Maybe you are just speaking to the wrong audience

2026-07-23T00:00:00+00:00

TL;DR

Being made to feel like you should stop talking does not necessarily mean your enthusiasm is misplaced. Not every conversation fits every audience, so instead of making yourself quieter, find the people and spaces where your curiosity is welcome. This blog is my attempt to create one of those spaces.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately

I’ve found myself in situations like this more times than I can count. You’re talking about something you genuinely enjoy, something you’ve been building, learning, reading about, or simply thinking about.

And somewhere along the way, someone makes you feel like you should stop.

Sometimes they say it, even jokingly, sometimes directly, sometimes they simply make it obvious that they’d rather be talking about something else.

After it happens enough times, you stop being surprised by it.

You recognize the feeling before the conversation is even over.

For a while, I thought that feeling meant I was talking too much, or talking about the wrong things. It took me much longer to realize that maybe I was simply talking to the wrong people.

I don’t mean “wrong” in the sense that they’re bad people. They aren’t. Not every conversation belongs everywhere, and not everyone has to be interested in what interests us. That’s perfectly normal.

What isn’t normal is allowing those moments to convince us that our enthusiasm itself is somehow misplaced.

Caring is cool

I’ve always liked listening to people talk about the things they love. Not necessarily because I care about the subject itself, but because I think there’s something deeply human about seeing someone become excited over something they know well.

For a few minutes, they’re not trying to impress anyone or become someone else. They’re simply sharing a small piece of who they are. Even when I leave the conversation without remembering much about the topic, I usually remember the person a little better.

That’s enough to make it worth listening. And, perhaps more importantly, it’s how we learn.

Not every lesson comes from books or lectures. Sometimes the most interesting thing you learn all week comes from someone who couldn’t stop talking about a hobby, a technical problem they finally solved, or a project they’ve been quietly building for months.

Curiosity has always spread that way: from one enthusiastic person to another.

That’s why it always feels like a small loss when those conversations are interrupted before they have the chance to become something else.

Not because every conversation would have become meaningful. Most wouldn’t. But some would have, and we’ll never know which ones.

That’s probably the part that took me the longest to understand.

How I learned to deal with that feeling

For a while, I thought the lesson was to become quieter. To choose my words more carefully. To avoid bringing up subjects that people had already shown they weren’t interested in.

That works, in a way. You stop feeling out of place because you stop putting yourself in that position. But you also stop creating the possibility that a conversation could become something memorable.

I don’t think that’s a worthwhile trade.

The better lesson, at least for me, was realizing that not every conversation belongs everywhere. Every topic has its place, every moment has its context, and every audience has its own interests. Expecting otherwise is unfair to everyone involved.

But the opposite is true as well.

For every conversation that feels out of place, there is probably another place where that same conversation feels completely natural. A place where someone interrupts you not to change the subject, but to ask another question.

Maybe that’s what finding your audience really means. Not finding people who agree with you. Not finding people who admire you. Simply finding people who enjoy having the same kind of conversations you do.

Why this is where I decided to start writing

Not because I think I have extraordinary things to say, and certainly not because I expect everyone to care about the things that interest me. Quite the opposite, actually. I’ve learned that expecting every conversation to resonate with everyone is one of the quickest ways to become disappointed.

Instead, I’d rather create a place where these conversations naturally belong.

A place where I can write about the things I’m building, the things I’m learning, the things that make me stop and think for a while, and occasionally the thoughts that decide to show up in the middle of the night, like this one did.

Maybe nobody will read them, maybe a handful of people will.

Or maybe, years from now, someone will stumble upon one of these posts while trying to understand the very same thing I was trying to understand when I wrote it.

Any of those outcomes are fine, because I don’t think the goal was ever to speak to everyone.

It was simply to stop speaking to nowhere.

So if you happen to enjoy these kinds of conversations whether they’re about software, technology, engineering, books, ideas, or just the occasional thought that refuses to leave until it’s written down, welcome.

Perhaps this isn’t just where I decided to start writing.