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The Influence You Have

A quick thought for you to chew on today.

I’ve written before that I believe you should be teaching others (either publicly or privately), even if you’re new or feel like you’re “not good enough yet”.

I promise, you’ll find more joy than you ever expected from it.  Let me show you an example…

A thank you message

Above is a message I recently received from my friend Ed.  I don’t know Ed personally – he found me through word of mouth, Twitter, and this website.  He’s reached out to me a few times, but we’re more acquaintances than close friends.

Despite that, the things I share and the efforts I make were part of Ed’s inspiration to discover a path to achieving his goals.

I could leave this post at that – that it’s awesome to help others because you get amazing thank you messages back and there’s a circle of warm, fuzzy happiness – but as much as that’s true, it’s not the entirety of this story.

Let me point out for a minute that Ed got a job as an audio programmer.  Currently, there’s no way I could pass a code test to land the same position with my employer (my C++ and engine-level programming skills are not up to par yet).

This should blow all your notions of “I’m not capable of teaching people because I’m not good enough” out of the water.

Yes, by my my standards – I’m an audio programmer.  But I’ll also admit to the caliber of programmer I am – and I think Ed would get hired before me if we were gunning for the same position.

But Ed still found motivation and inspiration in the things I have to say.  It wound up with him scoring a job, and sending me that super nice thank you note (as well as a further conversation) above.

My point is this: You absolutely never really know what you have to give until you give it.  You certainly have no idea what someone is going to take from it until they tell you.  You will be very surprised at how powerful both of those things turn out to be.

So I’d encourage you to really think about why you aren’t sharing and teaching.  I’m 110% sure that your reason is grounded in the fact that, on some level, you’re afraid of your ego being hurt.  I can promise you, it probably won’t be – instead you’ll learn a lot and get appreciated for your efforts.  Assholes are going to be assholes – but the rest are literally waiting to learn from you.

It doesn’t have to be a blog, or public, or a lot of work.  But you should spend some of your time pouring into others and passing on your talents.

I hope you can see, you won’t regret the decision.


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