A surprising and unexpected realization that came up with a friend

I spent the first three years of my content creation journey as a YouTuber.

I streamed on Twitch. I played video games. I wrote scripts and planned content around completing one of the toughest games I had come across (Frostpunk). By the time I was forced to step away from that life with the birth of my second child, I had wracked up over 200 videos and streams on my channel.

When I stopped, I had just crossed the 300 subscriber mark, well short of the 1000 required for monetization.

But what I had created and left behind stood the test of time. As of today, that channel only needs 60 more subscribers to cross that threshold. All that is required outside of that are to maintain the 400 hours of monthly viewing and three new videos posted within the past month.

At this rate, I could probably make it happen sometime in the fall of next year.

That tells me something else — that my strategy to help others complete the game was valuable to many, enough for the channel to grow on its own without additional input from me. It’s proof that I can actually create things that I enjoy and be something that endures with the proper focus.

Cool story bro, but so what?

What I’m trying to say is that time is all that is needed if you are willing to put in the effort.

Sure, the organic approach is the slow lane when it comes to social media (and it’s all social media at this point), but doing something for the love of it and stepping away when life happens (literally in that case for me) is not a sign of defeat. It’s a choice.

And I don’t regret any of it.

As I start my fourth year of writing, I’m reminded of the fact that I’ve far exceeded the volume of content in this space — nearly double the amount —- of my YouTube career. In fact, I’m closing in on 1000 days of writing and 500 articles scattered across three platforms.

So yeah, double is about right. But the gravy on top is what has happened over this period of time.

It took hundreds of hours and years of interacting with others across the world for one of my longtime online friends to point something out to me about my style. The reason I can connect with others through commenting more than through any of my other work is because of the way I think when I’m just riffing.

I can stitch many disparate things together and bounce from one to the other in a “Freakonomics” kind of way that keeps things interesting in a conversation. I draw from different inputs to synthesize them into some sort of coherent narrative or theme. I find the adjacent concepts and weave them in, smoosh them together, and toss them back out into the dialog to see what happens.

Or maybe it’s more of a tennis match?

Apparently there is a medium that may be more suited to my kind of thinking, one that I had dismissed in the past that is the best of both video and writing.

Podcasting.

I’m going to be toying with the idea a bit. I may not have anything immediately available, but it does sound intriguing. Fortunately, Substack has a built-in podcast option that I may take advantage of, but for now, I feel like it might be a bit of a shiny object moment for me. I’ve put a lot of effort into developing my thinking and realizing just how big the inner world can be.

Who knows? It might just naturally grow itself over the next year.

The remedy (is the experience)

I keep coming back to this.

My message to you is that you can question everything that you’re doing, and it may not seem like it’s all that important or meaningful at the moment. The “just in case” vs. the “just in time” mindset in learning and exploring is a tricky one to navigate. You’ll encounter both more often in real life than you may want, but there is no such thing as a “trivial fact”.

There’s only the angle, the situation, and the opportunity to apply it when needed.

Follow the path and have faith in the process.

Not sure what that means?

Neither did I when I first started doing all of this, but hindsight truly is 20/20. So here’s a little exercise to do:

1. Take a few minutes to reflect on what you’ve accomplished this year (yes, you HAVE done some things this year).

2. List them out on whatever medium you choose (paper, chalkboard, Google doc, phone app, dirt).

3. How did you get there? What was the story behind each achievement? What did you have to overcome, people you had to talk to, resources you had to gather, to make it happen? Brainstorm those out as well for each.

4. Here’s the interesting part: see if you can find a pattern or a throughline that connects all of them together. Circle or highlight or annotate them, whatever floats your boat.

5. Write down a summary, a single sentence or two, about yourself — a characteristic or trait that sticks out or underpins everything here.

Guess what? That’s kinda how my brain works…and I believe that you have that ability as well. The only difference is that I do it in real time all the time in my extrovertive state.

Maybe I should structure this a bit more and put it into a worksheet format.

Anyway, if you choose to do this exercise, let me know what you discovered about yourself.

It’s a piece of your identity that is not anchored in society, that’s for sure.