Share your knowledge and it will come back to you tenfold!
I had a discussion with a colleague of mine regarding sharing resources and how a couple of individuals always share so much information amongst the other colleagues, making our lives much easier. He did not like the idea of sharing what he found. People may feel that way towards knowledge, it is a treasure you work hard to obtain, the harder you have worked for, the more precious it is! Your little hidden treasure. However there is another aspect to information sharing and resource sharing that is fairly unpopular, but much more beneficial to everyone in the end. Give it all away, go out of your way to share what you have found and learned and it will come back to you and benefit you greatly.
I would like to be more specific now. I work in the gaming industry, one of the fastest growing and youngest industries as of this moment. I work as a UI/ UX designer and artist, a field that is rapidly growing with the extensive expansion of personal technology. There is much to learn and much to share in this field, that is one of the main reasons I decided to start a blog, sharing information. Structuring what I learn each day and sharing what I find, what other people have structured and pass on to the world to learn. Not only this is a great way to excel as a professional and build a concrete foundation of my craft, but also helps other people in their search.
The main concern of people is, won’t I get ripped off by sharing my experience and professional tips and tricks. There is a fear that people will loose something if they share their knowledge. Once they become good at what they do, some tend to close up and clench to their knowledge. I have found that in almost all cases someone else releases the same or even more developed piece of info later on anyway. So there is no point in storing that, this will not make you loose your identity. When talking about drawing, artists inspire me, because so many of them make tutorials and some are for free! They share their process with the people, share their ideas, references, tools etc. And to my surprise, they seem very confident and calm when doing it, they don’t tremble in fear of loosing their knowledge and becoming irrelevant. This is because working and practising their craft every day got them there, not just one idea or trick! In the end it boils down to this, if you have done the work and walked the walk, nothing can take away that from you!
I find it both frightening and reassuring to know this simple thing: No matter what I do, there will always be someone better than me at what I do! This is a very important lesson to learn, it liberates! So, in stead of setting yourself up for failure and comparing your work to others, strive to become better at what you do and share the knowledge! It will only come back to you, tenfold!
Thank you for reading and Happy Holidays!
/Mike
