Creating Content: My Secret to Learning - a podcast by Kent C. Dodds

Hey there friends So none of you are content creators none of you aspire to
that or anything but I kind of want to change your mind on that a littlebit. Creating content isn't just for the people who are out there creating
content and getting paid for it like me or whatever I didn't start getting
paid with the concept that I create and much the content.I create is actually not paid. My but like I often actually get asked about
like, how do you learn stuff and and how do you like know the stuff thatyou know. And and my answer is that I kind of cheat and I say, hey, I want
to learn about.How to use Angular with React and so I'm going to make a conference talk
proposal that is that. So, I know it's possible. I just I've never done it
before maybe but I know that it's possible. So I'm going to make a
conference talk proposal. It gets accepted and so now I have like, I'm
forced to go and learn this thing.And in the process of creating that content, I'm learning a lot about both
of these frameworks. So creating content is a mechanism for solidifying inyour mind the things that you want to learn about. And so this is why I
want to encourage you to write a blog or create content.In whatever form you want but blog is pretty straightforward most people
can do it without too much trouble And your first couple blog posts may notbe very good and that's totally fine but as you do it more you're going to
get more experience and you'll get better at it.
So don't worry about it and and really your goal isn't necessarily to
create this blog that everybody reads and it's the next thing CSS tricks or
whatever maybe that's what you want to do, but that's not relevant to what
I'm talking about. Your goal is to create the content and force yourself to
think about the things that you're writing.
I'll give you an example yesterday.I was writing my weekly blog that I
decided I do a weekly blog a couple years ago and it's been going for a
while and it's awesome. And I was writing in my weekly blog. I grabbed some
code that was in one of my workshops.It was a fetch implementation for fetching Pokemon using this API. Anyway,
and as I was writing the blog post, I realized that there was a small bugin my implementation. Even after I moved it over to TypeScript, there was
still a back. In fact, I found two now I think about it.And so in the process of creating this blog post, I learned.More about the
code that I was writing about So this is just wanting of many many examplesLike I've written libraries based on things that I learned as I was
creating content. In fact, testing library Dom testing library cypresstesting library react testing labor all of that came because I was creating
content on how to test and and then I decided oh this is too hard.I'm gonna make a library to do that. So anyway, I would encourage you to
take a little bit of time to write down what you're learning create some
content to dig a little deeper into the things that you feel like, youknow, really well.I hope that helps have a wonderful day.

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