Why I Started Posting to YouTube in 2022 and why you should too!
Yo everyone, its Maxwell, and I’m about to rant.
It’s too late. I am not good enough. What if I don’t know what I am talking about? Whatever I post won’t be perfect so why bother?
It goes on and on. I’ve heard it plenty before, mostly from my own mouth. These are things that I have been saying to myself for YEARS now. These saying and mindsets have prevented me from ever trying to start YouTube, which is something I would like to do. As a filmmaker I feel that I can only benefit from YouTube and that was something that I was missing.
The first point; its too late. It is never too late. I’ve heard this my entire life and for some reason, I just never believed it to be true. Then I look at what I’ve accomplished so far in life, and then I realize I’ve still got more than 75% of my life yet to live. Of course, theres also all those stories of people becoming mega successful with their careers, but not even starting until their 30’s, 40’s, and even 50’s! Time is such a weird concept, because when you don’t need it, it takes forever. When you do need time, it disappears in an instant. If you really look at it and break it down, there is SO MUCH time. You have plenty of time, sometimes its just hard to see because you are spending a lot of time, or allocating a lot of time in other places. Once you can break down how your time is spent, you may be surprised at how much time is left over. To say its too late is nothing more than a self built barrier, that when said enough, takes a hold of you, and does in fact, make time feel like its going away.
The worst thing that you can ever say to yourself is “I’m not good enough.” You will never win this battle of yourself. It’s something a lot of people struggle with now-a-days because of how much immediacy we see. From social media and the internet, we see so many succeeding right now and we start to think because we aren’t doing those same things that we therefore are failing and are not good enough. When in reality, you may have just as much skill or capability as some of these people, you are just at a different step in you career. Its okay to be at a different step in your career. Everybody progresses differently. This mentality and thought process quickly lends itself to imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome is the idea that you can’t see yourself being successful or any good at what you do. Its very easy to think this way, but very hard to break out of it. I like to think in much simpler terms. Bring the massive scale of our lives down to something that is just so much more manageable. So instead of saying to myself “I’ll never have a successful YouTube page, so why bother,” I started saying “I may be able to learn one new skill or apply one new skill in a YouTube video this week.” Instead of making it all about success, I made it about a much more achievable goal, with a mentality that was about growing, not reaching immediate social or monetary success.
According to globalmediainsights.com there are 2 billion ACTIVE users on YouTube. So even a really talented and successful YouTuber like Peter McKinnon with 5.56 million subscribers. Peter’s subscription count only accounts for 0.278% of all ACTIVE YouTube Accounts. Less than 1% of all YouTube accounts are subscribed to somebody who is at the top of the Video/Photo/Filmmaking niche on YouTube. The reason I went through all of this math to determine this point is because, for me, it illustrates just how many people are using the platform every day. That fact gave me confidence to say to myself “Well the chances that I can find some people to like my content, is actually really high!” And that’s true! There’s plenty of people using YouTube every day and that means there is plenty of content being shared, absorbed, and enjoyed.
The final point that I came to realize was that there is plenty of room for multiple creators and contributors to a single niche on YouTube. I used to think that there was too much competition and that the pool was dried up. I think that might be true for tutorials as there is only so many ways you can do white balance correctly. HOWEVER, I think that there is still room for tutorials and educational stuff about how somebody did it on their own. To elaborate, I mean how did they light a scene with the gear they have at home? How did they solve a problem creatively? These experience and knowledge are much more valuable. I went to film school, I know how to light, shoot, edit, and upload videos. That’s not what I am interested in. I am interested in how THEY did it. How THEY got to that result. Did THEY do it with a budget? Did THEY do it without a budget?
