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Jul 19, 2018

SourceCon Budapest 2018 was a first SourceCon conference in Europe and one amazing event. This conference is built by amazing people who like to share, and because I also like to share choosing the topic for my speech was a no-brainer.

My presentation had a name: “Share Your Knowledge to Gain Knowledge.” I strongly believe that sharing is still the best way of learning and remembering things and that sharing is a critically fundamental human trait. We have been sharing for longer than we can remember, and this is also the way we have obtained most of our knowledge and skills in our life.

Top 5 Reasons Why People Share

Maybe you share because you feel a certain pleasure, happiness or satisfaction when you share some knowledge with others. This is one of the reasons why you and most people share.

We are, by nature, social creatures, which means that we appreciate the companionship of others of our kind. This means we are capable of gestures that will bring others close to us or manifest feelings like compassion and altruism when we feel the need to share something out of the desire to help others.

There are five major reasons why people share their knowledge:

  1.   We share to look good (Impression Management)
  2.   We share to feel good (Emotion Regulation)
  3.   We share to teach and help (Information Acquisition)
  4.   We share to connect (Social Bonding)
  5.   We share to convince (Persuading Others)

When I started sharing my first article, my goal was to look good. It was a foolish goal, but we all have our reason why we start sharing, and I think most of us start with the same goal. With the first reason from the list. “Hey world, I am here and look at this amazing knowledge that I just shared with you!”

Can we say that sharing is embedded in our DNA? Well, not exactly, as some people don’t like to share or don’t do it very often. And that is OK. Some of us have to discover the joy of sharing one step at a time. It feels natural to share with the people we know, like family and friends; the real challenge is to share what you have with strangers, especially when you could get feedback on your work that might not be positive.

I remember how I was years before when somebody approached me and asked me if I could share something. My answer was always, “Hell no, that’s my secret knowledge,” yet after a few years, I am maybe oversharing a little bit. It was an interesting journey from “I am not sharing” to “Here is my book with some of my knowledge, enjoy.”

I learned a lot during these years, and during my presentation, I also shared what I learned because of sharing, and these are the TOP 5 points that I learned.

TOP 5 things I learned thanks to sharing

  1.   People share things that have the right type of emotion and things that give practical value.
  2.   People share the things others are sharing and things that have a story.
  3.   People share things that are funny. (Laughter is recognized by people of all cultures.)
  4.   Give before you get. (You need to share with others to receive more from them.)
  5.   Stay genuine. (And if people don’t like the real you, who cares?)

I had one goal in mind with my presentation; I wanted to inspire at least one person in the room to share more. Maybe you are thinking right now, Why only one person? Why not more? I didn’t give myself a small goal because I believe that one person could change the world, could be the spark that will make a ripple effect. And who knows? One day somebody may tell me, “You were the reason why I started sharing.”

Why Start Sharing

  1. Sharing and explaining help you to remember things better.
  2. Being challenged by others can also help you learn even more.
  3. The more you practice explaining and sharing information the more your skills improve.
  4. Sharing your learnings encourages others to share theirs with you. And this will help you to find new information and learn new skills.

I wrote a few articles for SourceCon about how typography influences readers, how people can be affected through different content formats and how the psychology of color plays a role in recruitment and more. All these things together, like typography, color, language, visualization, formatting, storytelling, presentation—everything is connected.

And I was able to write these articles and share this knowledge with others because others shared their experience with me through surveys, theses, posts, articles, etc., and thanks to those people I was also able to learn more about other things. Things I learned from them have had a positive impact on me and my work, and I hope the things I shared with others have also positively impacted them.

For my presentation, I asked SourceCon team if I could get some data about a few of my articles and if I could share that data and I was astonished with the effect that all these articles have had.

Maybe there is somebody out there using the information I shared for something new that they will share with the world and it will also help me.

This is one example of what sharing can do. This particular trait we have can take us a long way as we can change how things work. We can also share to make the communities in which we live a better and safer place, so the applicability of sharing is more than generous.

Conclusion

As mentioned earlier, people mostly share because it makes them feel good. And this is probably one of the most popular reasons when it comes to sharing. The truth is that, no matter what we share, the gesture makes us feel positive feelings each time. You can start sharing because of that, or you may have some other reason.

The majority of us enjoy sharing because we want others to feel the excitement and joy we felt when we discovered a particular thing. And this helps us create better and stronger social relationships.

And the best part about sharing is that it makes us and the people around us feel better and we learn more, so it will always be a win-win situation.

And as the Dalai Lama once said, “Share your knowledge. It’s a way to achieve immortality.”

Thank you for sharing!

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