Journalism and Media Opportunities reposted this
𝗦𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝘂𝗶𝗹𝘁 𝗵𝗲𝗿 𝗼𝘄𝗻 𝘄𝗲𝗯𝘀𝗶𝘁𝗲. 𝗛𝗲𝗿 𝗳𝗮𝗺𝗶𝗹𝘆 𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗱𝗼𝗲𝘀𝗻'𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗸 𝘀𝗵𝗲'𝘀 𝘀𝗺𝗮𝗿𝘁. I met a client last week.. she's a librarian, sixty-something, based in Sweden. She was onboarding me on a project and she pulled up her screen to show me something. A WordPress site she built herself. Book database, categories, the whole system, done on her own. I told her, that's genuinely impressive. And she laughed, this quiet kind of laugh, and said something I haven't been able to shake off since. "My children don't think I'm smart. My husband doesn't either." I asked her why. "Because every time I try to tell them about the things I'm working on, they think of me as a nuisance. Why is she even talking about this, what does it help us with." So she stopped talking about it. Kept building anyway, just quietly, for herself. I recognized that immediately, because I've felt it too. So I asked her something else. What else have you been building that you haven't shared with anyone? She pulled up another screen. SQL connections, a database she's been teaching herself for a while now. Said she doesn't even know if she'll get to use it at her age, but she loves learning it anyway. She told me she's hopeful about our generation, watches what Gen Z is doing with genuine interest, and wants to leave behind a collection of books for younger people, because she remembers a time when access to information wasn't something you could take for granted. Then she thanked me. Said it had been a long time since someone let her actually share that. I'm up most mornings before 4am, learning, building, reading. I do it because I want to get better, that's the whole reason. But when I try to talk about what I'm actually working on, most people around me tune out. It's just that the thing I'm deep in isn't the thing they're deep in. So you learn to stop sharing. You listen to everyone else's stories and rarely tell your own. And slowly you get used to being unseen for the parts of you that took the most out of you to build. Van Gogh sold one painting in his lifetime. One. He made thousands. I don't think most people are sitting on unsold masterpieces. But I do think most people are sitting on something they worked hard for that nobody around them has asked about in a long time. So here's the ask.. next time someone you know is deep in something, building something, learning something you don't fully understand. Don't wait for them to explain it well enough to earn your attention. Ask them a question first. You might be the first person who's asked in a while. Repost if you think more people need to hear this. ~ George Kamunge | CEO RatifiedTech