Dear Reader,

It started, as these things often do, with a video I had no direct intention of watching.

One of those evenings when the day had already asked too many questions of me, and all I wanted was a gentle distraction masquerading as productivity.

Instead, I stumbled into Nicole van der Hoeven talking about learning in public. (I will put the link at the end of this post)

Not as a branding strategy or a growth hack, but as a way of moving through the world with a little more honesty, a little less armour.

There was nothing spectacular about that moment. No cinematic epiphany, no instant life plan sketched in the margins of a notebook.

Just a quiet, slightly uncomfortable realisation: if I kept learning only in private, then the people who might need exactly my imperfect notes, my half-shaped thoughts, my unresolved questions… would never see them.

Perhaps you can relate.

We are good, as a species, at rehearsing in the dark and performing in the light.

But what if the rehearsal is where the real connection happens?

The Shift from Private to Public

Learning in private is safe.

You get to edit and refine what the world will see in the end: the polished insight, the neat conclusion, the successful experiment.

Learning in public is something different altogether.

It is the decision to let others watch you as you move from not knowing to knowing slightly more; from confusion to a provisional, fragile kind of clarity.

Nelson Mandela is often quoted for thi:

“I never lose. I either win or learn.”

– Nelson Mandela –

(Yes, I have cited this sentence in this post, but it is too good to pass!)

Taken deeply, that line is an invitation to redesign our relationship with mistakes.

If every loss is a lesson, then every visible mistake, every imperfect attempt shared with others, becomes a public contribution rather than a private embarrassment.

Yet the shift is not just emotional: it is epistemic.

When you work on an idea by yourself, your thinking is a closed loop.

You turn the same concepts over in your mind, polish the same sentences, reinforce the same blind spots.

It feels like progress, but much of it is simply repetition wearing a clever disguise.

The moment you share—even a rough sketch of your understanding—something changes.

You introduce oxygen into the room.

Other minds bring different angles, different metaphors, different objections.

What you thought was a solid wall in your reasoning turns out to be a door someone else has already walked through.

Teaching as Learning

Psychologists have a name for this aspect: the Protégé Effect.

When you prepare to teach or explain something to someone else, you learn it more deeply yourself.

In trying to make an idea clear for another mind, you are forced to clarify it for your own.

But there is a subtle twist that often gets overlooked.

Teaching in this sense does not require authority; it does not even require mastery.

It only requires that you are willing to say, “Here is where I am right now. Here is what I think I understand. Here is what still confuses me.”

This is not an act of arrogance. It is an act of service.

Last year, I started a YouTube channel called “Fallo con Mario”—Italian for something that translates roughly as “Do it with Mario,” though the idiomatic meaning carries more warmth than that.

It is devoted to productivity, organisation, and personal knowledge management, approached through this lens of learning in public. If you understand Italian, maybe you’d like to watch at least the first video.

Not because I have mastered these domains, but precisely because I have not.

Each video is a small sign that says: “If you are on this path too, you are not alone.”

The Relational Dimension

There is an extra facet of all of this: the relational one.

When you share your learning openly, you are not just broadcasting information into an unhabited outer space.

You are opening a channel through which others can speak back.

A passing comment reveals an entirely different resource you had never encountered.

A gentle correction saves you from repeating a misunderstanding to a larger audience later.

A simple “this helped” turns a solitary effort at understanding into a tiny contribution to a collective project.

There is a well-known metaphor, often attributed to George Bernard Shaw (but this is uncertain, please refer to https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/12/13/swap-ideas/), that goes something like this: if you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange them, we each still have one apple. Still, if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange them, we both walk away with two ideas.

Learning in public happens when this exchange is not a rare happening but a habit.

The internet, for all its noise and posturing, is still one of the most remarkable environments ever created for this kind of habit. Short posts, extended essays, sketches, unfinished notes, stream-of-consciousness voice messages, half-broken code—each of these can be a small lighthouse for someone who is stuck in the same fog.

Of course, there is a cost. Public learning exposes you to misunderstanding and misinterpretation. People sometimes see only the roughness of your thoughts, not the trajectory they belong to. They will mistake your work-in-progress for your final position. To soften this, focus on supportive comments from those following your learning curve. Build a community of encouraging persons where shared goals and values guide critique. By adopting these strategies, you equip yourself to persist and grow despite inevitable criticism and difficulties.

The Courage to Be Seen

This is where resilience enters the frame, not as macho toughness, but as a quiet willingness to be imperfect in public.

The Stoic philosopher Epictetus put it starkly:

To make progress, you should be able to accept being seen as ignorant or naïve. Don’t strive to be thought of as wise. Even if you succeed in impressing others as a wise person, don’t believe it yourself.

– Epictetus –

Not just being ignorant—that is easy; we all begin there.

Being seen as ignorant.

That is the part most of us spend our lives trying to avoid.

Yet understood in the light of service and connection, this vulnerability becomes something else.

Every time you show yourself working, you are doing something generous: you are leaving footprints.

You are making it easier for the person who comes after you to see that progress in any field, any craft, any discipline, is not a sequence of flawless performances, but a series of approximations.

Creating a Living Archive

There is also a practical side to this.

Learning in public creates a record.

Instead of letting your footprints and your stumbles evaporate in transient conversations, private notes, or evening reflections that never make it past the margins of a notebook, you anchor them in a visible place.

Over time, those fragments form a trail. Not a portfolio in the usual sense, but an evolving record of your curiosity.

Someone searching for an answer you once struggled with can arrive at your imperfect solution and, perhaps, push it further. In that sense, public learning extends the half-life of your effort.

You are no longer working only for the version of you in six months who will revisit your notes.

You are working for the stranger who will encounter your words, your diagrams, your stumbling explanations in three years, or ten.

To call this a “legacy” may sound grandiose, yet it need not be. Most of our contributions will be small, local, and niche. That is perfectly fine.

The internet is built on accumulated niches, and most of the pages that quietly save someone’s day are not the ones that go viral.

None of this requires a platform with millions of followers. It can begin with sharing your notes from a book that changed how you see your work.

You might start by summarising a podcast episode that gave you a different perspective, then jot down key takeaways.

Or by posting a question that’s been on your brain lately and inviting commentary. Sharing thoughts on an article or turning your lecture notes into a blog post can also be effective.

Posting a failed experiment and explaining what did not work—and why.

Articulating a question that you have not yet resolved, and inviting others to think with you.

These simple steps make the method easy to follow for new public learners, allowing them to join the conversation.

This is where the epistemic and the relational meet. By learning in public, you sharpen your own understanding and, at the same time, offer others a handhold.

You move from being a passive consumer of knowledge to an active node in a network of minds trying, in their own faltering ways, to make sense of the world.

Perhaps the most radical aspect is that you do not need to wait until you “deserve” to do this.

The very act of sharing is part of what earns you that future competence.

So the question becomes less, “Am I expert enough to teach?” and more, “Am I willing to document the path so that others can walk it with me, or after me?”

Until next time, choose one area you are currently learning in—however small—and share a single imperfect artefact of that process with someone else: a friend, a community, or the wider world; then pay attention to what happens to your awareness and to your sense of belonging when you let your learning breathe in public.

I am not sure, but I think the exact video by NVDH was this one: