Learn in Public

I’ve known Shawn for a little while online, but just recently met him in person. We got to talking about a variety of things and he told me about this short little piece of writing he’d done sometime past. So I looked it up and read it. It’s good. I like the metaphor that comes to mind of “creating learning exhaust”. I think that makes writing feel more feasible and accessible. What you produce doesn’t have to be Hemingway; rather it’s often just going to be the byproduct of your learning.

You already know that you will never be done learning. But most people "learn in private", and lurk. They consume content without creating any themselves…What you do here is to have a habit of creating learning exhaust. Write blogs and tutorials and cheatsheets. Speak at meetups and conferences. Ask and answer things on Stackoverflow or Reddit. (Avoid the walled gardens like Slack and Discourse, they're not public). Make Youtube videos or Twitch streams. Start a newsletter. Draw cartoons (people loooove cartoons!). Whatever your thing is, make the thing you wish you had found when you were learning…just talk to yourself from 3 months ago.