Just start: Robert Rodriguez vs MrBeast

Hey team, 

I hate editing videos. A lot of people hate editing videos, especially if it’s part of a side-hustle. It’s frustrating, it always takes longer than you think it will, and — like many artistic endeavours — it’s very difficult to get the thing on screen to match the ideal inside your head. 

So, it’s probably not surprising that the first thing many aspiring YouTube creators want to do — sometimes, before they even start a channel — is hire a video editor, so that they don’t have to do it. By contrast, many of the most successful YouTube creators — MrBeast, for instance — kept editing videos long after the point when it seemed financially sensible for them to do so. Marques Brownlee still edits his own videos, with 16 million subscribers and a bunch of other projects to worry about. 

I think there’s a lesson here. 

Robert Rodriguez is an astonishingly prolific director. Including projects where he’s directed part of a film (Four Rooms, Grindhouse), he’s directed over 20 films, putting him in the top 0.1% of filmmakers, ever. He’s also a self-taught polymath who can make his films the way he wants, because he knows how a lot about what goes into them. In his 10-minute film school series (which is well worth watching), he explains: 

“Being creative is not enough in this business, you have to become technical…too many creative people don’t want to learn how to be technical so they become dependent on technical people. Become technical, you can learn that. If you’re creative and technical, you’re unstoppable.”

I’ll probably think about getting an editor a long time before I get anywhere near 16 million followers, but right now, I think editing videos is a valuable thing for me to do: it’s teaching me what’s possible, and what the language of videos is. Trust me, the day you can start talking about J-cuts and step-ins, you’ll feel a lot more confident about one day hiring an editor. 

Have a great weekend!

Joel x

PS I also hate making thumbnails, and I’m bad at them. If you’re an aspiring thumbnail maker, please get in touch.

Stuff I like

📖 Book extract - An Illustrated Guide To Self-Censorship by Tim Urban

I’ve been a fan of Tim Urban’s work for years — he’s got a brilliant way of digging down to the roots of a topic so that he can untangle and make it understandable, whether he’s talking about the formation of modern Iraq, the problems of superintelligent AI (he was talking about it before it was cool), or the race to Mars. In his new book What’s Our Problem? A Self-Help Book for Societies, which I’ll be reading as soon as I can, he gets into the ideological echo chambers we’ve all found ourselves in, and how we might make our escape. This extract is brill.

🖊️ Article — Create a bestselling app in three hours for less than £100

Writing the above thing, I went back to this old article about the gold rush of Flappy Bird clones that happened in 2013. The piece promises that you can make a game without doing any work, but actually kind of proves the opposite point: yes, you can make a bit of derivative plug-and-play nonsense, but you probably won’t even make anything anyone wants to buy,  and you definitely won’t learn any transferable skills. By contrast, if you learn to make a game but it never sells — you can still take those skills to your next project.

🎶 Hype Music - Radio Protector by 65DaysOfStatic

65DaysOfStatic are a Sheffield post-rock band, which in practical terms means they specialise in creating vocal-free, guitar-heavy soundscapes that veer from delicate to aggressive and then straight back again. This was my tune of choice when I was trying to bring my mile time down, and now that I’m into running again it’s making a serious comeback.

🪶 Quote of the week

“No great achievement is possible without persistent work, so absorbing and so difficult that little energy is left over for the more strenuous kinds of amusement, except such as serve to recuperate physical energy during holidays, of which Alpine climbing may serve as the best example.”

From The Conquest of Happiness by Bertrand Russell

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