A little information needed, please. How many of you at one point or another were paralyzed from writing and/or posting something on account of feeling like a total fraud? Does having a blog change this, or exacerbate it?
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A little information needed, please. How many of you at one point or another were paralyzed from writing and/or posting something on account of feeling like a total fraud? Does having a blog change this, or exacerbate it?
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Uh oh… did someone just read Dalton Conley’s Elsewhere, USA… because he makes a big deal out of that (without much evidence, I might add).
No, for good and bad I haven’t read Conley. It’s more about getting into blogging, that one of the bars is the feeling that you have nothing to say, or worse, that what you might say would reveal you as a fraud. My point was that this is a common feeling, but maybe not.
I think all of us have that feeling at some points during our career. For me it usually seeps in when I’m about to do something new, and the feeling usually goes away after I’ve had some experience with the new thing. I think blogging has helped in that respect. By forcing myself out on the stage, I’m actually compelled to talk about what I know (or think I know) and communicate those ideas in a straightforward way. The mere act of hearing or reading my expressed thoughts helps me to realize that I do have something worthwhile to contribute. I guess that’s one reason that blogging is a productive format for me.
Ask me tomorrow though and I may have a different answer.
I feel like a fraud most of the time, so blogging is nothing special. In fact, as Brayden says, it helps dispel the fraud idea, especially if you fool yourself into thinking that posting to your blog is like publishing. After all, it is publishing (making public) in some sense. So you think: this is published, it must be O.K., and I wrote it, so maybe I’m not such a fraud. Then, after you “publish” it, nobody says, “This is the most uninformed piece of garbage anybody has ever written.” So you can continue to think, maybe it is O.K.
That’s why I see blogging as this wonderful vehicle for self-deception. But what do I know? I’m a fraud.