My plan for the next 3 months, seasoned with some neurosis | #46

Let's see where I'm at, come the beginning of May.

Hey friends!

In the past year, I've made a bunch of plans, tried a bunch of stuff, and changed my mind a lot.

If you've kept up, sorry for giving you whiplash!

A few weeks ago, I wrote a long post about my plan for 2024.

I've made some progress, but I feel that I'm meandering a bit too much. The long term plan was a little too high in the clouds. I think it'd be useful to lay out some concrete steps to take.

So, I'm bringing it down to earth and making a plan for the next 3 months.

In this issue, a descension from my high level plan all the way down to what I'm going to do next week.

• I want to help other YouTubers. If I even want to build a YouTube channel, building a profitable one will take years. So, in the meantime, I'll help other YouTubers build theirs.

• To be helpful, I need to learn helpful skills. What are the skills that add value?

  • Packaging

  • Scripting

  • Video Editing

  • Motion Graphics

  • Examples of videos I love

• To learn the (many) skills, I need a plan. Each skill is DEEP and there are TONS of resources for each one. Which ones do I pick? In what order? When will I be "ready"?

• Here's the plan, what're steps 1, 2, and 3? Study Hunter Weiss, make similar videos, then make some pitches!

• Bonus: the history of this newsletter

I help other YouTubers.

Even if I did all the right things to make a successful channel, I should plan for it to take years. That's a big commitment, and I don't know if I want to make it.

• I don't know what content I want to make.

• I don't know what part of the process I'm strongest at.

• Do I want the lifestyle of shipping videos over and over?

There's a lot I don't know.

To figure out some of those unknowns, it seems like a good idea to work with and for YouTubers.

Make thumbnails. Write titles, intros, and scripts. Edit the videos. Add motion graphics.

I'm interested in and have done a little bit of each of those, but I'm not good at any of it. I think that, until I get good at something, I can't tell how much I like it.

I want to get proficient at each of those things. From there, I can judge what I like and what my superpower is.

Part of the measurement for "good" is my own subjective measurement of quality. Am I proud of it? Can I do it quickly?

Another part is: does it impress my YouTuber clients? Does their audience like it?

In my past client work, when I haven't enjoyed it, it was because I felt like it could have been better. It could be more valuable to their audience. It could have been more engaging, clearer, prettier, etc. I could have been more proud of it.

But at the time, I had neither the skills nor experience to articulate why nor how to fix it.

Once I get the skills, I think my ideal clients are:

• big YouTubers I like who are pouring with ideas and could use all the help they can get. Ideally, I'm in their target audience.

• small YouTubers that are responsive, flexible, and have several opportunities for me to help them get some easy wins

I learn helpful skills

Okay, let's do a survey of what skills and sub-skills there are that I'm interested in.

It's wise to pick one skill, learn it, and then move to the next one. But DAMN, that's so hard for me. Partially because I find it all so interesting and I have an advanced-stage case of shiny object syndrome. But also, in my defense (breathing emoji), everything connects to everything.

The packaging depends on the script. The script depends on the packaging. The editing depends on the script. The motion graphics depend on the editing and the packaging.

Which is why I'm writing all this out! To make a conscious decision about what to focus on and in what order.

Packaging

The obvious sub-skills here are making titles and thumbnails. But, those are both rabbit holes.

Thumbnails means hard skills like Photoshop and Illustrator. And also less tangible skills like audience psychology, design, composition, etc.

Titles gets into who the audience is and what the script will deliver. Are there many audiences we are trying to appeal to? Is the video purely for ad revenue? Or are we trying to optimize a specific conversion?

Not to mention the other marketing stuff. How do we appeal to as wide of an audience as possible? What motivations, problems, and emotions does our audience have?

In general, the question, "given a thing I am interested in, how do I present it so that it's interesting to others?" is something I think about a lot. It's basically the Customer Awareness journey applied to content.

If said, "wanna learn some algebra?" you'd probably say uh, no. But if I said, "wanna make some money?" and later on that required learning some algebra, you'd be a lot more interested.

Scriptwriting

When I first started writing, I noticed that I always had a lot of ideas, but lots of trouble structuring them.

Some reasons for that trouble:

• I wasn't clear (and still am not clear) on who my audience is. What does everyone who reads this newsletter have in common? I don't know how to think about that, other than: y'all care about what I'm doing to some extent.

• Organizing everything requires being aware of many things at once. That is hard to do when text is the middle man between me and the ideas. When everything is in my head at once, I can sort it quickly. When there are 20 ideas and I can only hold 4 in my head at once, it's tough to figure out where they all go. I have to jump around from paragraph to paragraph, reading and rereading. Eventually, as I stumble around, I uncover a structure.

That created an interest in common structures for essays (and content in general). How can I make structuring easier?

