One hundred sparkling gems
Schubert wrote over 600 lieder along with many other works, including seven symphonies. He didn’t get to enjoy the fruits of his labor for very long, passing away at age 31. (Painting by Wilhelm August Rieder, 1825)
When I started making videos on TikTok this summer, I thought I was taking a pretty chaotic approach.
In order to turn out three videos a day, I had to make a video on any topic I could come up with. I couldn’t overthink it. I didn’t have time to make a plan and follow it.
Sometimes, this made the work easier — I could pull any idea off the top of my head and turn it into a video.
But there were also times when the lack of constraints around my topic meant that it was hard to think of anything in particular.
And as my number of followers grew, I felt an increasing responsibility to come up with some kind of promise to them: “This is what you can expect from me.” But how could I, when I wasn’t even sure what to expect from myself?
So about six weeks in, aiming to solve this problem, I went for a walk down to the pier near my house. As I walked, I reviewed each of my TikTok videos in turn, easily going from one to the next with a swipe.
By this point, I had over a hundred videos. I got the joke about twenty videos in: Of course I had a point of view. Of course my videos had common threads. They all had my stamp on them. They were all related to things I like to talk about: mindset, the creative process, the art of learning, compassionate productivity, leadership, and small business. Pretty much the same things I talk about here on this blog.
It was hard for me to see me because I was just too close. But other people got it. They could see what I stood for more easily than I could, and their feedback was helpful.
To me, my work was all over the place. But talking about anything I wanted to talk about was still pretty narrow in the scheme of things. To my audience, I had a little corner. I had a niche.
Having a body of work allowed me to stand back and gain some perspective. Patterns emerged because there was enough material for a pattern to form.
And sharing allowed other people to see it, too.
If you’re just starting out in a journey of making things and sharing them, you might be wondering how to define what you do or make sense of it.
You might even be hesitant to begin, not knowing what mark to make first.
To make it less scary, play it forward. What if you had one hundred sparkling gems of content already made? You would just have to come up with what’s next, not what’s first. No big deal.
Your job is to create those sparkling gems — to make whatever you can, with whatever resources you have — in order to get to the point where you have something to evaluate.
Along the way, you’ve also come up with something to share with others.
I remember when I first started making videos and there was white space on my profile. You couldn’t scroll down because there weren’t enough videos. I tried to imagine a future in which I had a scrollable feed, but I had a hard time picturing what would go in that feed.
Now, there are hundreds of videos. You have to scroll for awhile to reach the first one. And from that foundation comes a confidence I couldn’t have had in the beginning.
I couldn’t have known, at the start, what I would create and for whom. It was all ahead of me. I had to actually create in order to learn. The adventure has been a worthy one.
Maybe you don’t need one hundred sparkling gems of your creation. But what would change if you had them? What questions would be easier to answer? What would you know and understand about yourself that you don’t yet know?
Only one way to find out.
