All skills should start small

Whether you are working on a habit, goal, or developing a skill, you should always start small. It is hard to really get in shape by going to the gym 5x a week, especially if you have never gone before. Learning to develop small changes in your life that can snowball into the life-changing effects you want is a valuable skill to have.

For the past couple of years I've wanted to start a YouTube channel. Okay, let's be honest, circa 2015, a month or so after Casey Neistat started is daily vlogs, I was hooked. I enjoyed his storytelling and the way he presented information via video. I have no intention of being a daily vlogger, but I do want to be able to tell a story visually like Casey does, just with my own spin.

So for 5 years, in the back of my mind I have always thought about starting to regularly uploading content to YouTube. The issue I ran into was that I didn't know what kind of content to upload. I don't take vacations regularly, so travel vlogs were out. Most of my days are mirror images of each other, so daily vlogs were out. While I have a CS background and love tech, I don't really want to do a programming channel or review tech all the time. So I never started.

But at the end of 2020 I started thinking about it some more. The truth is that I suck when it comes to all the core skills related to being on YouTube:

• I don't know how to put together a story
• I am really bad at speaking to a camera
• My composition skills need a lot of work
• I have very basic editing skills
• I don't know how to color grade
• I know next to nothing about audio

But these are all skills that I am interested improving. So I came to the realization that since my first 50+ videos are going to suck anyways, it doesn't matter what the content is. I don't need to have a theme for my channel right now. I might as well get started. As long as I learn to improve a little in each video, then I will be better off than if I didn't start at all. Hopefully during that time, I can figure out what I do like to talk about and can define my channel.

Right now this is all about me developing skills. I am not trying to take it anywhere. If you want to follow along with each of my first 50 videos and the lessons I am learning, you can check out the project here. I hope to complete this project in 2021.

I would recommend figuring out what skill, habit, or goal you wish you will have developed in a few years and then define a small task you can do to get one step closer. If you want to hear more about this concept check out my first video here.