Recently I tweeted this:
Left tonight’s tech talk with more questions than answers, trying to decide if that is a good thing or bad…
— Wally Lawless (@Wallylawless) July 21, 2016
Afterwards I continued to wonder whether coming away from a tech talk with more questions than I started with was a good thing or not. It can certainly shake your confidence and make you feel like you might not know as much as you thought you did about the topic being discussed.
On the other hand, perhaps the fact that you have questions reflects the simple fact that the speaker simply has a different perspective from your own. Perhaps if you were to talk about what you were working on they’d have as many questions come up as you did.
There’s so much available to be known these days in the tech world, especially when it comes to the web I feel. As a result, it’s incredibly easy to get discouraged, or to constantly feel the weight of all the things that you know you don’t know. I know I certainly struggle with this.
I’m not sure what the answer is, but my strategy is going to be to try to be ok with not knowing everything. Maybe it comes with age and maturity, but it’s obvious to me now that aiming to know everything, no matter the topic, is a fool’s errand.
I’ve always been a great consumer of information. Recently though I’ve been trying to shift my focus towards only needing to know enough to take the next few steps I need on my journey. Once I’ve taken those steps I’ll be able to look from that new position of knowledge and experience and know what needs to be known next to keep going. I feel like this will help with overloading myself with information without really figuring out how to apply any of it.
After all, who cares what you know if you can’t do anything productive with that knowledge?
