Do you know what’s one of the strangest, but glorious, facets of today’s society? Everyone has something to say and an urge to broadcast that to the world. I definitely think the former has always been true, obviously, but the latter is a relatively modern convention. The ‘ease’ of doing it has in turn created the burning desire to do it.
I know it’s true for me. I used to be happy with what I had to say being the province of friends, family or at an extreme push or forum all of which had less of a need to mass broadcast.
Yet now I constantly wrestle with starting a new YouTube channel. It’ll never happen. I find why this is the case more interesting than the mythical new YouTube channel itself.
I’m too selfish
I say this a lot, but I don’t mean it in the sense of me being mean, lacking emotional intelligence or not being considerate of others but purely because I am selfish in terms of creating for others because the truth is anything I’ve done creatively I’ve mostly done for myself.
In the interest of full honesty I did my existing YouTube channel purely for myself!
Is this true of everyone on YouTube? Maybe it is a truism. It has one big issue when it comes to make committing to a new YouTube channel.
My existing channel was born out of my divorce. There used to be videos on there that gathered the channel’s early audience but really should have probably been content for a journal, not a YouTube video. What about the travel adventures? Yeah, there is a lot of experiential stuff in there that I think has lots of value for people to watch but let’s face it that camera was the person I was travelling with and this influenced the content.
There are very few 100% advice videos on my current YouTube channel, though I did start doing them under the How I Did It content stream and playlist. I wasn’t exactly not creating for others, but I was also creating it for myself and the content flow ebbed and flowed on the latter not the former.
I love the fact my videos have inspired people to make solo trips or try out different places and on the sporadic times someone posts on the comments to this effect it’s brilliant but I also know I will talk a lot about how YouTube developed me and I’d argue that has been it’s biggest advantage.
I’m strangely high performing
I say strangely because it has different facets to it. One is a logical outcome the other seems to be the reverse of it.
It’s more career than life
I’m high performing in that I am successful (though I’ve had my career lulls), have a high locus of control, believe I can shape my wider environment to my own ends, have a high confidence factor I can set myself up for success in a number of areas or know when there are risks and there are a number of things I do that I am willing to admit I do a lot better than a lot of people (albeit not all). I have a way of pulling what people see as disparate topics into the same umbrella to solve problems. I really believe I can make complexity actionable and communicate it and this is a cool thing.
Weirdly, this is largely related to work, my personal life is way more apathetic.
This tends to mean I miss the need for or don’t even see the need for content that describes the obvious. I look at some content out on the internet and think: don’t people just know that? I am naturally thinking several content levels up. Obviously, that content is valuable it’s just I’d find it hard to make or it’d not even occur to me.
It also means I lack the personal life organisation to do stuff like get up at 0600 so I can spend two hours on my YouTube channel before work starts.
I don’t project high-performance
The weird facet of where I sit in this high-performing thing is I don’t project it on other people or talk about it a lot. I don’t need to constantly demonstrate it in conversation. I just do it where it applies because that is what I see as being professional and leading. This means in general conversation I don’t seed my conversation with how good I am at X or Y or talk about the great things I’ve done.
There is one exception to this is when things start to impact my quality of life or general mental health then I’ll push back with my experience and knowledge so I don’t have to put up with that crap.
This definitely influences the type of content I do and would make it a bit more experiential than straight-up ‘knowledge authority’. The thought of slipping into more pure thought leadership territory hits me with the imposter syndrome hammer.
What would it be about?
This is a big problem. Not because I can’t think of what it could be about but I don’t think any of them are sustainable. This website and my existing YouTube channel point to things it could be about: –
- Media (probably more focused on TV)
- Being an introvert
- Role-playing games
I’ve missed travel as I’ve been there and work-related stuff as that would be too much like work. I am interested in all of these topics and have quite a bit to say on them but I hit a number of problems. Well, possibly only one problem.
Do I really want to commit myself to the time and effort to make a well produced video on any of these topics on a weekly or bi-weekly basis for years?
And that’s it in a nutshell. Once you create a YouTube channel you have to really like what you’re creating content on to a degree that you want to create content for it all the time. At any particular time you have to be interested enough to be researching topics, creating thumbnails, producing and editing videos, etc. It’s constant. I’m not even including the ancillary time of watching TV shows, playing role-playing games, etc, to support the content.
You could be one of those people who manages to wrangle a live show every week? I’m sure that has effort as well but there is a particular niche where you really save yourself a lot of effort and just waffle about shit at a set time a week.
I can’t see myself dedicating myself to any of these topics consistently like that. I sometimes wonder what that says about me as this isn’t true because it’s YouTube it’s generally true. I am really fascinated and think deeply about all these things quite a bit but not to the extent I’d want to create content for them as a life commitment.
I think holistically
I just can’t pick a single, relatively narrow niche and talk about for years and years most likely getting ever deeper and narrower into the topic. I just can’t do it.
I undertake and am interested in endeavours that rely on being very holistic and cross skilled to succeed and will make decisions to avoid long-term endeavours that are not.
This is true of every facet of my life. Let’s hit a few examples: –
- I make career changes when my role narrows rather than being broad experience consultancy based
- I don’t run role-playing games often because ‘just running’ isn’t what I find fun I’m looking for that idea that involves succeeding at doing a certain idea, style and approach.
- This is true in playing a role-playing game even when not running I am exploring an idea not just wanting to play game X.
- Assuming I’m not in a funk and doing none of them I’ll shift between my hobbies in tranches because I can’t just do one forever.
- I rarely just ‘like a TV show’ there has to be something about it that makes me think about things.
- I need to have achieved some sort of personal growth in things I do that aren’t passive and once that goes I do lose a bit of interest.
This means YouTube’s demand of picking a topic and sticking to it doesn’t really work for me. It naturally stunts the growth of the channel and gives it a natural life span.
You just have to look at the YouTube channel topics I picked out. I’m less interested in one of them than how two or all three of them intersect but YouTube doesn’t play well with that approach.
The perfect YouTube Channel?
A perfect YouTube channel does exist for me, it doesn’t really exist for YouTube.
- A holistic brand and content strategy as an intersection of things
- Series of videos irregularly (basically when I want)
- Produced videos not live streams as the mainstay
You know what this is? A very selfish way of approaching YouTube. It’s saying I should be able to pick video topics from an intersection of two or three topics and do video series on what I find interesting about this when I want and you should show up to watch.
There is little commitment to other people being interested!
Totally unrealistic though a few channels get away with it (albeit still with a narrower topic set). The key thing those channels have is ridiculously high content value, a ludicrously high narrative component that people find life-affirming or a person that comes with a pre-exiting audience or a few of these elements.
I can delude myself that is possible but it isn’t not without changing my life in significant ways.
And, Finally…
So, that’s why a new channel isn’t going to happen.
Ultimately, I think it all comes down to being too selfish. I want it to be for me as much if not more than for others. I want it to be about the holistic topics I find interesting not the focus YouTube audiences demand. I want to be able to do it when I want it only when I’m passionate about it.
The reverse is I can’t find a topic that I’m interested enough or passionate about enough to spend lots of time on it in a way that is more purely orientated to providing for others.
This is one thing I learned from YouTube.
Now, if someone is covering any of the topics outlined and once a thoughtful person to fill out discussions or live streams that’s maybe another topic as you’ve put in all the effort!