The more time I spend reading, thinking and watching content meant to help me get new ideas and become more knowledgeable, the more I begin to consider such knowledge to be more like common sense rather than something I discovered through studying.
That is mostly because a lot of what I read, or watch, makes so much sense that I immediately begin to consider such information to be so important that everyone should know about it, tricking myself into believing that all I know is common knowledge and that it's obvious that a lot of people know such things, and I'm the only one who just started learning.
Obviously, that is not true. Whatever I learn through reading or watching educational content is nothing extraordinary, surely nothing that no one else could learn, but it's still something that not everyone knows, not because they are not interested, but simply because they might have not stumbled upon that information up until now.
For example, the idea of generalization being good, that being a jack of all trades can actually be very useful, might not be common knowledge and might not be accepted by everyone, not because it requires a lot of understanding and a big brain to grasp such knowledge, but it might be simply because not everyone is interested in figuring out whether specializing is better than being a generalist.
Reading one book about this topic and several articles gave me a greater insight into this way of living and learning things, and so I can safely say that I know more about this topic than others, no matter how obvious all that information might seem once I know it.
The same thing can apply, for example, to the idea of giving and offering "gifts" to people, for free, without expecting anything in return, an idea that has been talked about a lot in the book "Are you indispensable?" by Seth Godin, where he argues that in order to be indispensable, you must always give, without expecting anything in return. The more you give, the more you'll get. This idea has also been promoted by Earl Nightingale, who's "formula" for success involves the following statement: "Our rewards in life will always be in exact proportion to our contribution, our service".
Once you read about those things, or once you hear others talk about them, they begin to make quite a lot of sense, at least if you agree with them, and then you begin to consider that information so essential and so easy to understand that you might think others already know about those things.
It is not always the case.
I've struggled many times in the past when it came to writing an article about things similar to what I mentioned above, because I considered such information to be common sense. I expected people to already know those things. I always thought that I was "late to the party" and I just then discovered something that was already known by everybody.
But as I said, not everyone knows what you know, just like you don't know what others do. It is why you, and I, and others, spend so much time learning new things - we don't know it all, no matter how obvious certain information might be once you understand it.
It is why you should never try to withhold your knowledge from others. It is why you should force yourself to write about things that you think others already know about, because others might not. You might think it obvious but the things you know might be fairly unique.
This is why everyone writes articles and posts them online - to share information that they have in the hopes that others will be interested, others who might not know those things. And it is why we read articles posted online - because we want to improve and to learn more from people who know things that we don't.
So, the next time you want to write and post an article, but you're unsure whether the topic you'd like to discuss is nothing but common sense information that everybody already knows, try to remember that no one knows everything, and that your old and common information might be something new and useful for others.