Why your project might be stalling out

Following through on a big vision is a bit easier when you have a lot of people and money involved. (NASA)

I wanted to start a YouTube channel. Here’s the story of why I didn’t (or, why I haven’t yet!), and maybe it can give you an aha for a project you’re stuck on.

It was the summer of 2020 and, like everyone else, I was kind of down and bored and looking for something to do. So I thought I would start a YouTube channel to teach people how to play music by ear.

I did a ton of research, which is unusual for me. However, I never started the channel. I made one video, but I never posted it.

Here’s why I believe that project never got off the ground.

One, I had no idea how much time it was going to take. That made it really hard to commit. Was it going to take three hours to shoot and edit a video? Twenty-five hours? Without a sense of how much time it was going to take, I couldn’t actually schedule it and I couldn’t determine whether it was going to be sustainable.

Two, I didn’t really know why I wanted to do it. I had no end goal in mind. I didn’t know what I wanted the outcome to look like. That meant that not only was I lacking a sense of how much time the work would take day to day, I didn’t know how many weeks, months, or years I was signing up for. Was I going to be making a couple of YouTube videos each week in perpetuity?

I didn’t ask myself those hard questions, so I didn’t come up with any hard answers. Instead, I drifted away from any thought of the project when life got difficult. Within a few weeks of conceiving the YouTube project, one of my key employees contracted a serious case of Covid and was out for several weeks. There was no time for making videos, and no incentive to make them.

Despite the curveball of Covid, these two reasons might not have been deal breakers but for the third: I couldn’t see a way to make incremental progress toward the goal.

Most of the YouTube videos I was seeing — the type of videos I wanted to make — were highly produced, well lit, twenty-minute multimedia lectures with impeccable sound quality. With virtually no experience in the medium of video, this would have been a leap for me.

And yet to start small seemed like a cop-out. I didn’t want to get stuck in a mentality of measuring the progress of the project only by what I shared publicly, but I didn’t want to buy into perfectionism by making videos and not posting them. Unable to reconcile these warring impulses, I did nothing.

This summer, finally, I’ve started experimenting with video consistently. And it turns out that there is a way to start incrementally: I can make and share videos as short as seven seconds! This way, I get to create and publish at a level that I can manage with my current skills.

But importantly, I’ve resolved the first two issues that hung me up before. I know what my time commitment is, and I know exactly why I’m doing it. With these considerations in place, I am moving confidently on the mastery path.

Your turn: If there’s a project you’ve been stuck on, consider: Have you broken down the time commitment required? Have you come up with a clear outcome you’re shooting for, even if it’s only a short-term one? And can you come up with a way to make the project smaller or break it down into modest, doable steps?

You may find that doing these things can finally get you underway. Alternatively, you might gain some insight into why the project is stalled out and realize that it isn’t for you in your current circumstances. This is liberating. You can make the choice to not move forward instead of blaming a lack of motivation or organization on your part.

Now that I’m busily making a bunch of short-form videos every week, starting a YouTube channel is seeming more within reach, skill-wise. Ironically, however, the more I understand of the time commitment it would require, the more I believe it to be out of the question for me — at least today.

If I ever have a clear and strong reason to start a YouTube channel in the first place, that will change. But at the moment, the project is not stalled out — it’s intentionally, deliberately, cheerfully on ice. And that’s for the best reason of all: I’m choosing to do other things I’m excited about.