An amazing mistake

Image by David Schwarzenberg from Pixabay

My greatest weakness is that I am a perfectionist. My whole life I have been obsessed with quality and it is a big advantage as a scientist/engineer. But it is also a curse. If the world were run by engineers, I don’t think anything would ever be accomplished. We would be too busy tweaking our products to improve it beyond that 99th percentile. Luckily, since a couple of years I have constantly challenged myself to produce content with low quality and instead go for quantity. This week I made an amazing discovery, which proves that I am now on a much better path.

I have been producing 1-2 daily videos since November 2019. I don’t know the exact number, but it must be around 600 videos by now. I use a software called OBS when I am recording my videos on my computer. By accident, I noticed that I have had the OBS video settings on the stream set to 720p and not 1080p. My past self would never have let this pass. He would have checked, double checked and triple checked that all the settings were correct before he published anything. But the fact of the matter is that no-one else than my past self would care! I felt so proud when I discovered this mistake because it is proof of personal growth. When you are starting to build a social media presence, you just must accept that it is a slow process. You will play in front of empty stands for a very, very long time before you get some traction. Now, instead of checking the video settings twenty times and writing a script for each video I probably managed to create 10-20 pieces of content instead. Which is time much better spent.

I am convinced that whatever journey that you decide to commence, the critical this is to simply keep showing up no matter what happens. Do a little every day and you will be amazed by what you can achieve in a year. Some people have asked my why I produce so many videos and told me that I need to back off and instead focus on quality. When I get those comments, I prefer to double down and publish 2-3 videos instead that day. I feel like in just about anything I do regarding my habits, whether it is video production, music composition, painting, learning a new language, whatever… about 95 % of the times the result is crap and doing it only feels like a chore. It is not fun at all. And the remaining 5% might be pure Gold. But it is impossible to know when those golden nuggets will pop out! The only way I know of that is certain to capture those moments, is to unconditionally keep showing up. I have NEVER been able to detect a golden nugget beforehand. And the ones that I thought were good, usually get zero engagement, and the ones that get most engagement is often those that I just did for the sake of doing.

I do suspect however, that if I just keep pumping out insane amounts of content – Quantity above Quality – I will learn what works and what doesn’t. I will listen to the audience, watch their response and do more of what works and less of what doesn’t. And I love this process. I know it works and that’s what keeps me going.

If you do something 1000 times, it is physically impossible to not get at least decent at it. Keep showing up.