Brent Simmons wrote an excellent post about his motivations behind blogging. What I found most interesting was what he said about being wrong:
Everything is provisional — it’s what I think now, and I might change my mind in a year. Or in a day. Or in a minute, when somebody posts (or tweets) more or better information or has a solid argument.
I completely agree with Brent.
Everything I write here, and everything I say on ATP, is my point of view at that moment. Ask me again even an hour later and I may have dramatically changed my mind.
One of the things that I struggled with a lot in early ATP episodes, and continue to work on today, is being confident in my assertions. It’s hard to be so confident and sure, without actually… well… feeling confident nor sure. Given that the audience for both my podcast and this website tends to skew toward the nerdy, and the nerdy tend to skew toward the pedantic, I feel like everything I “put out there” has an implied “COME AT ME” attached to it.
However, the feedback I’ve gotten from both the show and this site make it all worth it. Some of it is hard to read — often times it’s hateful and generally unproductive. But many times it’s constructive rather than destructive, and makes me think about myself and my views a little bit differently.
As Brent said, once you accept the beauty and utility of being wrong, “putting something out there” quickly becomes one important step on the path to being right.