I became interested in

• storytelling frameworks (e.g. hero's journey)

• storytelling components (e.g. camera shots - What purpose does each one serve? When would you use one over the other?)

• story genres (e.g. monster in the house, golden fleece, from Save the Cat!)

• story types (e.g. Kurt Vonnegut's 6 types of stories)

At some point I discovered George Blackman on Twitter. George Blackman wrote video scripts for Ali Abdaal, a popular Youtuber (5 million+ subscribers).

He has loads of content on how to write YouTube scripts, and I intend to binge and internalize it all.

Video Editing

Oh my goodness, video editing, another rabbit hole. There is the actual use of the tool, Premiere Pro. But there's also the intangible skills like,

• what footage to use vs discard

• when to use certain transitions

• color grading

• sound design

• audio stuff (e.g. making it sound good)

and so on!

Motion Graphics & VFX

Animation is another rabbit hole. There are tons of styles and techniques I'm broadly interested in.

In fact, having a whole bunch of browser tabs open with different animation tutorials was what prompted this newsletter.

Overwhelmed, I started asking myself: what should I focus on? Given that I'm interested in everything, I should filter by usefulness. Which one, if I learned it, would bring my closer to my goal?

Well, my goal is to add value to YouTubers, right? So what are the most valuable motion graphic techniques to learn?

It was around this time that I got on Twitter to decompress, and I saw this tweet:

And I thought... damn. Good point. That makes a lot of sense. Most of the After Effects stuff probably doesn't make a difference to most audiences. I have no interest in doing stuff that doesn't make a difference.

But, at the same time, I want to be careful about discarding fancy effects entirely. Surely, when used right, they add to the value of the experience. What about the value of experiencing them as art?

It got me thinking hard about what motivates me. What kind of work do I want to do?

I definitely don't want to slap cool effects on mediocre content (from my perspective). Effects that nobody cares about on content that barely anyone watches. And, of the people that do watch it, it doesn't impact their life at all.

So what *do* I want to do? Meaningful stuff. Content that's useful. Content that makes people feel things.

A few examples come to mind.

Some examples of videos I love

• 12 Principles of Animation - This video was such a joy to watch. So informative. The animations themselves were both fun and clarifying. One of my favorite YouTube videos.

• How Does Bitcoin Actually Work? - When crypto was all the rage I remember watching this and thinking, WOW, Bitcoin makes so much more sense. Super useful.

• The Right Way to Change Color in Photoshop - I love this tutorial because the value for the watch time is incredible. It's clear, it's a minute long, and in that minute it tells you

  • exactly what problem the video solves,

  • how to solve it,

  • what it looks like when you solve it, and

  • other problems you can also solve this way

• Tiktok logo animation in procreate! - I love this video because it's so scrappy and inspirational. When people see impressive art, I feel like there's a tendency to mystify it. To put it out of reach. Like, the artist can only make stuff like that because of a special talent or an unreasonable amount of effort. When I watched it I walked away thinking, damn, that could be me! I could be a great artist!

• 7 Business Concepts You've Never Heard of (But Will Make You LOTS of Money) - This video was awesome for many reasons:

  • it doesn't drag on - each second of footage earns its keep in the video

  • for every concept, he gives an example and gives context for why I should care

  • each extra concept he introduces, he ties back to the previous ones, helping me understand how everything works together

• I taught 116+ Salesmen My Closing Framework - Another Alex Hormozi video. I love this video on how to do sales. Not only does it walk me through the process, but it also includes the rationale for each step AND hints to know you're doing it right. Stuff like, "if they say this, you're on the right track". I love videos that tell you what to do, why to do it that way, and what you should expect to see or not see.

• How Writing Online Could Make You A Millionaire - I've written about this video before. I love videos like this that TOTALLY change how I see the world. Videos that take ideas that I didn't think of as unrelated and organize them into one big idea.

• When He Asks Your Age - I love Nikki Howard. She's such a great actress. Her faces and reactions are so on point. The scripts of her videos are so well written. The scenes are hilarious.

• How Asian Parents Flex - I love Steven He. His style of humor (dry, exaggerated, random, character-based) makes me lose it laughing.

So, yeah! I love educational, inspirational, relatable, and funny content. Stuff that stirs something within people, within me I guess.

I feel like it's easy to write off comedy as not being meaningful or impactful. Something we watch to distract ourselves. No lasting effect.

But now that I'm thinking about it, it isn't like that, at least for me. It makes me look at things in different ways, it reminds me to look for the whimsicality and fun in life. It makes me feel seen. A not-as-obvious benefit is that it allows me to relate to other people. It's a catalyst for bonding with others.

I create a plan

So, that's a lot of stuff I could learn. Each of those skills (packing, scripting, etc) has sub-skills and niches. I'm interested in it all, and I want to learn it all. But, in what order?

