Or why it took me nearly a year to write my first post here. Exploring my own fear and possible impostor syndrome.
I bought this domain name nearly a year ago, full of enthusiasm.
This is not the first time I was going to publish something on the internet. For the past 15 years, I have been publishing articles, videos, and podcasts but primarily for CookiesHQ, my then software consultancy.
Publishing was a way for us to grow, recruit, share our expertise, and make new connections, but also a way to give something back to the community and help others.
I’ve always enjoyed the web as a space; it’s the idea that everyone can own their little part of this vast space. You don’t need to be/want to be famous, and you’re sometimes simply using it as a cathartic or therapeutic experience.
Toughs, words, pixels on a screen and this act of creating something and hitting publish.
So, following our acquisition, I needed to get back to this idea of personal writing.
Surely, after 20 years of developing software professionally, 5 years of freelance and 10 years of growing an agency, recruiting,managing a team, growing our revenue to 7 figures, launching more than 30 different projects for our clients, working with startups, scale up, non profit organisations and finally going though an acquisition process and now building a new SAAS product, I would have a few interesting things to share.
So I started to list what I wanted to write and talk about. What subjects, I think, I can bring value on?
And after buying this domain name, I decided that I would write about what I know the most about:
- Tips about building and maintaining Ruby on Rails applications.
- New and shiny features of Ruby on Rails and how to use them.
- Sharing some updates on a personal project of mine.
- Thought about our industry, service businesses, the web and startups.
Easy enough, these are subjects I can talk about for hours with my team. How difficult could it be for me to write about this?
So I bought the domain name, inevitably played with every tool under the sun, and then decided to wire up a little WordPress site, and off I will publish a new article each week.
At least that’s what I thought was going to happen. Week after week, I would tell myself that next week would be the one. I will start next week to write something.
Surely enough, the next week passed, and that first draft was still an empty page.
Maybe it’s because I don’t have the time right now? After all, a lot was going on in Amba, and we were building the foundation of a new company.
Ok, let’s give it a month and come back to back.
Then, month after month, my desire to write and publish something was there, but my actions were not matching my desires.
After nearly a year, what was happening became pretty clear.
I was scared to start. I feared hitting publish.
Maybe that was ego getting in the way, perhaps that’s the so-called imposter syndrome, perhaps it’s the fear of talking non sense.
For as much I’ve done in the past 10 or 20 years, I know that I’m now starting again at the bottom. My space on the internet, this domain name, is empty and will need to be filled up. And I know this is going to be difficult.
While a lot of people will tell you to write for yourself, don’t worry if nobody reads it, let’s face it, no one wants to spend time doing anything for it to go completely unnoticed.
I want to share my experiences to be able to help some people.
I want to create new connections.
I want people to disagree with me so we all can enter a conversation and learn from each other. (If the Internet can still be such a place)
But all this, I know, is very difficult. Things take time. I’ve been there before.
So here I am, writing again for the first time and kickstarting my journey by sharing my fears with people to keep myself accountable.
Yes, I’m scared that this corner of the internet will become yet another dusty space where nothing more gets published. Yes, I fear hitting publish even if I’ve done it 100 times before. Yes, I fear that nobody will read this.
But, I will not let my fear get in the way. I’m going to hit publish now.
