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I don't know what I'm talking about
📰 Courage to admit our gaps & courage to take the leap
The internet gave a voice to everyone — me included. It has been overly repeated that anyone can say anything online, and it's clear that we enjoy making stupid people famous. Say something, say it again, then repeat it, and voilá, you are an expert on a subject.
There's an explicit formula for putting yourself out there as a specialist, and I believe one of these courses teaching you how to grow online has it all figured out. Do it like this, dress like that, speak this way, and never forget to like and subscribe. In no time, you'll be invited to fancy events and TED Talks.
I do not think the academy is the answer to avoid this wave of faux specialists — built on top of 90% marketing and 10% content. Usually, when met with these charlatans online, one would tell them to go read a book. Well, there's a lot of learning out of the pages of a hardcover.
Go to the country and talk to people that tend the ground or speak with those who do construction work. They know very much, and a good number never even finished school — and that's not a demerit.
I believe that an excellent way to fall far from that formula is to acknowledge what we don't know and speak up about things we excel in every day and those we don't know about. This can lead to a more sympathetic result: we are all people, and not only errare humanum est, but that nesciens est also humanum.
Not to know is human.
One of the best examples of showing humility in this world of know-it-alls is done by Dan Abramov (a ReactJS expert) in his Things I don't know as of 2018 blog post.
In it, Abramov plainly speaks about many technology topics he has little or no knowledge about. It's more extensive than just saying, "hey, I'm not as good as you think," and concise enough, so it doesn't get boring. I'd love to read about what Abramov learned since then — and what he chose not to go after.
Our brains are limited, and we have to make choices. As a proud generalist, choosing which topics I'll forever know only a bit about is essential. There's not enough time in the world to read all books, learn all languages, and know all curiosities about a subject. We have to be selective.
I, for instance, selected the subjects of interest while noticing my surroundings. While everyone focused on journalistic writing in college, I pursued photography and design. I'm sure I graduated a better designer than my colleagues, and although this does make me a worse journalist, it never made me a less-than-optimal professional. When I started programming, I purposefully went straight to Javascript, and I never touched anything apart from it except that one time with Python. Javascript — and now, Typescript — was the tool I needed and what could take me to achieve my goals at that time.
Also, I learned all of that in my free time.
In college, photography and design were pursued in addition to my daily tasks and classes, as well as in time out of the office — I worked through my whole college, as many Brazilians do. I remember doing HTML and CSS online classes during my lunch break or while I waited for a new order from my boss to re-draw a newspaper page at Folha de S.Paulo. All of these small and contained lessons paid out.
Am I the same as a Computer Science master? Absolutely not. I'm not the best programmer in my team, not the best in my company, and not the best among my peers in other enterprises. But, different from them, my lessons in communication bring a new flavor to the table that their Dot O Notation thinking might not be able to understand. Am I better than them? Not at all... but they aren't better than me in a broader sense. We, together, can form an incredible and unbreakable bond — the whole biblical rope concept.
I am, in no way, an expert.
I really want you, reader, to reread this sentence, so let's repeat it: I am, in no way, an expert.
Everything I speak about here comes from my mind and the plethora of sources I've come upon in this not-so-long life. I've read my share of Umberto Eco, Walter Benjamin, and McLuhan. I also completed Kent C. Dodds courses and took my Scrum Master certification after Valentin Despa's lessons. With all the books, videos, and audio in the world, I'm still a white guy with a voice online, with nothing out of the ordinary.
I don't know what puts anyone officially into that Specialist With Capital S chair. Again, I don't think the academy alone does it: getting a master's or doctorate in Brazil is soul-crushing, leading to severe mental issues and even suicide.
We've learned much about how appointed specialists can be absolute morons in these last years. We've seen rude people like The Uncle (from programming, you know who I'm talking about) to douchebags doctors that deny the vaccines and fuck up the entire planet, all of them with their academy-issued specialist certificates.
Doing a thing over and over again for some time, putting your work out there, might seat you in that seat — Dan Abramov is a ReactJS expert because he did a lot and showed all of that stuff to the world. At the same time, who can say we're not improvising all the time, trying a thousand times and only showing the ones that worked?
Parents know best
I can't have kids, but my friends can. They have pursued this goal in the last few years with vigor and focus. Seeing my friends with kids is a great experience — first because they are the ones required in smelly times, and second because I had the opportunity to finally understand:
We are ALWAYS winging it.
When I was a kid, my parents didn't know what they were doing. They were absolutely clueless when, on the same trip but on different days, I opened up my chin, broke a leg, then an arm — there's a picture in another issue of this newsletter.
When I was about 12, I was hit by a car while riding my bike. When my mother got the call, she drove through four different cities and reached the hospital — in the same neighborhood of the accident — before the ambulance arrived.
Did she know she was getting a shit ton of speeding tickets? Yeah, sure. At the same time, she was absolutely conscious of her controllable actions, focused only on doing her best to mitigate uncontrollable outcomes — my death, for instance.
My accident was way less tragic than I make it sound, but she did arrive at the hospital before everyone and was there by my side when I woke up. She improvised during her whole motherhood — until she passed away when I was almost 17 — but I can tell you she was an absolute expert in being a mother.
There are no masters or doctorates in parenting, and we, as humankind, have been doing it since before we climbed down the trees. I doubt we are correct in our methods — hello, therapy time again — but I can guarantee we've been doing it the best way we could.
Conclusion
It might look like I know what I was doing when I took this weird turn — from academy and technology to the joys of parenting — but, as I said before, I don't know what I'm doing.
I'm improvising, winging it, trying to cut the correct wire to defuse the bomb.
I hope you are here with me on the same page, improvising as a reader and consumer of the content I put up. If you ever feel like you don't know what I'm talking about, or if you don't get my weirdly misplaced analogies, please let me know.
Let's learn together and understand we don't need to be specialists every time to talk about something; we need to be sincere and say out loud: I don't know what I'm talking about.