Musings on my Fear of Blogging

A blog post can be scary to write. You’re putting your reputation out there for everyone to judge – and their judgments/comments can be viewed by the entire world.

I have two fears when writing a blog post: First, I fear I’ll write on a topic I’m familiar with, but that is so basic and simple that someone reading it will assume that I don’t really have much depth of knowledge. The second fear I have is that I’ll try writing on something that I’m not very familiar with, someone will point out some huge, obvious blunder I made in my post, and thus my blog post will be revealed as wrong and worthless. And sometimes I’ll have both fears at once about a post I write.

As for the first fear, I need to remember an interesting fact about learning: when you don’t know something, it can seem overwhelming and confusing, but once you work with it and learn it, it’s easy to think that you somehow had perfect intuition and picked up the technology as though it were second nature – and you forget that you were once overwhelmed and confused. So if I’m interested in writing about a technology that seems simple and obvious, I should remember that once it was this crazy, impossible technology that I was clueless about. It’s likely that there is someone else out there who could benefit if I wrote some of my thoughts an experiences down in my blog, even if it seems simple to me at the time. I’m just a couple of steps ahead of them.

As for the second fear, I just need to get over my pride and be willing to put some stuff out there on my blog, even if it might be wrong. If someone else rips it to shreds, it can be a great learning opportunity for me. It is certainly better than continuing in ignorance, and it can help me to connect with someone who is more knowledgeable than I who can help me learn even more.

Have I written anything helpful? anything worthless and stupid? Let me know!