My old school friend Aaron is a fisher and a craftsman and rod builder. He often makes me miss living on the South coast with photos of his fishing trips. Today he posted the photo above describing how he had managed to catch what he described as a ‘decent fish’. I’ve done a small amount of fishing in my time, but I can’t even imagine catching something like that. As I used to tell my students:
What’s ordinary to you can be inspirational (and more importantly, instructive) to someone else.
It’s easy to get caught up (no pun intended) in your own area. When you are striving to keep improving and you are getting better and better, you focus on the small improvements, how you are as compared to the next best person. Often it’s easy to forget how far you have come and how valuable it could be to share that journey with someone else. When the thing you are working on is niche it’s easy to forget that others might be treading the same path, or might decide to if only they knew the path existed.
These days many of us are working, and developing, in some kind of niche.
One of the beauties of the technologies we have now for sharing is we can get stuff outside of our immediate community where it is totally normal and into a space where people can find it for who it would be next level thinking that would spur them on to new things. It gets them thinking, realising there is a map for a territory they had never noticed before, realising that if they figure out that map they could head off to a different destination they might not have thought of before.
That’s why it can be important to share event when you aren’t seeking feedback, or even when you aren’t massively proud of something, because what you do every day can be hugely instructive to someone else and set them on a path they may never have thought of otherwise.
What’s ordinary to you can be inspirational (and more importantly, instructive) to someone else.
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