telepathy. We can share a moment or insight, and it can travel across space and time, reaching people far and wide. 🤯

This process is:

- Asymmetric: One person's insights can influence and benefit many.

- Asynchronous: Once written or recorded, the content can be accessed and revisited multiple times, even years later.

- Permanent: The digital age ensures that valuable content can be copied, shared, and republished across various platforms, enduring for as long as the internet exists.

Any content that has taken effort and creativity to be produced deserves to be distributed in a channel that will give it the most visibility. After all, if nobody sees your content, is it really published? When you have something valuable to share, think about how you can maximize its impact. Because content that remains unseen is like untapped potential, waiting to make a difference (or become irrelevant).

Grow

Sharing is a way of gifting others with your experience and knowledge. Publishing is a way of scaling the distribution of the knowledge. But “What’s in it for me” you may ask yourself. I’ve asked the same question myself many times and came to the following conclusion: “The more you give, the more you share, the more you get. I have no good explanation for it, but this is how sharing works.”

The more you give into the open, the more you get.


How do you grow?
- Become more courageous - putting something written down in the open, with your name on it, takes courage. It is opening yourself for other to criticize and some will take that opportunity.
- Dealing with different views - many things in IT are in the grey area rather than black white. You will learn to take criticism and sometimes convince/influence others.
- You get new ideas - clear writing demands clear thinking, which makes it the ultimate discipline for sharpening the mind. Also while writing, you get to learn a topic well. Which in turn forces you to the next level, and you get ideas/conclusions you would otherwise have no way to get to.
- Personal brand - software engineering has elements of craftsmanship and art (otherwise we would have been replaced by software by now). Making yourself known in an area will make your professional life pleasurable and take it to its limits.
- Career growth and visibility - it helps you stand out of the crowd and grow in your career.

Sharing will help you in ways you have not expected. If it has not, probably you have not shared enough yet.

What next?

Start small. And try to get every other post, every other talk in front of a bigger audience. The rest will figure itself out. Be warned, writing, speaking, and getting known are addictive. You may get used to it and turn it into a career. Give it a shot!

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