I have noticed how often people feel the need to establish why they are qualified to talk about something before they actually say what they think.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What do you do? What did you study? How long have you been doing this? What are your credentials?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It can feel like you need to prove you have earned the right to have an opinion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I understand why expertise matters. There are plenty of things I would rather leave to people who actually know what they are doing. If I need medical advice, I want a doctor. If I need legal advice, I want a lawyer. If I need someone to fix something I know nothing about, I would rather hire someone who has done it a hundred times than someone who watched a few videos about it. Experts know things I do not, and that is a good thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But being an expert and having something interesting to say are not the same thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You can spend years studying something and know far more about it than I ever will. You can also experience something once and come away with an observation that stays with you. You can try something and find that it works differently from what you expected. You can notice something that other people overlook. You can spend a lot of time thinking about a question without ever arriving at a definite answer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
None of that makes you an expert, but it can still make your perspective worth hearing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That is really where this site comes from. I am not an expert. I am just paying attention. I know some things, think about others, wonder about plenty more, try things, find things, build things, and go to work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Some of the things I write about will come from experience. Some will be opinions. Some will probably be questions that I have not figured out yet. I do not want to pretend otherwise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If I write about something I tried, that does not mean I have figured it out. It means I tried it and have something to say about what happened. If I write about something I found, it is not because I discovered something nobody else knows. It might simply be something I found interesting enough to remember. If I write about something I think, I am not presenting it as a fact. It is just what I think.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I also do not want to feel like I have to pick one subject and become an expert in it before writing anything here. My interests do not work that way. I might be interested in a website I am building one day, something I noticed at work another day, a piece of music I found, an idea I have been turning over, or something completely ordinary that caught my attention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That feels more honest than pretending I have a particular area of expertise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There is also something I like about being able to say “I don’t know.” Maybe I will change my mind later. Maybe someone will point out something I missed. Maybe I will learn more, look back at something I wrote, and disagree with myself. That does not make the original thought worthless. It was what I thought at the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I do not want this site to be a collection of answers carefully arranged to make myself look knowledgeable. I would rather it be a record of things I have been paying attention to. Some of those things might be useful to someone else. Some might make someone think about something differently. Some might not matter much to anyone except me. That is fine too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There is already enough pressure to sound certain about everything. The internet is full of people speaking with complete confidence about subjects they barely understand, and I do not want to add to that. But I also do not want the opposite problem, where people who are not experts decide they are not allowed to say anything at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You do not have to know everything to notice something. You do not have to have all the answers to have a question worth asking. And you do not need a collection of impressive credentials before you can share an experience that meant something to you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For me, that is enough reason to write. Not because I have figured things out, but because I am paying attention to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When I write something here, I am not asking you to treat it as the truth. I would rather say, “This is what I think,” and leave it at that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I have noticed how often people feel the need to establish why they are qualified to talk about something before they actually say what they think. What do you do? What did you study? How long have you been doing this? What are your credentials? It can feel like you need to prove you have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":57,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"slim_seo":{"title":"I Don\u2019t Think You Need to Be an Expert to Have Something Worth Saying","description":"I have noticed how often people feel the need to establish why they are qualified to talk about something before they actually say what they think. What do you"},"_slim_seo_primary_term_category":0,"_slim_seo_primary_term_post_tag":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-i-think"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/unheard.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/unheard.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/unheard.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unheard.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unheard.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/unheard.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56,"href":"https:\/\/unheard.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55\/revisions\/56"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unheard.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/57"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/unheard.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unheard.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unheard.me\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}