I have come to a terrible conclusion!
Namely that I am going to have to start writing notes before I make my videos, at least if they are more than just me vlogging about my day or whatever, because I keep getting partway into a video when my mind goes totally blank and I forget at least half of what I had intended to say and I end up dissatisfied with the final product.
Aging plays havoc with our working memory, and mine was prone to randomly dumping its contents even when I was a kid, so there might be a LOT of note-taking in my future.
In the meantime, I will at least write notes for my vids at least some of the time, and that means I will need to exercise a little more self-discipline.
Speaking of which….
Either than, or I have recently made a quantum leap in brevity. This would please me enormously because I’ve always thought of myself as being too prolix, and I have been striving to make my writing more compact and impactful for God knows how long.
So it’s possible that I am just getting my point across faster now. In which case, huzzah.
But that would not explain the feeling of an icy cold wind blowing through the shockingly empty caverns of my mind all of a sudden.
That must be what it feels like when people find their minds going blank when they sit down to write an exam or the like.
But in my case, that’s knowledge, and I can almost always dredge up things I know.
It’s trying to think of things to say while recording that has been suffering lately.
Also, my little comment about lacking self-discipline got me thinking about the subject, and while my point about it having made my life harder still stands, in other ways I have demonstrated a lot of self-discipline.
For example, in writing 1K words a day since 2011.
And I got to that level of self-discipline exactly how I said : by repetition. I just did my thousand words a day for long enough for it to become normal to me and at this point I am pretty sure I would go (more) insane if I didn’t have this outlet.
You have to teach your words that they have a way out into the world.
And it’s getting that way with my videos too, even though I have only been doing them for like four or five months.
This time, it’s also my personality and expressiveness that have found out there is a way out and have started clamoring for it every day.
I am still pondering ways of making my videos way more ambitious and more professional looking. I feel like I need to make a quantum leap to a new energy level with both my vids and my extremely geeky metaphors.
I feel like I could make something truly amazing if I could get my shit together. These videos of me talking are okay for TikTok because that’s what a lot of TikTok is like. But on YouTube they look so boring.
And I want to make stuff with pizzazz. Stuff that, to the best of my ability, seems like actual television to me.
Or at least like the other YouTubers I admire. Ones that, I must stress, are actually making money at it.
I want to be like them so bad. I want to have a large and attentive audience who actually listen to and respect what I say and who appreciate my words enough to want to buy my merch, join the channel, stalk my Discord, or whatever.
I don’t care. I just want the money.
More after the break.
Getting it together
So what do I mean by getting my shit together and why do I find it so hard?
In my case, getting my poop in a group would involve gathering up all the loose threads of possibilities in my head and putting them into a single coherent picture that could then be used to go forward as a single, powerful, unified whole.
Which sounds really impressive. Yet a big part of me rejects it utterly.
Because i am very much a creative type person and as such I don’t like those kinds of constraints. I like to keep things loose and open because that is how creativity works best – when your mind is as open to connections as possible, without a lot of walls and barriers getting in the way.
So it really comes down to the question every kind of creative must face at least once – are you willing to make artistic sacrifices in order to make your talents pay?
And I’m not sure, to be honest. I certainly don’t want to do it. If I wasn’t so interested in finding a way to pay my own way for the first time in my life, I wouldn’t do a damned thing I didn’t feel like doing and would just continue to let my creativity express itself in whatever way it happens to come out that day and be done with it.
But I want to finally become a real, honest to goodness grownup, and my best long term bet for that is to learn to make some dosh with my creative talents.
It needn’t be a lot of money. I would be quite happy to just make a minimum wage living on my videos. After all, it’s not about getting rich, it’s about finally being self sufficient.
By my calculations, a minimum wage living gets you $2856/month dollars before deductions in this province. I get $1375/month on disability.
So that would double my current income, more or less. Not bad. To me, that seems like I would be living in the lap of luxury.
And it’s probably doable… if I can get my shit together.
And I don’t really wanna.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.