From Excuses to Execution — How I stopped not doing and started taking action!
For some reason I have this fear of starting.
Because of this, I’ve been making up every excuse to get started, but not actually start. For example, I spent most of this week linking all my social media accounts. Something that needs to get done, but not exactly critical path. I set up my streaming configuration on my desktop. Again, helpful, but not the best use of my time.
I know all of these things will help facilitate if and when I decide to actually put myself out there. I’m hoping this happens sooner rather than later.
I wrote that 2 years ago. For two entire years, I knew I wanted to start something, but never actually started. For two years, I wrote things down, I wrote a lot of things down. I jotted notes down and I would talk to my coworkers about a future I would create. Fast forward 1 year, and I bought a book that was supposed to help me get started on building an entire business. For 30 days, I did everything the book told me to do, but I never actually launched anything. Well that’s not entirely true. After 30 days I at least had some momentum so my wife and I built a Youtube channel and started posting Scratch tutorials.
Right after the new year, we published our first video. This was the first time in my life that I created something. After years of talking about how I was finally going to get started, I had finally done it. I actually took a step in the right direction. Shortly after that video, we published another one, and another one, and then after a month, we had 10 videos published! It felt good to finally have start moving the needle. It felt good that after years of saying I was going to do something, we were finally doing it.
10 more videos and we were gaining speed. Our videos weren’t doing too well. We had made 10 Scratch Project videos and 12 Scratch Basics videos. The project videos were doing okay, but the Scratch basics were not taking off at well. After 12 videos, and not really knowing what we were doing with respect to the Youtube algorithm, we started losing steam. Poor titles, no thumbnails, no keywords, and very little publicity, we weren’t going anywhere.
Then the pandemic hit and we basically came to a halt. Our schedules drastically changed and everyone’s lives changed. We stopped making videos for about 7 months. During those 7 months, we posted only 1 video where we did a deep dive into our academic and professional lives. The video was developed to be presented to a class of freshmen engineers at CSULB. During those 7 months of not posting videos, some of our videos were still being watched. One video had almost 3 thousand views and another was up in the 2 thousand range.
Something magical happened during those 7 months. A man by the name Pat Flynn entered my life every single morning. He started a daily stream to help people through the pandemic. He had lost his job in 2008 during the great recession and didn’t know what to do. He turned to the internet and eventually built an empire. Now, in 2020, during the worst period of American history, he was here to give everything away for free. For months, I listened to him teach me how to take action and realize my dreams.
In September 2020, we resumed our Scratch tutorials. We updated our thumbnails, updated our keywords, updated our titles. We started reaching out to the Scratch community and asked our friends and family to subscribe to our channel. As of this writing on November 21, we have published 53 videos and we have 281 subscribers. Things are growing, slowly, but steadily growing. Our goal is to end the year with 350 subscribers and plan on getting to 1000 subs in early 2021. We’ve also started blogging and a podcast. We have a lot of content coming your way. Please subscribe, follow us, and join us on this journey as we try to figure out how to build a business and take control of our finances.
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