Stop being afraid of failing, they said.
Learn from your failures, they said.
It’ll be fun, they said.
Yeah, well, maybe it’s an acquired taste.
Historically I’ve struggled with framing my failures because I do this fun thing where I feel like a failure. . . not quite all the time, but pretty dang close—even when I’m not actually failing. So even though I’m working on that, it can still be a struggle to actively learn from my mistakes when I don’t even know what’s legitimate vs a figment of my imagination.
However, this week I had a real life, legitimate, actual failure. I was supposed to film, post, and submit a video (this one, for those of you who missed this piece of cinematic gold) by 11pm on Sunday evening. I ended up missing my deadline, receiving a strike (which is a bad thing, because after three of those bad boys, it’s banishment to the Isle of Perpetual Tickling), and experiencing inexpressible embarrassment and general uncomfortable-ness.
These are my lessons. Please learn something from them and don’t do the same things I did. Save yourself the mortification, humiliation, and other less-than-enjoyable stuff.
Don’t wait until you have an idea to start working on something—especially if you have a deadline.
Lots of people talk about this—don’t let your perfectionism overtake you, don’t let analysis paralysis get in the way, just do something. And I’ve always took that as “Sometimes you won’t have an amazing idea—be content with starting with just an idea.”
However, sometimes that isn’t an option. Sometimes you’ve got to go and start your project with literally no idea where it’s going, or what you’re doing, and figure things out along the way.
If you’re working on something for fun on the side, then maybe you’ve got a little bit more freedom to wait until an idea seems just right. But if you’re on a deadline, you absolutely need to stop staring at that blank (or scribbled-on) sheet of paper and literally just start it.
For the first week of this ongoing project, I knew immediately what I wanted my video to be about, how it should be structured, and what I was going to say.
This past week, however, I was not so fortunate. I wasn’t connecting with the content, I wasn’t seeing any patterns—I was pretty much stuck. And it wasn’t for lack of trying—I spent hours and hours sitting down with my notebook to try to come up with something that made some semblance of sense. But it just wasn’t happening.
Not until I physically walked out into the food truck with a bag of salt and vinegar potato chips (the best fuel for true creativity) and started talking my idea into existence did anything start clicking. Then began the mad rush for props and supplies (not until after multiple people unexpectedly opened the door to see me eating chips and talking to myself, of course).
So. Start doing something. Even if you don’t have an idea. A dumb video is better than a late video, or worse—no video at all.
If you want to teach somebody something, you’ve got to actually understand it.
In hindsight, this is what really did me in. I was trying to come up with a video that would consolidate a bunch of varied information in such a way that it was easy to digest and understand.
The problem was that I really had no idea what I was talking about. I understood the concepts on a kind of far-off level, without really internalizing them in a way that was applicable to even myself—forget trying to help anyone else.
If you genuinely don’t understand something regarding the project that you’re needing to accomplish, don’t just charge forward. Maybe taking a couple minutes to actually understand what you’re talking about will even help you come up with an idea.
A couple minutes spent on developing your own thoughts and sense of understanding could potentially save you hours of frustrated banging-your-head-against-your-notebook-ness.
Respect your budget.
Earlier this month I talked about creating a time budget for myself. It had worked well for some aspects of my life, but in terms of getting this video done on time, it did not.
However, this was entirely a reflection of my own choices as opposed to the usefulness of the budget. I chose to spend much more time on coming up with the idea of the video than I had budgeted for myself. That ended up cutting into the time I had set aside for actually filming and editing the video.
I know now for next time that I cannot overspend in one area without severely impacting another area of my life. Even within the same project this principle is true.
If you’re tempted to spend more time on one area of your project, be aware that that time will have to come from somewhere. It’s not a self-replenishing resource. Unless you make cuts somewhere else, you will feel the pain of this on the tail end of your project when it’s 7am the day after the deadline and you know you’re really done for.
Last but not least, respect the vindictive power of YouTube—it doesn’t owe you a n y t h i n g.
If you think for a minute that YouTube might be on your side, help a sister out, and upload your content in record time just because you’re on a deadline—you’re dead wrong, pal. Sorry. I don’t make the rules.
Murphy’s Law says that if something can go wrong, it will go wrong. YouTube’s Law says that if you’re stupid enough to wait until the last minute to start filming and editing your video, you’re contractually obligated to experiencing slower than usual upload times, random debilitating errors, and, if you’re on an especially tight deadline, completely dropping your video and making you restart the upload process even if you were 94% of the way there.
It might even make you do it twice, just for fun—and to really drive home the point that you absolute cannot rely on YouTube to just put in a good word with the chef and get you a magical secret menu super-speedy upload process. It’s just not done.
How much time do you think you’ll need to upload your video to YouTube? Okay, triple it. Now you might be safe.
Those are my lessons. Like I said, please take a cue from me and be aware of your time-surroundings. Good luck to you and your future project endeavors!