2014-01-24: Added text from images

Don't wait to feel like an expert before you share what you've learned. The world needs more beginners.

Sharing what you're learning

So there's value in whatever you can share, even if you're just starting out.

But you probably weren't waiting for that reassurance. Maybe there's something else holding you back. The more I think about this, the more I recognize (in myself and others) the fear, sometimes, of being less experienced and less knowledgeable than other people think you are.

I find myself adopting these coping mechanisms when the impostor syndrome intersects with my professional life:

Dealing with impostor syndrome

With others, I minimize the chance of impostor syndrome by giving them as much information as they need to make their own decisions. As for me, I think the best strategy for me is to throw myself into being a beginner, to embrace that figuring-out, to be delighted by the gaps and the mistakes, and to share the journey – especially the detours.

TEXT FROM “Sharing What You're Learning” 

Books are great, but they're not for everyone. If you find it hard to get through a book, figure out what your personal learning style is, and adapt to that instead. Do you prefer listening to audio or watching presentations? The Internet has plenty of resources, and many libraries carry audiobooks and DVDs as well. Do you prefer doing things with your hands? Experimenting is getting easier and easier.

That said, reading is a skill you can get better at. If you can become more comfortable with reading–or at least, with getting the most important points from a book or a summary of it–you can access a treasure trove of people's knowledge through the ages. Here's a sketch of mine from 2012 on How to Read a Book (Adler and van Doren)

Still, if you've got a choice of learning formats, why not pick one that follows your learning style? =) Good luck and have fun!

Have you identified any role models for the skills you want to learn or improve?

When people tell me they want to learn more about something, I often ask them who they look up to as role models for the skills they want to build. It really helps to have a clear picture of what success looks like, and then you can play “spot the difference” to figure out specific techniques or steps for improvement. You might not want to do everything that your role models do or suggest, but studying them can show you options and ideas you might otherwise have missed.

I get a lot of value even through learning from role models from a distance. Since there are so many ways to learn, I generally don’t want to ask for people’s attention, so I rarely reach out. Instead, I try to build things up so that people talk to me. =) Other people get a kick out of getting e-mails, tweets, or comments from famous people. If you’re one of those — or if you want to ask your role model for more specific advice — here are some tips for building that connection!

(Also, it really does help if you tell people what you’re learning from them or trying to learn from them! =) Sometimes people don’t know what they know until someone asks.)

I’ve been drawing a lot more on paper lately, so I should update my Sketching Tools page. It is nice as a way to quickly get my thoughts down without the tiring brightness of the computer screen or the distractions of the Internet. Here’s what I’ve been learning about the differences between drawing on paper and drawing on my computer:

There’s always room to make things better, of course. How can we think on paper more effectively? The mindmap that I’ve been working on gives me a useful overview, letting me see when I’ve accumulated several sketches in a particular area so that I can put them into a blog post. I’ve also figured out how to include the sketches in my review process, thanks to this Flickr metadata downloader (Python). Speech recognition still hasn’t made its way into my toolkit, though…

Now that I’ve got a decent archive of paper notes, the next challenge is making these easy to search and organize. I’ve put together some tips for making your paper notes more searchable here:

… and getting them into your computer so that you can organize them along with the rest of your notes.

Lately I’ve been using Flickr for sharing and tagging images and Evernote for the occasional hand-written search. Let’s see how this works out…

I’m really curious about how other people manage their paper notes. I’ve been trying to find more details on how Isaac Asimov organized his notes – filing cabinets, apparently, but it would be great to get more detail! Do you have a large paper archive? How do you manage it? Do you know anyone who does this really well?

The growing popularity of Google Helpouts mean that I often respond to requests from people who want to learn more about taking notes and learning more effectively. I want to make sure that people who book Helpouts with me (for the virtual equivalent of hot chocolate and a muffin!) think about specific questions, check for technical issues, and are otherwise prepared for the 15-minute conversation. That way, we can both get the most of the time.

Since I find myself sending people messages that are similar but not identical to others I’ve sent, I use text expanders instead of autoresponders to save myself time. My favourite automation program is AutoHotkey, which is rather geekily configured through plain text files. (Want a cleaner interface? Try Lifehacker’s recommendations for Windows or Mac). I’ve defined a few hotstrings that expand to welcome messages for my different Helpouts, nudges about technical issues, and so on.

If you find yourself typing or copying and pasting a lot of text frequently, consider using a text expander. Typing a pre-defined shortcut is easier than finding a specific item in your snippets file, and you might even be able to do all sorts of other things with the tool. For example, I’ve used AutoHotkey to set a keyboard shortcut for copying something from a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet row, switching to another application, pasting it in, reformatting it, and then moving on to the next row. Lots of good stuff. See my Autohotkey blog posts for more examples.

Be lazy and automate! =)

Take better notes, and the world will beat a path to your door. Or something like that. =) As it turns out, sketchnotes are an excellent way to capture ideas from presentations and meetups. Eric asked me if I was interested in sketchnoting more of the Awesome Foundation Toronto pitch nights. (They give the awesomest project $1000 in a paper bag to help make things happen.) I did the sketchnotes for a while because I wanted to learn more about what makes projects awesome. The sketchnotes were faster to make and more engaging than video highlights, so people really liked them. But I’ve been inching away from sketching other people’s stuff so that I can focus on my own, so…

Awesome Foundation is pretty cool and I like how they encourage people to come up with and share great ideas… but I’m keeping my event commitments to the minimum. Maybe it will be a good fit for someone else, though – local sketchnoters building their portfolio and their business, perhaps? It would be great to see different styles, too!

Anyway, since I’m moving a little bit away from doing events, I thought I’d put together some guides to help people who are looking for event sketches.

Hope that helps!

It turns out that you don’t have to write alone, and that you don’t have to have all the answers (or all the ideas!) at the beginning.

I’ve been using Twitter to share ideas related to upcoming blog posts. For example, I asked people what kept them from taking notes, and I added their thoughts to a blog post that I was writing. I shared something I realized about dealing with uncertainty by making potential outcomes arbitrarily better, and that led to a back-and-forth conversations that helped me clarify what I meant.

Condensing an idea into 140 characters is a great exercise. Bonus points if there’s a question in there too.

Sometimes I share post ideas before I’ve drafted the posts so that I can see if an idea resonates enough to make me want to write it. Sometimes I share the idea after I’ve outlined or drafted the first version so I know what I think. I don’t ditch post ideas if they don’t get a response, but I mix in people’s feedback whenever I can.

I also use Twitter to share links to some blog posts after they go live, but the conversation seems more interesting if I don’t start it with a monologue. Besides, editing an upcoming post to incorporate people’s thoughts is much easier and more useful than updating something that people have already seen in their feed readers. The Share a Draft plugin is great for giving people links to unpublished posts. ScribeFire is great for editing existing posts.

Another benefit of writing posts in advance is that by the time you get around to folding people’s insights into your post, you probably have enough distance to edit your first version ruthlessly. If you do this at least a few days in advance, you can even go back to the people who shared their thoughts with you and see if you’ve quoted them properly.

If you blog, try giving people a sneak peek at upcoming thoughts and asking them for feedback. You can do this through e-mail or through social networks. I like social networks like Twitter and Facebook more than e-mail because other people can see and build on responses, but feel free to use whatever works for you. Enjoy!