How to Become an Expert: Making Ideas Stick
Jan 18th, 2010 | Expertise, Job, People, Skills
Are ideas born interesting or made interesting? – Chip & Dan Heath
You have 2 options to communicate your ideas:
- Tell people what is interesting for you – easy, but unfortunately, your ideas will be wasted because of other people low interest, incomplete knowledge or disagreement.
- Make your ideas interesting for other people – hard, but you have chances that other people will pay attention, understand, remember and act upon your ideas.
This post is devoted to people who are interested in the second option.
Why should a programmer care about communicating ideas to other people?
It is true, the primary job of a programmer is to feed computers with ideas. But you cannot quietly hide behind a computer forever. You have to deal with other people:
- team – to contribute and explain your programming ideas
- customers – to discuss and build trust in your solutions
- end-users – to make your programming ideas useful for users
- programmers of the world – to share your knowledge and exchange ideas
- capitalists – to sell your ideas
- low tech crowd – to promote technology ideas
Why is it so hard to make ideas interesting for other people?
- Curse of knowledge – once you know something, it is hard to imagine not knowing it and communicate to novices
- Resistance – many people ignore or resist new ideas
- Limited brains – people have short attention span and can be easily overwhelmed by new and complex information
