Just Start: Speedrunning Failure
Hey all,
There’s a flow to your week that you quite often experience when you’re regularly making YouTube videos. It goes something like this:
Day 1: “Gosh this is exciting. Hope it does well! I definitely won’t check the analytics until it’s been up for an hour. Ah okay, just a quick look.”
Day 2: “Hm, about normal. Still, you never really know until day three.”
Day 3: “Okay, this one isn’t popping off. Shame.”
Day 4: “Ugh, am I really any good at this? I thought I knew what was happening with the last video, but this one just…isn’t working? Why though? Why?” [This is the lowest point]
Day 5: “Okay, it’s a learning experience.” [By this time, you’re in the weeds with all the last-minute tweaks for the next video, which distracts you from the current video.]
Day 6: “It’s totally fine, I’m past this. Okay, one more look at the analytics.”
Day 7: “Can’t wait to see what the next video does!”
If you make videos every week, this happens a lot — until you have a moderate-to-strong banger, at which point the whole experience kind of inverts, and you spend a day or two congratulating yourself before worrying about the next video. But it was a familiar feeling for a while, and eventually I worked out why.
I wrote four books when I was in my twenties. They were published by Scholastic and got a couple of nice reviews: they also didn’t sell many copies and nobody asked me to write any more. This was at least partly my fault: at the time, I had no idea how to help market them, and so I hardly even tried. But it was also an interesting experience: every three months, for nine months, I had that nervous sort-of-sick feeling that comes when you’re about to put something out into the world and have no idea how the world is going to respond.
It often feels like modern life is speeding up, but putting things out into the world is one area where I think that’s definitely, provably, actually happening. When I started working as a journalist, not many people were online: now, you can fire your thoughts out to an email list and get back a bunch of replies five minutes later (seriously, do email me). In some ways, this is probably bad, but in at least one I think it’s good: you get to speedrun failure.
The problem I had in my 20s was that I hadn’t failed a lot: obviously I’d had frustrations and knockbacks by then, but I wasn’t into the mindset of being hit with a setback or a disappointment and just treating it like part of the process. Speedrunning failure lets you experience this stuff all the time, get used to it, and get into the habit of making changes without taking anything too personally.
In Think Like An Artist, Will Gompertz is pretty critical of the ‘fail fast, fail better’ style of motivation-speak, but even he has to admit that artists fail sometimes. The trick is, the good ones use it to do something else.
“We all fail. But only in the most perfunctory sense, in so much as not everything we attempt works out as we had hoped. But such instances are never really failures, because through persistence and application we will reach a point of clarity, which is only accessible because of those so-called failures…a far more important lesson to learn from artists is not that they fail, but that they prevail. Artists make. Artists do.”
And quite often, the doing is the fun bit.
Have a great weekend!
Joel x
Stuff I’ve done
🎥 Video - How To Manage All Your Interests (and get real results)
We are so back. This video, which gets into my system for making concrete forward progress on a bunch of life projects every day, seems to have struck a chord with a lot of people — it’s had a tonne of nice comments and found a bunch of new subscribers. Hope you like it!
Stuff I like
📖 Book - The Guest Cat by Takashi Hiraide
I read this a few years ago and recently found it during a clearout: it’s super short, and a lovely little meditation on the transitory nature of life. If you’ve got recommendations for more novellas like this, please send them my way.
📝 Article - Soften The Ground by Visakan Veerasamy
This short piece (it’s really just a Twitter thread, collected) really resonated with me, and sort of formalises the process of getting ‘into’ stuff that feels difficult or inaccessible: you find a simple way in, eg liking one specific bit of art or aspect of someone’s career, and use that as an on-ramp for a deep-dive into all of their work.
🎶 Hype Music - Bootlegger Boogie by Kristoffer Madigan
The music for Cuphead is pretty incredible throughout, but this one’s going on my Brazilian jiu-jitsu playlist because it’s the perfect combo of mellow and energetic. Even the scatting works!
🎙️Podcast - Scott Galloway’s formula for getting rich
I’ll be honest, I’d barely heard of Galloway before listening to this, but it’s full of interesting little nuggets and uncommonly-given advice. Also, he literally says ‘Just Start’ in response to one question — so, y’know.
🎥 Video - The Myth of Heroic Masculine Purpose, and How it’s Harming Men
I’ve mentioned this channel before, but this was a really nicely-researched and edited video on some of the mythic films (Bond, Batman, Iron Man especially) that have fed culture over the last decade or two, and how their depiction of purpose as a solitary, all-encompassing pursuit is probably bad for us. Lovely stuff.
🧐 Quote of the week
“If more of us valued food and cheer and song over hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”
From Thorin Oakenshield, in The Hobbit
Like this newsletter?
Please forward it to someone else! Also, if you’ve got a book or an article you think I should read, or something you think I should watch or try, please send it my way.
And if you haven’t already, please check out my YouTube channel, where I deep-dive into stuff like productivity, lifelong learning, piano and Brazilian jiu-jitsu.