exactly one year ago today I posted my first video online

if you ever doubt how far you can get in a year, here’s what 365 days of consistent effort led me to:

0 to 111 videos (not all created equally, some short form, some long, some personal, some public)

0 to 166,723 followers across instagram & youtube

for an entire year i showed up almost every single week, sometimes multiple times a week, creating something new, experimenting with my editing, my tools, the platforms I posted on

365 days ago i didn’t know how to edit.

i only knew how to shoot video on my iphone.

i was extremely camera-shy.

i didn’t know where creating silly little videos would take me.

but, i did i have pretty decent taste & an eagerness to learn

it’s always tough in the beginning because there are so many new variables to grapple with & it often feels like shooting in the dark. but if there’s one thing i’ll say it’s this:

don’t over think it & optimize for fun over everything else

if i didn’t have fun throughout all the ups & downs of creating i wouldn’t have stuck around long enough to see my hard work pay off. i probably would’ve given up a few months in. (this is actually what happened to me & trying to learn how to code lol)

it won’t always be fun, there will be times where you feel imposter syndrome or times you get caught up in a comparison trap. but eventually when you look back you’ll see how much you’ve started to close the gap between what you want to create & where your skills currently lie.

if you were to tell the past version of myself that my skills would reach a point where people would pay for them, i’d think that was absurd- in fact, i probably would’ve even disliked that idea.

& i’m not saying the goal is to make money off of your skills or even to grow a following- the point I want to drive home is the idea that if you start putting effort into something you’re interested in now (even if you have 0 experience), you’ll surprise yourself at how far you’ll go just by putting in consistent effort into something.

so maybe, you owe it to yourself to go do that thing you’ve been putting off for so long.

Link

Control Over My Life