There is a reasonably big paradox or it feels to me that there is one – scarcity leads a lot of times to better results then the abundance.
The band Queen produced one of my favourite songs – “Too much love will kill you“, which has a lot of reflection in my thoughts on this topic –
”
…
Too much love will kill you
Just as sure as none at all
…
“. :)
When some resource is easily accessible and abundant, people will tend to devalue it and ignore it, even though it might be the best thing since the sliced bread.
Talking to a CEO of major company? Oh yeah, I might take a selfie! (There are just few CEOs of the major companies around, well real at least – I am not talking about LinkedIn titles. Another bonus for anyone is “JUST” CEO of their own small company – those are not interesting for the market … :s )
Talking to another smart Architect – meh! (There are so many of them around)
Blogging about newest feature – yeah, bring it on! (one might even try ton claim that they/she/he were the first and the only to discover it)
Blogging about a popular feature – nope, everybody have written everything already (such a poor excuse to avoid writing, a kind of a “writer’s block” thing).
The rise of the whole minimalism topic is another drive towards the same destination – overload won’t get you moving anywhere.
Consider the opportunity to learn – all those wonderful videos, blog posts, subscription to paid services, books, etc.
They are available for the majority of the interested IT people at almost no cost, or as little as 30$ per month a subscription to Pluralsight (and for the less fortunate a lot of times these are not small numbers, I have to add).
That is the price of 3-4 meals in Lisbon. Sounds BEYOND accessible.
I know many people with subscription to Udemy, Pluralsight and similar services – yet the vast majority of them won’t use this advantage.
Most probably because it is way to accessible and our lizard brains might be thinking – it’s too easy and I won’t stand out from the crowd with that. Yeah.
In the 1990s (I might be *sounding* here like an old faCt :)) with the scarcity in documentation and the lack of the examples people seem to be fighting more to make things work then the current religion of Copy&Pasting from the operation “Googling StackOverflow”.
In order for something to be valued by the majority of the humans – any service/product/feature must be scarce, or at least scarce in evaluation/perception.
Knowing a thing or two about the scarcity of the resources, I want to stress that too few is definitely not enough but it seems that at least in time, the internet access should solve access to the free information such as this blog, but not having enough to progress will prevent one from advancing.