Knowledge is Underrated and Information is Power
Knowledge is underrated and information is power. My friends and family are always telling me how smart I am and that I underestimate myself. Does this happen to you? Come on, admit it, at least your mom does it! Maybe it’s just me but at some point you have to start listening. A realization came over me that I may not be the most educated or knowledgeable person about some things but we all have something in us that we are nearly specialists in. In fact, you probably don’t feel that way because the information you possess inside you is so routine that it’s a no brainer. To others who struggle or want to learn thirst for this knowledge and look up to you for it. Does this sound familiar? No… not what others think of you but what you think of the people you look up to. You’re probably thinking right now, who the hell looks up to me? Now flip this around and put yourself in the shoes of that person you look up to. What is going through their mind when the idea that someone looks up to them comes through?
This is not meant to be a happy go lucky article but really… there is something inside us all that other people crave. You just don’t know it. Lets take my particular situation for example… programming. I recently worked with an individual that I really felt was far more advanced than I. Everyday at work I was asking questions and we worked back and forth through problems. For me this was a really great dynamic because I felt like a dolt most of the time. Later on I found out that even though I looked up to my programming partner, he learned a lot from me as well. How is this possible? In this situation it really was a great dynamic. The knowledge I had complimented what he needed and vice versa. How great is that? I feel that I was very fortunate in that situation.
What I am trying to get at is for all of you reading this right now… go write something down that you know. No matter how stupid or trivial you might think it is right now. Hell, go make a blog post, podcast, screencast, video out of it. Someone will find it useful. There has been many times that I felt i’ve looked everywhere for solution to my problem only to find it was never shared because the answer was too simple to some. As an example I want to give a plug to my friend Stephen Korecky. He recently started a new blog called AdminNoob. He’s taken all of the stuff that is actually pretty simple for most of us in the know but was all information that he had to figure out himself while acquiring a new skill. He felt that there was no one place to find all of this ‘beginner’ info regarding server setup and random system administration… so he wrote it down. Now the people in the community that I trot may not find this as useful because they probably already know most of it. Again think of the person that stumbles upon this site when in need. It’s like an intellectual gold mine to them!
