Here's to a New Experiment.

This year, being a beginner has been an interesting experience. Not an easy one, but a necessary one. I went from beginner to being able to have conversations with a native in French within 6-7 months, while still working and trying to be an adult (doesn't mean I'm fluent but I'm comprehensible to a native, which makes me feel good every time I think about it).

Doing that did something to me in the sense where it taught me again that I'm capable of doing difficult things. There is something that difficulty does to confidence. Each time you overcome being an imposter at something, you add to your list of experiences you can use to remind yourself when you hit the next struggle.

For me, I think I've been able to resolve two insecurities in my head. One, is the capability to do difficult things and the other is consistency. This is the 47th week of writing one of these letters and I haven't missed a week yet. Even if I start missing weeks now, it would not negate the confidence that I've built that I am capable of being consistent at things. And that's separate from other things I've been able to be consistent at lately.

If you've been following along you would've read something I've written about building capacity. That's the general theme of my life right now. Learning french gave me my spark back. Now I'm using that spark to fuel my curiosities, catch up on the things I've felt behind in, and stretch myself to do more than my current limits. When I started learning French, it was incredibly difficult to do it with everything else I had to do. I felt stretched but also knew this couldn't possibly be my limit. And now, several months later, I'm still practicing french every day and while my intensity has reduced, I no longer feel overwhelmed as far as french is concerned. it's simply a part of my schedule now.

My capacity increased.

So now, I'm working, practicing french every day and upskilling. I also have side projects I'm building and working on. I can do all of those at a reasonable pace. The trick is systemising everything. Once you have a system, the time to do things becomes more efficient and then you can free up bandwidth for other things. Do I feel balanced? Not necessarily. But I feel I can manage it.

So naturally, it was time to throw something else into the mix lol.

(I know this sounds a bit unhealthy but I've been complacent for a while and been struggling to get out of that headspace. Now that I've succeeded at that, might as well ride this wave as long as I can)

So now, in the midst of the other things I'm working on, I decided to start a YouTube channel and post a long form video every day for 30 days straight at a minimum. Do I need to do that? Not really. But I want to see if I can.

As for why I'm doing it, I noticed two things in my life.

One, since I work asynchronously and can pretty much live my life without interacting with people except the occasional meeting. I could feel my ability to articulate myself verbally slipping. If you don't use it, you lose it (and it's not like I have spent much time developing that skill to begin with).

Two, I have a tendency to want to disappear to one corner of the world but most of the things in my life I have now seem to be some form of ripple effect of being visible. I'm still trying to figure out what a healthy balance of the two is. But some quotes from Austin Kleon's Show Your Work put things into perspective.

"Share what you love, and the people who love the same things will find you."

"Give what you have. To someone, it may be better than you dare to think."

"Find your voice, shout it from the rooftops, and keep doing it until the people that are looking for you find you."

"I'm not going to sit here and wait for things to happen, I'm going to make them happen, and if people think I'm an idiot, I don't care."

Buying the physical version of the book was money well spent. All of those quotes mean something different to me now than the first time I read the book a few years ago. They were true then. I lived it. They're still true now.

I've been visible and invisible. I don't think either extreme is the answer and I'm also not willing to pay the price of being too visible. But I know what the price of being invisible is. While breaks have been necessary for my mental health, I have paid certain prices for invisibility that I am no longer interested in paying.

So, I need to figure out (again) some form of presence, personal brand and visibility online. Treat it like a job and not an inconvenience. Maintain better boundaries now that I'm older but not throw the baby out with the bathwater. The internet isn't the real world and can be quite toxic and unhealthy. But it's also the same thing that's giving me the capacity to write to you. If you're reading this, chances are we met or will meet because of the internet.

So, YouTube makes sense as my next project. 30 days of posting to get the reps in, but in reality, one of the many steps in figuring out what I want to be online while I get to practice communcating and speaking more, learn about what makes a good edit, algorithms, retention, providing value, effective CTAs, etc, all transferrable skills to other things I care about even if I don't end up as a YouTuber or content creator.

It's like habit stacking. I'm combining several goals into one experiment that doesn't have to stop with the experiment. It just needs to get it going. As for why I'm making myself do it every day, it's a numbers game. If I'm going to learn and get good at it in any way, I'm going to have to frontload all the bad reps. 30 days is 30 videos, many of which would not be very good. But, I would need to get through 30+ videos anyway. Might as well speedrun through some of them.

So, we'll see how it goes. At the time of posting this, I have posted four long form videos. 26 to go. Here is the latest one.

Like, share, subscribe. Feedback is also welcome. I'm interested to see where this goes. At the worst, I would have something reasonable if you search "Daniel Abudu" on YouTube unlike before, with new skills, even still as a beginner, that I can deploy elsewhere.

At the best . . . I can't even articulate that.

That's all for now. Hope you enjoyed it.

À la prochaine 😊.