Dabi (Dr David Liu)@dabidoYT
I think a top 1% YouTube strategist knows about everything they’ve heard. Every concept is not new.
But if you’re a top 0.01% YouTube strategist, I think there’s a humility of “just because I haven’t heard of new things recently, doesn’t mean new things don’t exist.”
I find that if I’ve not learnt anything for a while, it’s because I haven’t pushed myself enough to put myself into intellectually difficult enough analyses/situations.
Arrogance is a kind of recurring stupidity that needs to be consciously perceived, then overcome. It’s the worst combination of contentness + blindness one can have, because it stops you from learning AND perceiving.
It’s not good enough to be the “best at x”. That’s just other’s opinions. Instead, it seems better to ask of oneself the question: what’s the truth of how this all works? And how close am I to that?
Inevitably, that ends up being a good motto in terms of self-improvement. You can go to infinite heights with it, because your limitation is no longer others, but perpetually yourself.
That said, I probably repeat the following phrase like a broken record, but there’s plenty of others who are way smarter than me at YouTube. The depth of others’ knowledge can be insane (a lot of you that follow this account!) and I feel fortunate to not come anywhere close to knowing everything.
But for storytelling for example, which I know I’ve studied in great depth, so much of what I continue to learn is actually just to continually observe everything that both on and off YouTube, and see if it applies to storytelling. Storytelling is a great tool for making really good videos, but for me, it’s a framework by which I interpret my own life and everything around it.
I guess the main productivity hack to spending an obsessive amount of time on something, is to let it be your lens for interpreting the world. The world is full of stories that don’t look like stories, for example. Even eating a meal has open loops, anticipation, payoff, resolution. This isn’t even my original idea, I got it from a book on writing manga by a famous manga author.
But if it’s your lens, you can’t help but use it all the time. There’s about 5,000-6,000 waking hours in a year. I’ve been thinking this way now for about 4 years. I am delighted to report to you that there’s new things to discover everyday despite this.
Our lives are short, so this is probably not a worthwhile approach for people who don’t get intrinsic joy out of doing it. It’s kind of weird.
But, the act of interpreting everything in the context of the goal/journey you care about, that’s cool and worthwhile trying for sure. Maybe that’s business, music, sports.
I’d recommend most people at least give it a shot: the analogous application of life’s learnings to your main mission. You have to think outside the box a lot of the time, and make some real stretches, but it’s kind of fun.
