Teach everything you know

"Teach everything you know" is such a powerful idea.

In a recent all hands meeting at work, I presented some ideas I had found interesting from an article I read over the weekend. (Here are the notes I took from the article: Managing Energy vs Managing Time).

The article was old (2007), but the ideas were new to me and I found them relevant to myself and I thought others at work might be feeling similar, so I shared what I had learned, adding in some color and experience from my own life.

I thought one or two people might say "oh huh, interesting, thanks for sharing"

But the feedback was so incredibly positive! Some choice quotes:

Super inspired and got some really useful tips Ben!

This was great, I am terrible at all those things you mentioned

Ben, that was amazing. It was EXTREMELY helpful for me.

Ben is wise.

1:1s with Ben are like family therapy, where the customers are your parents and siblings

Ben, that was really amazing. Why: It was personal (e.g. you used personal, real-life examples of how you've felt), it was open, it was useful, it was inspiring. Really good job.

One person said "that's the best all hands presentation we've ever had".

(yes, part of the purpose of this post is to document nice things that people say about me so that I can refer to it later and feel good about myself.)

Takeaway

My takeaway from this is that information does not have to be novel in order for it to be extremely valuable to you or whatever audience you are addressing. In this instance, I shared something that was interesting and relevant to me with a group of people I interact with regularly. And because we interact regularly, this information was highly interesting and relevant to them, even if it wasn't new or groundbreaking.

You should share what you learn, especially when it is new and interesting to you, because that is when you will be most excited about it and people will be most interested to hear about it from you.