Make Mistakes in Public
I often got anxious about making mistakes, and the slightest thought in doing them in public always freaked me out. In this post, I’ll talk about how I deal with it nowadays, and how I think you should approach it as well.
What learning in public means
People often learn in private, that is, people produce content for themselves, like taking notes in their notebook or in note taking apps, but their public output is basically zero.
You already know that you will never be done learning
With that in mind, to learn in public is to produce things you wish you had found when you were learning and make them public. For example:
- Write articles, blog posts
- Create posts on social media: Twitter, LinkedIn, etc…
- Make YouTube videos/livestreams
- Reach out for people that created content you like online (open PRs, ping them on social media, etc…)
Another important thing to keep in mind is not to keep in mind the numbers of the things you make public. It’s not because a blog post you’ve loved written has zero likes and the silly meme went viral that you should stop writing about what you’re learning or what you’re interested in.
You cannot predict how the public will engaje with the content, but if you constantly have the habit of creating content that yourself from the past would’ve liked, that’s enough. Other people finding it is a great consequence, but it should not be what you’re aiming for.
Quotes in this section and more detailed explanation about learn in public can be found here.
But how do you deal with making mistakes in public?
Making mistakes is bad
I constantly felt afraid of learning by myself, of experimenting, of making mistakes, of being judged. I know some people aren’t like that, but a lot of people actually suffer from it.
There are actual reasons that you might be like this, and although I’m not diving into about each of those reasons, I must talk about a specific reason that I believe can be of help to a majority of people that feel this way. The reason is: you lack experience.
What I mean by experience
I’m not talking about a job, project or anything specific. I’m talking about absolutely any experience that you might feel the slightest anxiety doing. That can travelling abroad alone, asking the girl you like to go out, asking “dumb” questions for your coworker, et cetera.
How to stop feeling anxious
Think about an experience you had in the past that you felt really anxious at the time, but now when you stop to think about it, it’s so embarassing that you ever felt anxious about it, like ordering your own food on the restaurant.
Now, what made you stop feeling anxious (or bad, in any sort) about it?
Again, that can be of many reasons, but one I will highlight in this post is: you went through the action even though you were anxious. In other words, you expose yourself.
This is an actual technique in behavioral therapy called exposure therapy, where the patient is gradually exposed to the anxiety source or its context in increasing anxiety, so the anxiety is not so big that it traumatizes the patient, but gradually making the patient closer to what makes it anxious.
Essentially, the whole point of exposing yourself to anxious situations is telling your brain that it is okay doing a specific action or going through a specific event. Because, basically, our brain is not used to deal with that much of stimuli we get bombed everyday (social media, too crowded places among other things present in our current society).
Learn that making mistakes is good
After all that exposure therapy talk, let me relate it with learning in public, and actually making a more specific allegation: To learn in public can be as great as the mistakes quantity you make in public.
Every mistake can be seen as a chance of improvement or a self-demanding weight you’ll have to carry around all the time.
Always prefer to look at a mistake as a chance of improvement.
By learning in public, you can receive more feedback, improving your capacity of feeling anxious about your mistakes, hence it becomes easier to make mistakes, enabling you to exponentially improve yourself.
In short, you become antifragile.
Disclaimer
Let me make one thing perfectly clear: it is not simple to expose yourself to social interactions (for example) if you have social anxiety or any other disorder. I am not telling you to expose yourself to extremely anxious sources. Yet, if you’re like me and don’t have enough money or time to talk to a therapist, actually exposing yourself purposefully to some sort of anxious source can be of help.
Conclusion
Learning in public is a great way to learn, but it can be leveraged to exponentially improve yourself as you get more comfortable with making mistakes.
If you have any doubts, recommentations, thoughts that you’d like to express, please feel free to reach me.