One of the best ways to help yourself grow is to constantly challenge yourself, at least that’s what I’ve learned over 31 days.
When an athlete gets ready for the Olympics or any important race, they challenge themselves to beat certain times. When a rich guy wants to get richer, he challenges himself to make more many than he did last year. And when a content creator challenges themselves, they just don’t know what to do.
I tried to challenge myself to do more. In October I released a new YouTube video each day at around the same time to try and discipline myself. I believe I have some sort of ADHD and I’m an INFP, so challenging myself is the only way I practice discipline. I need to work towards a goal to actually put in the hours.
I enjoy being a journalist and content creator, but sometimes there’s not enough to challenge me, especially because I don’t really compare myself to other creators. I don’t strive to make better videos or posts than them, so the only why I can do better is to compete with myself. And the October Challenge was the first step to testing my limits and learning what works best.
I can tell you now it wasn’t easy to come up with ideas for 31 videos, shoot them, edit them and then design thumbnails. I thought about abandoning the challenge dozens of times, because some videos didn’t even reach 10 views at a time. And it sucked, because it was hard work and I still had other stuff to take care of.
Unfortunately or rather fortunately it was a challenge and Barry can’t back from an accepted challenge. I pushed through and now I can confidently say I’m glad I did it. I’m impressed with the work I’ve done, even though some of the videos don’t look that good. I’m impressed because I took on a challenge and completed it.
The analytics from the videos now help me see what works best and hopefully that will help me to do better in the future. After this challenge I’m taking a short break from long format videos for a while. I’ll still upload to TikTok and Instagram every now and then, but for the next month I will mostly focus on writing – more on that coming soon.
Anyway, I will appreciate it if you can check out my October Challenge videos or go through the whole playlist. There’s a little bit of everything from, me recounting my YouTube journey, to me talking about my favourite MCU Phase 5 movies, to me yapping on about a couple of short films I made and to me talking about movie snacks. I bet there’s at least one video you’ll find interesting.
And thank you to those who showed up during October to support me or to just add a like to one of the many videos. You guys are awesome and I hope you keep enjoying my content.
