Wednesday, January 09, 2008

Do you know something important you'd share if asked?

two people share an ideaSummarize what you know in writing.

In particular, if you've already written an email about something useful, simply edit that email for a general readership and email it to be posted on the internet. All you need to do once you know how is send your useful information in an email, and it appears on the internet for all to see and find and be helped by. It's called posting to your blog.

I'd be glad to set this up for anyone reading this that is intimidated by the prospect of doing so for themselves. (It only takes me a minute or two.)

I believe that whenever you have something important to share, you should write it down and post it. That way more people can benefit from it. So start by going over your emails and simply edit any useful information you may have already written something about. I've been bad about sharing my own knowledge, so I'm trying to put out short posts like this one to at least share a little bit, and hopefully come back later to flesh this out with more useful links and examples. My idea is that at least it's here to help people learn something I think could help them help others.

For example, a retired doctor I know had a serious ongoing condition following a serious injury. It destroyed his quality of life and seemed likely to shorten his life. He knew how to find the best doctors, but they didn't know what to do.

He found a treatment known only to a minority of physicians at the time that completely cured his condition. How did he find the treatment? He searched the web. While his doctors didn't know what to do for him, the internet led him right to a medically-recognized (barely) complete solution.

Another man I know helped his mother tremendously during the final months of her life by providing medical information to her doctors that they weren't yet familiar with.

I haven't yet been successful in getting either of them to write about their experiences and knowledge, which is frustrating. I think everyone should be encouraged to share the most important things they know that could help others.

And we can go beyond sharing our own knowledge to encouraging others to share theirs. It's also my feeling that posts that simply share our personal experience as a way to connect with others should be separated from those things we have to say that can help others. Mixing it all together makes it harder for others to find what they're looking for in our writings.

So that's my take on how and why we should all share what we know so that others can benefit.

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