Well, I'm learning it to be valuable. It seems like the best move would be to

• pick the most valuable stand-alone skill (e.g. scripting),

• niche down (e.g. finance),

• put in the reps (e.g. make scripts), and then

• do outreach until someone hires me.

But, honestly, I feel a lot of resistance when it's framed like that. Some spitballing of roadblocks and fears that come to mind:

• what if I write 20 scripts and send them to 20 people and get no responses? how do I know if they were just busy or if what I did was crap? how do I even tell as a beginner? what if in that process I've learned nothing? and then I've just wasted another month?

• what if I do all this and I find out I just don't like doing it?

• how do I know any of this is useful to anyone, how do I know I'm on the right track?

• what if I'm not good at it? or it turns out to be more trouble than it's worth? what if, after everything is said and done (marketing, sales, brainstorming, research, writing, revisions), I don't even make more than I would at a job?

• what if I don't have enough expertise to write the scripts? what if I'm stuck and can't find the information to finish it?

It's hard to tell how much of the resistance is anxiety vs a lack of desire.

It's also hard to tell how much of the lack of desire is lack of experience vs a bad personality fit (it's not a thing I enjoy).

Ugh, so much uncertainty.

Another thought that emerged is: maybe I don't actually like the "doing" part? I keep thinking about this plan as a means to an end. A lot of my frustration with my past work experience has been its lack of scalability. What would I do if I knew I couldn't scale it?

Maybe what I actually like is

• learning about and studying this stuff

• talking about it with people

• helping people solve their problems

And I should go be a support or sales engineer, or something?

Or maybe it's the fear talking. Maybe with familiarity and comfort, once I know what I'm doing, I'll feel a lot differently.

Sheesh, I feel overwhelmed. Okay, what would this look like if it were easy? What would I enjoy doing for which there seems to be a market?

This Hunter Weiss video comes to mind (linked in case gif doesn’t load):

Making educational motion graphics videos like this looks fun. Looks like I can learn to do it in the next 3 months. Maybe if I got good enough, either Hunter would hire me or could refer me? Or I could look in his replies, message his past clients, etc.

Hm. Ok, then maybe here's the plan for the next 3 months:

1. study the video and list out what techniques he uses

2. study other similar videos and list out what techniques they use

3. study George Blackman's and Jenny De Hoyos' content and create your own playbook

4. come up with 5 ideas for videos I can make that are similar

5. make those 5 videos, learning and practicing the techniques on the list

6. come up with a list of 10 people I'd love to have as clients (e.g. people who post educational content I like to consume)

7. make a video for the first person and send it to them with a pitch

8. if they don't reply, go to the next person on the list, repeat until someone hires me

So, the deliverables are, in order:

• a list of techniques used in the Hunter Weiss video

• a list of techniques used broadly in similar videos

  • NO MORE THAN 3 + whatever's in the Hunter Weiss video to prevent me from going overboard

• a scriptwriting playbook

• a list of 5 video ideas

• 5 videos based on the Hunter Weiss and similar videos

• a list of 10 people I'd love to have as clients

• one video for each of them until someone hires me, or until I’ve hit 10 videos

Alright. I feel pretty good about that plan. I still feel the fear and anxiety, but here's the contract I'm making with myself:

Follow the entire plan. Deliver all the deliverables.

If your fears are correct... if you have trouble getting feedback, if it turns out to not be that profitable, if you don't like doing it, fine. You tried.

And if you have no other ideas after that, I guess start applying for support or sales engineer jobs.

That's it for this week!

PS: if you're interested in a small blurb about the history of this newsletter, look below!

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History of this newsletter

When I first started this newsletter, I envisioned a future where I was paid to write stuff. I started out by trying to pick a niche and going with it. That didn't work.

Next, around Dec 2022, I decided to write whatever I wanted as long as it was once a week. I did that for about 6 months. It was fun, but I felt like I was bouncing around between different areas at a surface level. I wanted more focus.

Then, in June 2023, I decided to get Serious and tweet every day about my progress for 1,000 days in a row. I didn't know what I wanted to do for a career, but I wanted to make sure I was Doing Something. I wanted tangible evidence that I Was Serious.

I did that for about 200 days before I realized most days I was spinning my wheels. I felt like I had to get something tangible done everyday, which turned out to be VERY hard. I found that most significant progress required research and planning. Doing the planning and the executing all in one day, every day, was unrealistic.

So, I took some inventory, thought about what I learned, what I liked/disliked, and made a plan for 2024.

I also decided to switch my progress reports from daily tweets to weekly emails. That way, I had some breathing room to totally blow off a day and still feel like I'm on track. It would also allow me to elaborate on why I'm doing things.

Now, I think of this newsletter as chapters of my story. It'd be cool if it grew to be pretty big, but I'm doing this mainly to clarify my thoughts and keep a record. I also want a medium for friends, family, and fans (hehe) to keep an eye on me, what I'm up to, and what I'm thinking about.