I’ve taken a little break from my content strategies for success series lately. I would love to have a better excuse than I was busy and let that provide cover for the real excuse: I was doubting myself. If the goal of your blog is to establish yourself as an expert in your field, then it’s hard to keep going if you don’t believe in yourself. This is something I’ve struggled with a bit in the last few weeks.
Today I want to address believing in yourself, something I’ve struggled with. Tomorrow I will discuss the need to feel like an expert.
The Suspension Of Disbelief
Today, what I love about what I do is how frequently I have no clue what I’m doing. It wasn’t long ago that all I knew about web development was how to write the most basic HTML tags, with no CSS, let alone PHP. Last week, I had two patches I contributed to merged into WordPress core. The feeling that I still wasn’t good enough was keeping me from blogging, but the sense of accomplishment that came from becoming a WordPress core contributor has helped me get over my temporary crisis of confidence, but I never would have gotten to this point, if I hadn’t suspended my disbelief in myself a long time ago.
The willing suspension of disbelief is what makes literary fiction and dramatic works possible. Only when we agree that the limitations of a medium does it become real. A play is only a play when we decide it is more than actors on a stage performing a work. A few years ago, during one of my many crisis of confidence about whether or not I would ever be able to finish my masters thesis given all of shortcomings as a human beings, I decided to apply this concept to my self.
I decided to pretend I knew what I was doing, that I could do whatever I set my mind too. I suspended my disbelief in myself.
The Power Of Belief
My master’s thesis led to the idea for a WordPress-based web app, something I had very little idea how to create at the time, so I decided to throw myself into the WordPress world full-time after graduating. I took a job with the Pods Framework that involved providing support for a plugin that I had no idea how to use.
I learned how to use the plugin by helping people use it, and by writing tens of thousands of words worth of tutorials on how to use the plugin. My favorite part of the job is knowing every day, at least one Pods user, but probably more will ask me a question I have no idea what the answer to is. It also helped me learn about using WordPress as a content management system as well as object-oriented PHP.
In a world where technology, and the environment are constantly evolving what you have learned is so much less important than how quickly you learn. This throws a wrinkle into the idea of your blog being how you show off how much you know about something, when what you really want to show is your ability to learn things, such as the answer to someone else’s problem, quickly.
Remembering that I don’t have to know everything about what I do and blog about helped get me through my most recent crisis of confidence, more than any accomplishment. I remembered that I’m good at not knowing everything. It also gave me something to write about tomorrow, how to escape the expertise trap, and a post that creates the need for another post is the best way to keep a blog moving. So consider me back on track.