Month: July 2020

Making videos was a bigger challenge than I expected. Not necessarily due to skills or gadgets, but the act of talking to a camera was surprisingly tough early on. My biggest challenge, however, was breaking away from the written posts. Doing both led to more stress than intended, and so I think I’ll be falling back on my roots for this blog. This trial did accomplish at least one goal, regenerating my interest in writing content.

The Good

Putting videos out felt great. Even with the few views and comments I received, making them was a fun process. While there is still a lot to learn, I had a good time coming up with how to do certain aspects like the set, script writing, and much more. It was such a new space for me, that there were many areas to experiment in.

This trial did generate the line of thought I wanted regarding my approach to these trials. In particular, I came up with a new formula to tackle posts for future experiments. Approaching posts in a methodological way will hopefully lead to more interesting writing in each. Rather than my drivelling about the prior week and progress as a whole, I instead can focus on what I’m doing, why I’m doing it, and what results I expect to see. Updates and progress will still likely play a role, but not construct the post entirely, which led to some boring posts in the past.

The Bad

My original intention during the trial was to only make videos. Instead, I had both videos and written posts being worked on each week, causing more stress than I hoped for. If I stuck to videos only, I might have seen better expectations. However, the writing process of this blog has been what’s kept me doing this for so long.

While the filming and creation process was fun, the post-production pieces like creating a thumbnail, title, and description for each video was a struggle. The thumbnail was certainly my least favorite part of posting the video. As an avid YouTube viewer, I know how important a thumbnail can be to spark interest. Coming up with engaging images to spark interest is a skill I need to develop.

The Future

While the video process was a lot of fun, I don’t plan to continue making weekly videos for the time being. The writing element of this blog is something that I do appreciate too much to let go. Creating both videos and written posts each week is a little too much for me to take on right now.

After a few weeks off, I want to try putting out a video on a monthly basis and see where it goes. As of now, I don’t know what these new videos will look like. I’m unsure if it will be the trial/self-improvement type of content I make here or something entirely different. All I know is, it’s a fun hobby I’d like to continue. The content itself will likely be an experiment in and of itself.

This type of hiatus is the exact reason I didn’t want to buy gear like a camera, microphone, lighting, etc. It’s entirely possible, I’ll never come back to making videos, and had I bought a bunch of gear, it would now be sitting in storage until I eventually got rid of it.

Now comes to the time of the long awaited next trial. This was a tough one for me. I feel that I’m in a place where most of my habits are what I want them to be, but now I need to rebuild the systems around them. To accomplish this, I’m going to be trying out the service BeeMinder. This service allows you to create certain goals and if not met, there is a financial penalty.

While I’ve been writing for a few years now, I never took this blog seriously. It was a fun little hobby, and I would knock out a post each week. The problem was that over time, I grew consistently frustrated by my lack of growth.

Why I Started Writing

In 2017, I was living in Irving, Texas. Just before moving down there to live with my brother, I started listening to several podcasts and reading books. Before then, I hadn’t been much of a reader; the closest I got to reading in my spare time was almost finishing Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, until I lost the book with about three chapters left.

The chain of content led me to arrive at the person to whom I believe is truly credited with inspiring my writing, a man named Tynan. His appearance on Noah Kagan’s podcast was the first time I went back to listen to an episode multiple times. His crazy life and interesting stories had me hooked. At the time, I was also consuming everything Tim Ferriss put out, eventually introducing me to Mr. Money Mustache.

All of these influences coalesced into an idea; what if I actually started doing the things I read about and heard? So I started the first trial by riding my bike to work. This was a life changing experience after screaming at Dallas traffic from my car twice a day for months at that point. The cool breeze passing by in the Texas summer sun was nice. It was also a great chance to catch up on more podcasts, leading to more inspiration.

Time to Grow

After years of putting out the same content, I’d grown significantly as a writer but fear I’ve stagnated as a creator. The process has become pretty uninspired. The answer came to me from an unexpected place, an anime podcast. A creator I’ve long followed discussed the evolution of his content over time and said, “if I’m doing exactly the same content as I’m doing last year, to me, I failed.”

