YouTube Progress in a Year and 40 Videos

I've always hated being filmed, either in a photo or a video, but for some reason I've felt the pull to learn how to do that. Especially in English, my non-native language.

The first time I experimented with this was in 2017 when I moved to Spain. I wanted to document my language learning journey, but the idea fell apart pretty quickly after I tried shooting a couple of videos and seeing how awkward I was on camera and how the sound of my voice made me cringe too hard. Those videos are too painful to share publicly, I'm afraid!

Nevertheless, I tried.

This idea kept growing in my mind for years. I was postponing it because I felt like I didn't have anything interesting enough to make videos about. I kept dabbling in talking to the camera and filming some guitar clips for my Instagram account.

During the summer vacation of 2023 I took some time to learn the basics of tattooing and this time I felt like the topic would be interesting enough to make a YouTube channel about. I managed to make one video, but after I got back to work I didn't have the time or motivation to keep practicing tattooing and the idea died with it.

Towards the end of 2023, I was experimenting with starting a tech blog. I challenged myself to write a weekly post for two months. I managed to get a lot more reads than I anticipated, which gave me confidence that maybe I can do other stuff as well. During that time I started thinking it'd be cool to have a tech podcast.

During this time we had started making practical arrangements towards moving to Panama so this was also on my list of potential YouTube channels.

March 2024 I finally decided to do something about the fact that I wasn't comfortable on camera. I decided to challenge myself to film everyday for 10 minutes. It wasn't nothing special, but towards the end of the month, talking to camera started feeling more natural. I was far away of being good or fluent at it.

In April I took a trip to Helsinki and this trip ended up being my first vlog video on my channel that I published.

Even though I wasn't 100% happy with the result I was comfortable publishing it. This became the first video of my +35 videos on this channel in 2024.

I tried posting a weekly video for a few months and I managed to keep it fairly constant. After multiple videos, I had gained enough confidence to give podcasting a try. I recruited my colleague to be my first guess and we recorded the first episode in July, which I posted in August. This was a major milestone.

My personal channel, Slanted T, I had not shared with anyone, but this podcast one, I advertised on LinkedIn and Reddit. It was terrifying.

I kept doing more podcasts and more videos on my personal channel and making videos became easier. Eventually, I had one video "blow up" compared to my usual 8-10 views per video which was pretty exciting. The video was a spontaneous talk about how difficult it is to make videos and how hard YouTube is.

By this point, I had become somewhat comfortable on camera. The problem was that with work becoming more demanding and other life activities I didn't have enough time to dedicate to weekly videos. I decided to stop trying to make videos weekly and publishing videos became more sporadic.

But I kept going.

Last autumn I went to Belgium for a tech conference and there I tried a new format. I wanted to create a reportage from the conference, so I interviewed the organizers, speakers, and visitors to put together a +30min video of the conference. This was totally on a different level than I had ever done.

The editing process took over 10 hours instead of 1-2 that I had used to. But the most difficult part was to film in public and get people involved. This taught me so much about just doing things. On the first day at the conference, I was too afraid to do it, but I decided that on the second day I had to do it, there were no second tries.

The story I'm trying to tell here is that it is possible to get comfortable with this stuff as long as you put in the work. Publishing videos is the best way to get better at it. You can't create masterpieces before creating shitty videos first.

Of all the +40 videos I created last year I'm proud of maybe two or three, almost each of the videos was difficult to post because I thought they were not good enough.

I hope my story could inspire you to take the first steps on your journey or support you on your first steps in your path of making videos out there in the open.

Here's one more video that I felt proud of making.

Thanks for dropping by, I appreciate it!