It's Only Obvious To You

A couple of years ago I published a quick how-to on passing a stupid limitation on a medically related website. Documenting it in the blog post took way longer than solving the problem. I threw up the blog post thinking one or two other people might find it interesting. Instead, I go dozens of emails thanking me for solving a problem that was apparently vexing to a lot of other people.

It was only obvious to me. How many ideas are you sitting on that might be obvious to you, but revelatory to somebody else? Obviously, you don't know the answer to that question. However, we are all pretty damn bad at judging our own creations. I can't even count the number of my blog posts or tweets that I thought were really clever, and completely ignored by the rest of the world. Meanwhile both times I've gone seriously viral on Twitter the tweets took probably 5 seconds to create. They were both throwaway comments in my mind, that somehow resonated with hundreds of thousands of other people.

¯_(ツ)_/¯

So share you stuff. Publish those thoughts. Don't self-censure. It might be obvious to you, and amazing to somebody else.