You Don’t Spring Forth Fully Formed
22 May, 2026
A bunch of years ago, I co-ran a bloggers meetup in Auckland. One member of that group was having a hard time getting his blog started. Not because blogging was difficult, but because he was getting in his own way.
He was a techie who had some methodology or another that he dreamed of sharing with certain corporate movers and shakers, and to create demonstrations of that he was learning to code in JavaScript. Making his ideas a reality using JavaScript was taking longer than he expected, and he was taking a few wrong turns (both with that process and with his blog).
I suggested that he blog about his attempts to learn JavaScript in relation to his project — not just about what (little) he’d completed at that point but also about the mistakes he’d been making. Partly to help and encourage others and partly to get his blog up and running.
He blanched at that idea, and went into a spiel about how his intended audience wouldn’t take him seriously as an expert if he made his missteps and fumbles public.
Like others I’ve met who’ve aimed for that lofty goal of expertise, he didn’t realize that none of us starts out as a fully-realized expert. In anything, expertise and experience take time to accumulate. They come at a price: hitting the books, toil at the coal face, sweat. But there are also screw ups along the way, wrong paths taken, and times when you find yourself munching on shoe leather.
No one expects you to be perfect. No one expects you to be infallible. Everyone stumbles, not just when they’re at the beginning of something but all along the way. There’s no shame in that. Sharing your stumbles makes you more relatable, more human. It also shows your capacity to adapt, to learn, and to grow.