I have seen a lot of blogs over the years and found them very useful in my everyday work, and particularly recently the number of great Tableau blogs out there are brilliant. I’ve always wanted to be able to write one, but found it quite intimidating to start it off as I have often had these kinds of questions:
- Why should I do it when there is so much good stuff out there at the moment?
- Will it make me look stupid or un-knowledgeable doing it?
- What if the things I talk about are too basic, or uninteresting?
- Do people know all this anyway?
- Where do I start?
The motivation for me to start this came early on when working at Lloyds Banking Group, which has a really collaborative culture and emphasis on knowledge sharing. In our BI team, we have weekly knowledge shares where even small tips and tricks are encouraged (primarily in Tableau). Seeing the things shared in that session and how useful it was to people, I realised something key – that not everyone knows everything!
I, like a lot of people, can suffer from Imposter Syndrome from time to time – where you doubt your abilities and feel like you shouldn’t be where you are. When reading around about this I came across the following diagram in various forms which pretty much sums this up, and the realisation I had during out knowledge shares:
When you think about it this way, it makes it so much easier to start sharing things, as you realise that there will always be something you know that can help others, as not everyone knows everything you do.
With this in mind I started writing a few Tableau specific blogs in our internal Tableau forum, and found I really enjoyed writing them. I also found it was a great way to reinforce any of the learning I had done, as then trying to explain it to a wider audience just cements the fact that you know how to do it.
I was still nervous about potentially doing an external blog, but I sought some advice from one of my colleagues who already has a successful blog – Marc Reid (datavis.blog). He gave me some great advice and some links to blogs to help me get started. One of these links that particularly helped me was from Sarah Bartlett’s blog on the benefits of blogging – where she basically says that everyone should have a blog and gives all the reasons why – well worth a read.
So this brings me to this, my first blog post. If you are reading this then that means I have actually hit ‘publish’ on the website – and that means I now have an incentive to keep this going!!
Thanks for reading.
Ant.
Ant Pulley | Blog 
Congratulations on your first blog post! I’m happy to hear you found my post helpful.
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