You are early in your career, and you have an idea. It seems vast and far away, and you first start to question if you are capable of doing it. Let’s say that you decide that you are. But then you get to the part where you need to engage with other people, and attract their interest. Maybe you would need to arrange a regular meetup, or even a single meeting to discuss something. You zoom out of yourself and look at your current role and position in the academic hierarchy. I’m not qualified to do that. you think.

As we grow up, we are used to churning through the different stages of life. Primary school turns into high school, high school turns into college, and maybe college turns into a first job or a graduate degree (and then a first job). It’s very easy to walk along an expected path like this that has been done by so many before, and where the expectations are clearly laid out, and we know it’s what we are supposed to be doing. So what happens, then, when we have an idea that strays from the path? Especially if it involves others or engagement, we might be quick to think that we aren’t qualified to do it. Maybe it’s that we don’t consider ourselves leaders, or we typically associate the task with someone further along in their career. For whatever reason, we tell ourselves this story, and then never engage with the idea further.

The easiest question to ask when you tell yourself this story is “Why not?” And if you circle around reasons about your ability or qualification to do so, you should follow up with that by telling yourself that those reasons are not good enough. You then might look around at the sheer number of projects, initiatives, or software that exist and wonder why they do. At some point, don’t all of these things have to be someone’s new idea? Think of all these resources that you hold dearly, and realize that there was a time that they didn’t exist, and had the person that created them had a similar thought, they wouldn’t be there. The next thing to ponder is what are truly the consequences if you aren’t a huge success? If you label it as a failure, that seems pretty dark and gloomy. So instead think of your idea as an adventure – what kind of adventures can pursuing this thing take you? What skills might you pick up? When you really think about, the absolute worst thing that can happen is that the idea doesn’t work out, and you learn something. At the other end, the idea could be hugely succcessful and change a community or practice. More realistically, you will end up in the middle ahd have started a new project that could be interesting or inspiring, and learned something too.