I no longer have coworkers I can corner during coffee breaks to share the latest weird trick I found in ServiceNow.
Remote work didn’t kill that desire to share, though. I can’t help it!
The nullEDGEAdvent series was an experiment to see how it felt to do that online. And I ended up learning a couple of things besides the technical stuff.
1. Fear vs reality
Publishing for 37 days straight? Everybody is going to realise I’m stupid, and laugh at me, and I’m going to die!
I’ve been writing on my blog since 2017, and comments have been disabled since day one. I didn’t want to deal with spam… or critics.
In reality, the worst-case scenario is:
- People see your content.
- They keep scrolling.
- Look at that cat video! Insightful cat!
Maybe on Twitter people will mock you, but LinkedIn is a pretty safe playground, and the ServiceNow community is extra nice.
The upside is much bigger! You find like-minded people!
2. Writing is thinking
ChatGPT can write good summaries. Probably better than mine.
I could feed one of the nullEDGE videos and get it done in seconds.
But so could you!
And it would be the same soulless wall of text that clutters your feeds and half of the internet.
I actually did it a couple of times… just to beat procrastination:
- Me: Summarise this video.
- ChatGPT: X delves into the importance of…
- Me: Shut up! I’ll write it myself!
Your brain is good at detecting repeating patterns, and it rebels against them. The same way it rebels when it hears the same boring patterns in every reggaeton track.
I like AI for accelerating tasks I hate, but I love writing.
Connecting ideas, remembering experiences, increasing entropy.
Writing is thinking. And I love thinking!
3. Overthinking + Rabbit holes
I love thinking so much that sometimes I exceed the recommended dosage.
Rubén in 2024:
- I feel like writing more.
- There’s my blog, but I use it mainly as a public KB of technical ServiceNow articles.
- A newsletter is what I need! But I need to find the best platform…
- And I’ll have my blog, my newsletter and LinkedIn. I definitely need an app to manage it! Buffer? Hootsuite? What about self-hosting Postiz?
- And a way to connect the content across platforms! POSSE, PESOS, PESETAS?
- I must know all about marketing frameworks. Wait… isn’t TOFU something you eat?
- These guys selling content calendar templates on YouTube seem to know what they are doing! Let’s watch one more video…
Result: 0 content created.
Rubén in 2025:
- I should check the nullEDGE sessions.
- Why don’t I write about them?
- Create a task for each session in Todoist and add a date.
- Every morning:
- Open video + Take notes in Documate.
- Copy/paste to LinkedIn + blog.
- Complete the task in Todoist.
Result: 37 posts created.
Key takeaway: Open your favourite note-taking app (guess which one is mine?) and just start writing.
4. Vanity metrics
Why does the post that took you hours to write have fewer impressions than the stupid cat meme that took you 2 seconds to publish?
- Normal people don’t open LinkedIn on Christmas day?
- More people like cats than ServiceNow?
- You published just before the internet was blocked due to an important football match? (not a joke, this actually happens in Spain)
Who cares? Counting impressions and likes feels good for a while, but don’t forget why you’re really doing it!
5. Self-promotion guilt
LinkedIn is mainly a self-promotion tool. A weird one. And if you don’t have enough weirdness in your feed, you should check r/LinkedInLunatics.
And still, I don’t feel comfortable promoting my blog and even less Documate, despite being really proud of it.
I had no trouble promoting the nullEDGE conference for 37 days straight, though.
I always wonder if it’s something cultural. I feel that’s common around here. Are guilt and shame imprinted in the back of our Spanish brains?
Why aren’t there any Spanish ServiceNow MVPs so far?
Language barrier? Trying to keep a low profile? Impostor syndrome?
I’m lucky to be friends with and live around some of the most knowledgeable ServiceNow consultants on the planet. I can have a coffee and learn directly from them, but the whole world would benefit from them sharing more.
Si tienes alguna teoría al respecto, me gustaría escucharla. 🙂
6. Curse of knowledge
I have a hypothesis on why people don’t share more despite being very knowledgeable.
Have you read the title of one of the nullEDGE sessions and thought something like “Why are they making a session about something that obvious?”
Congratulations, you are experiencing the curse of knowledge!
The importance of technical governance might seem obvious when the fear of technical debt haunts you in your dreams. Probably not so much when you are writing your first GlideRecord script.
Don’t hesitate to share something you’ve learned because you think “everybody knows this already”. What are the odds you are the last person on Earth to hear about it?
Your “stupid” knowledge is expertise for somebody else. Don’t keep it to yourself!
- Original: https://xkcd.com/386/ ↩︎
- Original: https://xkcd.com/2501/ ↩︎
