I'm Sucking At YouTube, But Who Cares?

Dance like no one is watching because, well, in this case, no one really is.

I am talking about having recently started a YouTube channel which is supposed to be an extension of sorts of my writing here and elsewhere. That's an overstatement because the reality is when it comes to writing I like to think I am decent at doing it, and of course I actually do have an audience.

Making videos is not my forte at all. That's the bottom line. But there was a time when what I wrote wasn't good either, but I kept doing it and eventually got better at it.

It's like anything you do in life, right? As the old saying goes, "Practice makes perfect." Or, at least in theory that may be mostly true. I am not sure it is exactly true. If you're 4 feet tall all the practice in the world may never make you a great basketball player.

The thing is, right now I am not even really trying all that hard to dance. I'm just doing whatever comes to me and going with it. I've gotten a couple subscribers and a few views. But I am virtually invisible. It is what it is. 

I don't really have a camera presence, and that hurts me. In fact, I have a face for radio. But my voice isn't that great either honestly. There is no nice bass to it, and I don't have the ability to really project the way I would like to.

Do I just use an AI voice for everything? Maybe. I've done it on a couple of videos, but it sounds kind of robotic to me. Not at all appealing, but maybe it's more appealing than me?

And while I can think rather quickly, there is a naturalness to the way I write which does not translate well in front of the camera. I write better than I communicate, and maybe that's the way it is for most writers. I am not sure, but I suspect it might be.

I need a script in front of me. What I really need is a teleprompter. But I won't spring for one. Not yet anyway. But maybe one day. I guess I will wait and see if anyone at all comes and finds me and gives me a reason to make an "investment."

My studio sucks. Right now, it's mostly just my dining room, if I happen to be doing a video in which I actually appear in. I'll change it up a bit and sometimes do a bit in the living room or some other space in the house.

Hopefully a clean space. I mean, my house is not dirty by any means, but it is certainly well lived in if you catch my drift.

Most recently I decided to do episodes of what I am calling a podcast. But I am not sure if that's really what it is. Podcasts that appear on YouTube tend to do well. But most of them are on done on camera. They adorn themselves in interesting lights, maybe sport a pair of headphones and a microphone on a boom to make it look all fancy and stuff.

I have none of that. Even the footage I have available for a faceless read off of one of my blogs is crappy at best. Boring at most to look at.

I'm thinking, maybe someone will simply load up my video on their phone and listen in the car? The whole 5-8 minutes of the typical one, by the way. The podcast, or whatever it might actually be called, is based off my blogs, and blogs tend to be relatively quick reads.

Even if I sometimes get called a windbag. Oh well. Can I sit for an hour and talk my way through it? Not hardly. If I could, being as opinionated as I am, I'd have probably tried to become a radio talkie many decades ago.

Too many umms and ahs. I know this because when I finish the audio recording, I have to edit a lot of that out.

I'm really just messing around. I am not trying to seriously accomplish anything, but I want to think something might blow up and send me to the moon. You know, cash in on some big bucks from all that YouTube ad revenue and potential sponsorships.

Maybe. One day. Who knows? I suppose I might be making a bit of a fool of myself trying this thing out. I guess I don't really care. I'm too old to be worried about what someone else thinks, you know. And like I said, maybe I will get better. Maybe the process of making videos will become as easy as writing comes to me.

Even if I am embarrassing myself, but hopefully not tarnishing my reputation, like I said, no one is watching. I am the Jonny Fever of YouTube, dear readers. Maybe I should just stick to what I know. Isn't that a great tenet even of writing? Just stick with what you know.

But then how can I grow? Maybe there will be a time, 10 years from now, I will be thankful for having struggled through the first days of all of this—onward and upward is my motto. Maybe I will become really good at it and have great success.

It is interesting to scroll down on some very popular channels and see where they came from when no one was watching. It's night and day from video 1 to video 950. Perhaps it will be the same for me?

For now I am going to keep at it. As I also like to sometimes say, sometimes it's the journey that's more fun than the destination. This does seem like a very long trip, though.

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Weirder and Weirder

Whenever you start raising bars and "breaking barriers," things never really ever go back. Long gone are the days when you would see married couples on TV sleeping in separate beds. Actual sex and some pretty raunchy sex scenes, including gay sex have hit prime time.

Not to say it is all bad, mind you. There are things that are just real, and we all know what those things are and what goes on.

I am just saying that at the pace that bars are being raised nowadays, I think it's going to be a fairly rapid pace to things becoming more and more bizarre. Not that things aren't already quite bizarre if you ask me, beyond just sex scenes on TV.

The world is becoming weirder and weirder. What happens is a sort of "scrubbing" of sorts. You just get used to it, and when you get used to it, you sort of become a bit immune to it.

Sort of like when a homicide detective can walk around rotting corpses and enjoy a sandwich for lunch while they investigate a scene. A situation that, for most of us, would find us looking for the nearest toilet to unload what we ate for breakfast, let alone mow down on anything new.

I get that people want to "express themselves." Take the story of the AirAsia CEO, Tony Fernandez who openly and unabashedly held a team meeting while shirtless and receiving a massage. "I want to be transparent," he says.

Is it entirely bad? No. But it's weird. Not that I am some morals zealot or anything, but I do believe that in most things there should be at least some modicum of decorum. What do we do next, have a bath while figuring out what profits should be at the next quarterly report? 

But then, at the same time, social media has become something wherein everyone wants to be a star. And let's face it. Many people become stars for all sort of things they do on social media. Not all of it good. And a lot it quite weird.

Everyone has a schtick, and when you get famous for going out there, eventually in order to become more famous you have to go farther out there than the last guy did.

Elon Musk became famous for being outspoken and sometimes saying some outlandish things. So, why not get out there too by having a shirtless massage during a team meeting? Musk raised the bar and Fernandez perhaps wants to raise it some more.

I don't know, I just think the phrase, "Truth is stranger than fiction," is becoming more and more true with each passing day, and I am not even sure I can predict what's coming next. I just know it's going to be stranger and stranger the more time that passes.

I wonder where that's going to leave us eventually.

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