Hey friends,
We’ve just wrapped up the first week of the first cohort of my live online course, the
Part-Time YouTuber Academy. We’ve got 400 students taking the course in real-time, and the sense of community that the students have already created is pretty inspiring.
One of the main messages that I preach when it comes to succeeding on YouTube (and in fact, in every other creative field too) is that in the early stages, quantity matters more than quality.
Here’s the classic
Parable of the Pottery Class (adapted from the book
Art & Fear) that illustrates this:
There was once a pottery teacher called Brian. One month, he decided to split his class into two groups. Group A had to make a pot every day for 30 days (so 30 pots in total). Group B had to work on a single pot for the whole 30 days.
At the end of the month, Brian judged the quality of the pots. Without exception, every one of the top 10 pots came from Group A, the guys that made one pot per day. None came from the group that focused on perfecting their single pot.
When it comes to YouTube videos, my mantra has always been “your first 100 videos are going to suck. So get through those as quickly as possible, and then you’ll start making good stuff”.
This is (of course) the advice I’m giving students of our course as well. Each week, they’ve got a homework video assignment to film, edit and publish a video so that by the end, they’ve published 4+ videos on their channels. But importantly, this is just the start of a multi-year journey (hopefully) - it’s a marathon, not a sprint.
I’m writing this because it’s advice that I need to take myself.
I’ve been wanting to learn (a) how to draw, and (b) how to write songs for years now. But what’s holding me back is a sense of “I don’t know how to do this”.
Instead, I should just aim to draw 100 things, or write 100 songs, and figure the rest out along the way, like I did with YouTube.
So my question to you is this - what are you stalling because you feel you haven’t learned enough to create? What’s your sense of perfectionism holding you back from creating?
Have a great week!
Ali