Record a Video Every Day - Day 16
The progress I've made in sixteen days.
On June 30th, I committed to an experiment—to record a video every day for thirty days. This came after realizing that creating videos would be one of the highest-leverage activities I could do. It’s worth noting that I committed to recording, not posting, the videos. Relieving the pressure of posting gave me the space to get more comfortable with being on camera.
I’ve never struggled with self-confidence, but putting your self out there—really out there—is a different story. When you’re engaging in a new activity, your brain predicts the worst as a form of protection. It’s just trying to keep you safe; it doesn’t know what’s going to happen. The only way you can overcome these fears is by dosing your self with prediction error. What I mean is, you need to give your brain new information to make predictions on.
In the case of recording videos, you need to actually record videos to demonstrate that there is nothing to fear.
It took me three days of recording to decide one was good enough for YouTube. Today, I released my fifth YouTube video, and I’m planning one more this week (I’m testing out a Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule). This was partly aided by the knowledge that YouTube is pushing smaller creators who are doing minimal editing.
Music to my ears.
If I had to live up to the standard set by all the videos you see on YouTube, I’d never post. All the editing and optimization are exhausting to me. I can figure that stuff out, but when standards are high for a brand new activity, it paralyzes me.
I applied the MVP concept to this experiment and decided that I’d make each video incrementally better. For example, the video I made today was the first one where I set a thumbnail. Previously, I let YouTube set whichever thumbnail it wanted. I knew thumbnails were important, but the task was enough of a barrier to stop me. Once I figured out the mechanics of posting, it was easy to spend a little time making a thumbnail.
If you had told me last month that by the middle of July I’d be posting three videos a week to YouTube, I wouldn’t have believed you. It was only through embracing an MVP approach and making tiny experiments to test things out for my self that I realized this was an attainable goal.
What experiments are you running these days?
I’m still trying to find the golden spot for posting. Time of day, how many a week…it’s a lot.