FUN > FEAR
Okay, so I’m getting ready to post week eleven on my YouTube channel. That’s 11 consistent weeks of creating content for a Saturday release. That’s a big deal for me. When I started to seriously consider starting a YouTube channel, about 15-16 weeks ago, I was honestly unsure if it was something I was going to enjoy doing, but here we are, still going strong.
The big thing now is staying ahead. When I first started recording, I made 3 videos in one week and then Christmas hit and I didn’t record for 2 weeks, but because I had a mini backlog of videos, I was still able to hold myself to the commitment to post once a week.
Still today, my goal remains the same to post a class every Saturday. Even though I’d like to up it to 2 videos per week, one yoga class & one sit down chat. I have yet to create a ‘normal’ YouTube video where I’m talking about a specific topic to the camera, but once I get rolling with this, I think it’ll be really fun. Which leads me to my next point:
As I was sitting eating my chicken and goat cheese beet salad, pondering the day and ‘productivity’ YouTube videos I listened to earlier, I heard the phrase appear before me:
“Let the fun outweigh the fear.”
In one of those videos, Ali Abdaal said that his definition of success is “enjoying what you do”, which requires you to make what you’re doing fun. And he also said that it’s best to look at things like an ‘adventure’. By doing this, we can let having fun with the project be more motivating than the idea that we’re not good enough, and let the fun of the journey outweigh the insecurities we might be feeling about it.
Especially for something as vulnerable and intimate as YouTube videos (I mean, you’re literally inviting strangers into your home to listen to you), it’s really easy to let the fear become crippling; thinking you’ll never be as good as someone else, or that you don’t really have anything special to offer that’s not already out there, or that you’re not knowledgeable enough in that field to actually say anything worth a damn. And this is hard, it’s certainly something I struggle with. Thankfully, I now have a friendly reminder written on my whiteboard reminding me everyday that having fun is the reward, whereas feeling inferior will rob me of joy. And another great quote that followed this train of thought was:
“It’s what you do in the dark that leads you to the light.”
A beautiful phrase really. Something I’ve been carrying with me for many years now; I must've read it somewhere in a book when I was younger, and clearly it really stuck. I remember being in high school thinking about all the things I was doing in my life that I thought were preparing me to be someone different than I am now. But for this, I’m grateful.
Here’s the video I referenced:
