I started blogging back in 2004 on LiveJournal (it was Medium of those days, if you kids don’t know). I didn’t have any audience in mind when I wrote on my personal blog – it was literally a log of my personal thoughts. It allowed me to write about anything.
An year later I started writing about free and open source software and that was when I was writing for an audience. I was writing for others who want to learn and use open source software.
Since I was also learning stuff, I wrote about things that I found interesting and people seemed to like it. I didn’t put any restrictions on myself on what to post and what not to post.
But after a few years, the number of posts I wrote decreased. Looking back I think the reason for that is I began to be more conscious of the type of posts I write. I started working and when I looked around, I saw people much experience than me doing way cooler stuff.
I soon lost the motivation to write things that I loved to, thinking “Who am I to write about these? There are much better people than me.” That is where it went downhill.
I am just another “average” person who has some opinions to share with others. The good thing about being an average person is that there are 50% of people who are even worse than you at that particular thing.
Being average puts you right in the middle of this broad spectrum. You can write much better content than some expert because you are much closer to the left end of the spectrum. You can explain stuff much effectively and in an easy to understand way than the experts.
Also it is easier for you to improve your writing to the next step than someone who is at the 95th percentile to reach the top.
Take for example computer programming. I call myself an average programmer. I know only one easy programming language at best and understand some basic concepts. I don’t know how any fancy algorithms are written or how to write a particular data structure using less memory.
There are people who are able to do much more than what I said and I personally know some of those people.
There might be someone who can write a complex parallel program using haskell in one line. And I would have to google to even make sure that I got the spelling of haskell right.
Does that mean I shouldn’t post about the time I learnt how cool goroutines are? Definitely not.
There are people who are still using some badly written old java code or someone even maintaining decades old COBOL program on mainframe.
It is for those people whom I am going to start writing about. People who are below average. I hope that with my writing, I will be able to make them even better and hopefully I also move to a better place on the spectrum.
Being average is good. It gives you opportunities that others don’t have. Grab it.