A builder's approach to content creation

I did some introspection recently and came to the conclusion that I've been going about most things wrong, despite finding what some might call success in a lot of my ventures.

I've been a... content consumer? for quite some time now. I was watching YouTube pretty early on in the younger years of the internet, I watched Twitch shortly after it transitioned from JustinTV and, though I wasn't around in the IRC or Blogspot days, I started reading blogs pretty early on.

Fast forward to the present, content marketing is having its hay day. It is seemingly the only way to market, with the paid ads space becoming more and more of a perceived nuisance and a huge privacy and security nightmare and cold calling/emailing breathing its dying breath.

As I dove further into the entrepreneurial space, my research and content consumption took me to the content marketing space. I was convinced that building an audience "using these FIVE tactics!!1!" and becoming rich off my YouTube ad revenue would be my future. I was to become a content creator.

Except, I'm not that. I'm a builder.

I tried for a long time to combine those two worlds, to be a content creator that builds, but I noticed more and more that I hated most of the non-building parts of content creation. Video editing, thumbnailing, pushing metrics to the peak, changing the way I speak to push up engagement... it felt disingenuous, in part because it's all a series of psychological tricks meant to induce dopamine hits and keep a watcher/reader engaged, and in part because I'm simply not a content creator that builds...

I'm a builder that creates content.

That inversion is pretty important, because centering one's activities on one's identity is key to feeling fulfilled. Instead of creating a steady stream of content for its own sake, being a regular uploader on YouTube, writing 5 blogs a week on... whatever topic I can think up, why not build things first and let the content come where I think it should?

You'll notice this is the first blog in a while. I switched my focus to YouTube at the beginning of the year, which is where this realization came from. I thought maybe motivating myself to upload 100,000 times a week would push me into the content creation headspace. Then I fell off, because it was incredibly unfulfilling and because I wasn't building enough to actually generate content around it. I started trying to think up things that wouldn't require me to build much so I could just have a video out.

That just isn't who I want to be.

So, from now on, I'll be doing infrequent and less polished content on what I'm building. You'll get to see cool stuff, not just the run of the mill tutorial series that's been done time and time again. It's time to get back to my builder roots, both on my blog and on YouTube.