What stops me from writing and posting something publicly? Probably the same thing stops you, too: the belief that it is not novel enough.
I think it comes from the belief that we do not have good enough content to share. When we read highly cited or widely shared articles online, we usually find something novel in them. So, when it comes to writing and sharing our own ideas, we judge them from the perspective of novelty and tend to undervalue them.
Because most of the ideas that come to us exist within our informational bubble, we genuinely believe they are common sense and that there is nothing worth sharing. So, we decide they are not worth writing about or posting.
There is research behind this intuition. The effect is known as the curse of knowledge: once something feels familiar to us, we tend to overestimate how widely known it is. The original experimental work on the effect showed that better-informed people struggle to ignore what they know when predicting the judgments of less-informed people (Camerer, Loewenstein, and Weber, 1989).
More directly, a later series of experiments found that people were more likely to judge information as common knowledge when it was easy for them to recall, even when others were unlikely to know it (Birch et al., 2017).
Ask someone outside your bubble
The next time you are about to discard an idea for something you want to write, ask someone else whether they think it is common sense. Ask someone outside your bubble. Then write your article anyway. Write it and post it for yourself.
People have been fundamentally alike for centuries and millennia. We share the same problems, although different people may have distinct or similar opinions on the same matter.
You may have noticed, if you have read enough self-help or personal-development books, that there is a limited number of ideas and principles underlying almost all of them. There is nothing wrong with offering your own interpretation or your own perspective on the same idea.
A simple idea can still resonate
This happened to me this year. I had a simple idea that I could post on my blog. I almost discarded it. Then I read an article that was at the top of Hacker News. It was simple but touching. The fact that many people engaged with it made me believe that, when you write and share something authentic, it can still be well received even if it is not something brand new.
So I wrote my post, published it on my blog, shared it on Hacker News, and forgot about it. Then, one morning, I saw messages from my friends telling me that my post had reached the front page of Hacker News.
It was a post about a small trick I use to save my evenings (sometimes, hehe). I had not invented anything new. You can read comments from people who do similar things, and some people even shared links to well-known techniques that describe the same idea. So, it was not novel, but somehow it was well received.
I do not really understand why or how. I think it was mostly luck. But for me, it was a strong confirmation that novelty is a powerful self-filter that makes us discard potentially good posts.
Final thoughts
If you have recently thought of something but self-filtered and discarded it because you believed it was common sense and there was nothing worth sharing, bring it back to life. Take a pen and paper, spend 60 minutes on it, post it somewhere, and share the link in the comments.
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