Good question! One that I’m asking myself as we speak…
My own learning
I’m starting this mainly because I made the choice to get out of my comfort zone and figure out how to continue to invest in myself. I find it really easy to learn and develop skills that are directly relevant to work or to life, but it’s a lot harder to intentionally go off and learn something new. So in an effort to continue to learn more things in life that are useful, here I am!
You might ask, what does this have to do with learning? Well, it’s starting off less about the writing and more about everything that goes into building a blog - the website, interactions, hosting, etc. I’ve spent the majority of the technical portion of my career around backend systems, not frontend, and I frankly think that’s a shame. The blog part just happens to be because I wanted to learn something new and see if I could scratch an itch along the way.
The itch
So, what’s the itch? Another good question…
As an individual, I’ve always loved to read and use reading as a way to continually learn and develop. In addition, as a manager and leader I’ve found one of the things that I love the most is mentoring good people. I’ve never been a teacher, but as I’ve mentored more and more I’ve been seeing what I’m sure teachers get to see more regularly - people learning and growing faster and more effectively as a result of your efforts. So where do these two things intersect?
It’s a real pain to curate relevant content! I find myself constantly bookmarking articles that I like, but when I go back to re-read or to share them with someone else (months or even years later) I’ve found that I didn’t put enough time and attention around how to categorize, rate, summarize, etc. many of these articles. What’s more, I’ve found many articles touch on bits and pieces of things, but doesn’t necessarily organize or present information in the way that I personally like when I’m discussing different topics with people.
So long story short, here I am - both learning for myself and (hopefully) using this eventually as something that I can share with others to learn from as well.