I can’t believe last time I wrote a blog post here it was over 4 years ago! A lot has happened since then and I regret that not of it has been captured here.
You know, I used to be an avid blogger in my late teen years. I wrote in Farsi. Today, I don’t think its topics were that good, but I wrote consistently. I just wrote about “stuff and things that were on my mind”. The blog was surprisingly quite popular and if my memory serves me right at a point I had ~2000 readers a day. Mind you, this is circa 2000 when not only the internet is not widespread in Iran but only a tiny fraction of the population are aware of it and are savvy enough to access it.
That blog had a positive impact on my life. It got me to meet and befriend many interesting and intellectual people. Because I wanted to make it look nicer and have distinct features, it pushed me to learn web technologies in more depth, which eventually led to me founding a web studio and going professional!
Long story short, that blog was an extraordinary experience. It opened some doors I never imagined it would. I wish I could relive that era again. That experience will probably never repeat. It was a golden era which is long gone now. Having said that, I still think I can get back into the habit of writing. I’m keen to embark on that adventure again.
When I started this blog, I wanted to have a fresh approach. First of all, the blog was going to be in English. Secondly, I was going to write quality content as a subject-matter expert. In the hindsight, I didn’t recognise the issue that the latter rule was going to cause me: It’s not easy to produce quality content as an expert. Fear of blunders and making errors did prevent me from writing.
In addition, both the Dunning–Kruger Effect and Impostor Syndrome are two phenomenons that I have been frequently dealing with. At points feeling high and confident about a certain topic, only for it to be followed by self-doubt and anxiety about the very same topic.
Learning and self-improvement are near and dear to my heart. I also have numerous professional and personal interests and hobbies. While this is a good problem to have, nonetheless it is a problem if not contained! It’s a recipe for:
- becoming a jack of all trades and master of none;
- feeling less knowledgeable as every day passes.
This post titled The More You Know The More You Realize You Don’t Know goes through more detail explaining this.
Is wisdom the ratio of what you know over what you don’t know? Or is it what you know plus what you know you don’t know?
I’m now coming to terms with myself that I’m never going to be the kind of expert I expected myself to be. Certainly not in the short term. Maybe I set the bar so high such an expert simply cannot exist. A unicorn, if you will. Maybe my definition of the word “expert” needs a rework.
In any case, I’ve decided that quality content does not necessarily equate to expert produced technical material. I can still write about “stuff and things that were on my mind” and it can be quality content. My first blog may not have had the greatest topics, but it certainly wasn’t boring. It was quality.