In last week’s video, I introduced a more formulaic approach for handling trials as experiments. Giving each post an identity as a piece of the scientific method is my attempt to change the content I’ve been trudging through the past year or so.

In regards to content creation overall, I feel I’ve never really taken it seriously. On a run earlier this week, I thought a lot about how I might work more consistently, as well as tools and strategies I could use to get better. Many posts I’ve written feel like a cobbled together mess, in hindsight. Forcing a post out was a way to stick to a schedule, a good habit, but it also strained my relationship with writing on occasion.

In the past few days, I’ve learned a lot on creating better quality content, methods of sharing said content, and growing. I may not be able to go 100% in all directions at once, but I want to continue making small steps to improve where I can.

This week I changed up my approach using a background set that is hopefully a bit more interesting, as well as wrote out a script. If the thumbnail didn’t give it away, I was pretty self-conscious about how I was mostly reading off it, but after a few hours of filming, I went with the takes I had.

I’m definitely learning a lot while working on these videos. They are extremely short, but take a ton of effort. I am excited that I feel I’m getting better. There are a few areas I know I need to improve, but I’m confident I’ll continue to get better with practice.

A quote I’ve been pondering a lot lately has been, “Take it slow. Train with humility.”

After three years, I finally ventured into the world of making videos. As a long YouTube watcher, I thought it would be somewhat easy to get started, but little did I realize the challenges in getting just a simple video put together.

Be sure to check out the video. Don’t forget to like, comment, subscribe, and all that fun YouTube stuff.

Thank you for supporting this project of mine!

In tracking my time, I’ve gained a lot of insight into how I’m spending my life. Where I’m using my time, and in what ways I can shift that time to the things I want to work on. I’ve long been a serial planner, but executing those plans hasn’t always been consistent. This is definitely a habit I want to continue.

Planning Is Only Half the Battle

Over the last couple years, I’ve become a person who makes plans of what to do for each day, week, and month. Having these plans has helped me to focus on what I set out to…some of the time. Often, I end up rescheduling or rearranging my plans because I get caught up in some distraction. Be it a new idea, a good book, or one more turn.

Having a plan is great, but executing the plan is the important part. Tracking my time has shown me how poorly I tend to stick to my plans. Being able to compare my plan to tracked time directly is huge. It is an easy way to see the disconnect.

With this in mind, I will continue time tracking. It’s a tool I don’t know how I lived without before. It’s made weekly reviews much easier.

Stopping Strategies

In better understanding this tendency for distraction, I created systems for sticking to those plans.

One strategy that has promise is to envision what my goal self would be doing at a given time. For example, if I have a goal physique, when I’m feeling too lazy to workout, I think of what the ideal version of myself will be doing and start. Even if it’s a few pushups and pullups, it makes me glad I to do something.

When self control failed, I needed a more concrete solution. To stop playing games too late I scheduled my PC to shutdown at a certain time. Since putting this in place, I haven’t once run out this shutdown timer. Simply having the pressure to stop has helped me to control the impulse to keep going.

With this success, I want to find ways to add this type of pressure to more areas of my life. There are services like BeeMinder and Stickk that fit the mold. A brief explanation is they add a financial incentive to completing goals. While I’m hesitant to put my money on the line, it may well be the thing to get me to better execute. Starting somewhere small but with a big impact is best. I plan on reviewing my time tracking, plans, and goals to find a good crossing where I can find the best place to start.

Video Killed the Write-io Star

While I’ve learned a lot in writing this blog for 3 YEARS now, I want to shake the format up for the next trial. Moving from the written word to a recording. That’s right, I’m dropping the B for a V and trying out video.

Over the years of writing, I’ve become a much better writer. I find reading my early posts pretty painful. Shifting this logic to the speaking, I’d like to see how much I can grow as a speaker. There are also other skills and technology to learn. From filming to video editing to lighting and set design, there is a lot of growth potential in changing the format.

I’ll still have a post each week with an overview and outline, but will primarily cover my thoughts in the video itself. So feel free to continue checking here for new updates.