I’m on the lookout for wisdom on how to share my work. Here are a few quotes.

Austin Kleon says: [Amateurs are] just regular people who get obsessed by something and spend a ton of time thinking out loud about it.

David Foster Wallace said that he thought good nonfiction was a chance to “watch somebody reasonably bright but also reasonably average pay far closer attention and think at far more length about all sorts of different stuff than most of us have a chance to in our daily lives.”

Tiago Forte talks about creating an online course of your own, long before you feel ready to do that. He says what do you know better than 99% of the world? Create a course teaching that knowledge. If you were an Art history major, package up what you learned into a course.

Each of these stresses how within each of us, we already have something to share with the world, simply because we obsess over things, and through that obsession we learn and improve. The world wants to hear about that. Even if you don’t feel ready, tell me something you learned today or a mistake you made or something that evoked emotion in you. All of these I value, the world values.

This is an empowering thought. I’ve used to think it’s only those who have produced a final product who actually have something of worth to share. Now I see how flawed that thinking is. So I ask myself, on Feb 9th 2021, what do I obsess over more than the average person?

  1. What are Stories, why we tell stories. What can we learn from the oldest stories.
  2. How to write stories, how to share stories, what makes good stories.
  3. Stress-free productivity. Work-life balance. How to live a healthy life.
  4. Understanding Human experience: how and why we act. Meta-cognition: perceptions, meaning, chaos vs order. How to express emotions, what is a whole person.
  5. Communication and how we use language (especially written language).

These are the things that although I’m no master, I already have something to say about them.