Issue 32: Goals for 2025

Same me, same channel, new goals

Jan 10, 2025

🚨 NEW VIDEO DROP

A video that motivates the powerful hierarchical model

📺 What’s coming up?

A video on different levels of simulation studies and how to implement them

📰 TL;DR

I’ve set goals for myself and the channel.

Yet another goals post

2024 was the year that I committed to regularly writing for this Substack. I’m proud to say I (mostly) succeeded in this.

Coming late into 2025, I thought it would be cool to establish some personal and channel goals.

To be upfront, I’m not really a fan of New Year’s Resolutions. I’m more a fan of quarterly goals since they’re a good balanced of proximal and distant. But making a goals post 4 times a year sounds annoying for both me and you as the reader.

So, here’s my one goals post for 2025.

1. Reach 100K subscribers by June

This is already a dangerous goal because it’s a goal based on something I fundamentally can’t control: other people. I’ve always subscribed (pun intended) to the idea that if my library of videos provide enough value to someone, then it’s inevitable that they’ll subscribe.

But I wanted to set a time constraint for a three reasons.

I’m graduating in June. No one in my department knows that I do YouTube, and I thought it would be pretty cool to reveal a big number at the end of my dissertation.
It helps add a sense of urgency that can hopefully forces me to innovate more on my process. Somehow, the channel grows everyday, but with my current output, the rate at which is grows will not be enough to reach 100K by June.
I’ve wanted a YouTube button pretty much since they were first introduced. I would love to get the button in the place where the channel was born.

There’s a Zen quote that often think about when I start to fantasize about the 100K number:

Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.
After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.

In other words, reaching the number won’t really change my daily life. However, I do acknowledge that any source of motivation is good in the long run, so that’s why it’s a 2025 goal.

2. Make an online course

I get the feeling nowadays that “creator online courses” get a bad rap (for good reason). I think that — for better or worse — the chance to make money can create a race to the bottom in terms of quality, and online courses are not immune to this.

That being said, I recently watched a video from someone who seemed like they put their heart and soul into their course. I highly recommend watching the video. Their experience gave me a good perspective on how to make a “good” course. I say it in quotes because I didn’t vet the course itself, but her experience was in line with what I expected. It inspired me to turn making an online course into a 2025 goal.

For someone who makes educational content on YouTube, an online course almost feels like a natural extension to what I already do. It’s an established way to create a new income stream for myself and to make a resource for interested students. But I still want to be able to look myself in the mirror after I make it.

I’m a big believer in making the educational materials I make free for others to use. I grew up not having a lot of money, so it’s my way of trying to help others upskill themselves and help them on their own journeys. I spent a lot of time in 2024 trying to reconcile an online course with this principle. I think I’ve found way to do this, so please look forward to this in the future.

I’ve never mentioned it before, but it was fundamentally an online learning platform that altered the path of my life and brought me to where I am now. A much better and happier place. I’d like to do this for others.

3. More compelling statistics video

For my last video of 2024, I wrapped up a series of explainers. Coming into 2025, I want to explore new ways to talk about statistics in an effort to improve the quality of my videos. My current stretch goal for a video is 10K views, but I’d like to push this to 20K in 2025.

The only (fair) way to get more views on a video is to make it more compelling for people to watch. The main way to do this is through storytelling.

Another avenue of improvement has been in my manim skills. I just learned that manim can do a lot of the editing that I used to do in Final Cut. It takes more time, but I was really happy with some of the animated sequences for the GLM video. It seems my audience liked more than usual too, so hopefully this will bear fruit in 2025.

In a time where Sora and Veo 2 both exist, high-quality content will become rarer and attention more sparse. Here’s to keeping

4. Pick up job skills before I graduate

In the later years of your Ph.D, your learning is almost entirely self-guided. If you need to learn a new statistical approach, it’s typically assumed that you’re equipped enough to figure that out.

This skill is going to come in handy for job applications. I’ve noticed that a lot of statistician jobs lately want causal inference (with a fancy “real-world evidence” label) and SAS. I’m not comfortable with either of these, so it’s going to be up to me to pick them up before interviews. It’s been a while since I’ve studied survival analysis theory, so that’s something I plan to review for skills.

Concretely, this just means dedicating some time each day to read, think and revise. But it’s also another distraction from YouTube, dissertation work and my social life. That sucks, but unfortunately, it’s how it is with Ph.D stuff. I simply can’t rely on my PI to link me to jobs; it’s on me to prove that I am too good to ignore.

That’s it for this one. See you in 2 weeks.

Footnotes

🧐 What am I enjoying right now?

I am so hyped for Severance Season 2.

📦 My 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
You can support me on Ko-fi! YouTube and Substack are by far the best (and easiest) ways to support me, but if you feel like going the extra mile, this would be the place. It is always appreciated!