David Park
We talking about Practice!
Practice makes perfect right?
Wrong
Practice makes permanent.
Don't watch any videos, don't watch any tutorials, don't hire a coach. Pick up a golf club and start to swing it. Practice for years. Congratulations. You have permanently fucked up your golf swing to a point where it will be incredibly difficult, maybe impossible, to fix. This is now the foundation of your golf swing for the rest of your life. Practice makes permanent.
New YouTubers often ask me for advice: “I put out a couple of videos and they only got 1000 views.” I give them this look: 😒. I had to make ten videos before I cracked a hundred views. I had to make 20 videos before I cracked a thousand views. Some people just got IT. They turn on a camera, start talking, and the views flood in. They're either just incredibly attractive, incredibly charismatic, incredibly interesting. They just got IT.
But for the rest of us, we practice and we get better. YouTube, like all things, is a skill that can be developed. Anytime someone asks me for advice, I always give them the same advice.
Treat every video you make as practice for getting better at making videos.
Especially today, people treat content creation as a lottery. Unfortunately, people also treat life as a lottery. They believe that success, wealth, prestige, all come from chance. They justify their shortcomings on bad luck, or in the case of YouTube, the algorithm. But the truth is, you can get good at YouTube, and life, if you treat every opportunity as practice.
But not all practice is created equal..
My aunt was my piano teacher growing up. Every time I would mess up, she would make me stop and start over from the beginning. I hated this. I know I made a mistake but I wanted to finish the rest of the song before I had to go back to the start. She used to tell me, "Do it right every time or you'll get good at doing it wrong." Often growing up, we were told to practice practice practice, that repetition is the most important thing. However, the wrong kind of practice is not only pointless but can often be detrimental to progress. It's possible to practice and get worse at something.
I'm currently doing a 30 day daily vlog challenge on YouTube. My justification was that I wanted to get the reps in. The more I vlog, the better I'll get at it. So far, in the last few weeks, I've made as many videos as it would normally take me six months to make. I've been making the videos so fast that I didn't even pause to consider WHY. The whole point was to get better at vlogging, but if I'm being honest, I think I got worse. My days are busy, and I used that as an excuse to push out last minute vlogs just for the sake of getting them out. I think I picked up bad habits and it's going to take me time to filter these out.
I still have ten days left in the challenge, and I'm glad I caught it now. Doing things properly doesn't mean spending copious amounts of time doing it. It just means to be thoughtful and intentional about how you do things. And this doesn't just go for YouTube. Whether it's YouTube, work, relationships, anything. Every time you do something is an opportunity to practice getting better at that thing. When you're done with that task, you will either be slightly better at it, the same, or worse.
Pay attention to how you practice. What you practice and the way you practice is the way you learn. Also stop making shitty YouTube videos. 😛