Issue #29: Sharpen your toolkit
Go beyond your zone of comfort for your craft
📰 What is this issue about?
A method for breaking out of creative plateaus
📺 What’s happening with videos?
Recent — Explaining logistic regression: A video about the logistic regression model and how to intuitively interpret it
Upcoming: Propaganda for statistics
There comes a time where…
… you realize that your current skills are enough to do thing relatively effortlessly.
For a while now, I’ve felt that way about YouTube.
I have two formats that I can write content for, I have a consistent brand that I hope my audience can recognize, and I’ve developed a workflow that can output a video in a few days.
While I enjoy the efficiency that’s come over time, I can’t help but feel some pangs of stagnation every now and then. I can’t help but feel (with no evidence to substantiate it) that Very Normal could grow even faster if I could just make “better videos”.
However, it’s my current skills that makes my current videos. Better videos necessitate that my skills get better.
But what to improve?
For me, I spent some time revisiting the manim website to study their examples and documentation. If you weren’t aware, manim is a tool I use to produce most of the math-based visualizations for video.
I know enough manim to:
Make simple graph animations,
write text,
make animated transitions
Fundamentally, these three skills are all I need to make my current videos. But seeing the recent video by 3Brown1Blue, I was reminded that manim is clearly more powerful than what I currently use it for.
So, alongside the usual scriptwriting and editing for the logistic regression video, I dedicated some time to study manim’s Example gallery and even started to look into 3Brown1Blue’s own Github repo to study his animations. My goal with the logistic regression video was to incorporate 1-2 new techniques from what I learned. Hopefully, returning viewers can appreciate that the channel is evolving.
This is obvious advice, no?
Maybe this advice feels too obvious. But it’s easy advice to ignore when your current skills enable you to effortlessly put out videos. Why change what’s not broken?
Frankly, it is a pain in the ass to juggle learning new skills with current content obligations. This video took much longer to get out because I had to figure out how to incorporate the new skills with the current workflow.
But this process is crucial to improving as a creator. I’ve been putting it off for a while, so it feels especially painful, but I also feel more proud of the work I’m putting out.
Manim is just one of the many tools that go into Very Normal. There’s also writing, the stories, the technical explanations, and the handmade visuals. All of these could use sharpening as well, but to avoid choice paralysis, I’m just gonna try to be happy working on 1-2 for each new video.
You should always be sharpening your toolkit so that you can do more with them. Sometimes, the move isn’t to learn brand new skills, but to deepen the ones you already have. It’s one of those lessons I’ve learned many times before and will probably need to remind myself many more times over.
So, I hope to remind you of this lesson as well.
Until the next one.
Other Stuff
🧐 What am I enjoying right now?
Book — I’m re-reading Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life Through the Power of Storytelling by Matthew Dicks.
📦 Other stuff
I wrote guided solutions to problems to Andrew Gelman’s Bayesian Data Analysis. It’s for advanced self-learners teaching themselves Bayesian statistics
I’m now on Ko-fi! Some subscribers have asked about additional ways to support the channel. This seemed like a quick and simple solution. I cannot express how grateful I am that people feel that way about the channel, thank you for your support!