There are two problems in our profession:
- Imposter Syndrome
- An infinite amount of information readily available
Independently, neither of these are actually problems 1.
At the intersection of Imposter Syndrome and infinite content is where we spend too much time. We’re spending time reading how others have solved their own problems instead of solving our own.
The intersection of Imposter Syndrome and infinite content is a dangerous place to spend time. The intersection is why Hacker News, Twitter and Medium are all popular in our profession today.
We’re so insecure in our own skills and experiences that we try to read as much as possible.
We assume that everyone else has figured it out.
I read this post about Scrum, I can finally get my team to do it “right”. It’s been retweeted 13.4k times, so it must be good.
If I read this Medium article about the best user research questions, I’ll finally start to get value out of my user research. It’s got seventy-billion “claps”, so it must be good.
Everyone else is reading this book, so I better get in on it.
Thing is: the authors of those blog posts probably feel the same way.
But we don’t think about that. We skim the article (at best) with confirmation biases running in the background, fixate on the bulleted list of “solutions” at the bottom of the page, share it in our team’s Slack page, then wonder why the problem won’t go away.
And because their solution to their problem didn’t solve our problem, we actually feel worse. So we read even more.
Most blog posts about how some other awesome founder or design team or engineer lacks enough context to actually be useful. 2
Those blog posts, Quora answers, clever Tweets, and sometimes entire books, lack context.
Your team is not the same as their team. Your experience is not the same as their experience.
If you’re a manager, stop sharing Medium articles, tweets and blog posts. Read what you want to read 3, but establish a point of view and share that with your team, instead. Help create an opinionated team with a point-of-view to solving problems, not just a team that regurgitates whatever article was popular last week.
And if you’re an individual contributor, do the exact same thing.