A problem that has started to arise in this age of the “YouTube New Wave” and cultural shift of quality > quantity has been the excessant stress that everything we post online needs to be perfect. Each frame of the video being hyper-analyzed over months, while we dive deep into our craft.
The first video that really took off for me on YouTube, was a piece about my gap year. If you’ve meandered into this blog page, then I’m sure you’ve seen it before - a love letter to a year of my life. What most people don’t know is that I dropped everything for 4 months to work on that film, spending 8 hours a day editing, storyboarding, and creating the most perfect tribute to the year. It’s a beautiful thing, to care so deeply about a piece of content or story that you tell to dedicate hours to perfecting each minute detail. However, this train of thought can quickly derail into an unhealthy obsession. The thing about creating films of this caliber or diving deep into this level of analysis is that it becomes a crutch on your ability to create pieces of work consistently. At a certain point it must be understood that quantity is still the largest lever to quality.
The more I grow into this role of finding my voice on YouTube, I begin to realize that the mission is much greater than my own ego or sense of perfectionism being fulfilled by the quality of the content I create, but rather the ability to tell meaningful stories that have the ability to change how someone sees the world. To convince someone to go on their first hike, to turn towards the outdoors as a haven for their mental health, and to not feel as alone in this world. Of course, this doesn’t mean that I should try to reach the most people in hopes of the “highest impact”, it just means that I cannot afford to be a perfectionist in what I create anymore.
I think back to some of the most impactful bits of videos I’ve watched before - a vlog by Casey Neistat, a moment at the end of an Elliot Choy video, a vibe in Sneak0’s old vlogs, I’ve learned so much from videos that I’m sure would have been excluded from the internet if the respective creatives would have listened to their perfectionist mind.
That video you are about to scrap, that idea you don’t feel like chasing, that screenplay that you are thinking about throwing away - odds are that piece of work is going to be someone’s favorite video. Something that one person may go to over years, pick apart, and use for their own journey. The world deserves to see what you have to say, don’t be afraid.
You still need to make great things, you need to care, throw everything you can at the screen, but as the great Virgil Abloh once said “Perfectionism doesn’t advance anything”.