Work until the work is done
User CDD20 has made over a thousand of these poignant, evocative images available for free on Pixabay, asking nothing in return. Each piece of art is filled with love. (Image by 愚木混株 Cdd20)
My video workflow is supposed to be as follows:
Every Wednesday: script or outline five videos.
Every Thursday: shoot five videos.
Every Friday: edit and format five videos.
If I do that, I will have five videos “in the can,” ready for the following week.
Well, I aspire to this workflow, and each week I get a little closer. If I have too much of a backlog of work, these tasks get pushed back. I end up scripting on Thursday, shooting on Friday and Saturday, and editing each video on the day it will be posted.
That’s what happened this week. Yesterday, I spent two hours editing a 57-second video. The time alotted for this editing was thirty minutes (perhaps you can see why I have a backlog of work).
Although two hours is a long time, I was deeply absorbed in what I was doing and barely noticed the time passing. As a result of making all of these videos, I have gotten interested in visual storytelling — how even a one-second clip can evoke emotion or imply a much longer sequence of events. It was fun, though painstaking, to take the existing footage and use it construct a narrative.
I posted the video just before 3:00 PM and went to meet a friend for a walk. When I checked back a few hours later, the video had been shown 2,500 times and attracted a number of new followers. View counts soon went up into the tens of thousands, and by the time I went to bed, I understood that I would wake up to 100K views and at least 2,500 new followers. That’s exactly what happened.
It’s funny when I think about the vaguely resigned feeling I had about the two hours I spent editing. Is it more “worth it” because the video was successful? I did it because it’s what the video required. If the video had achieved 500 views I wouldn’t have felt disappointed (I’ve put just as much much time and effort into plenty of videos that attracted little attention). I simply enjoy the process of getting something as close as possible to the vision I have for it.
A lot of things went well with this video. As I was editing it, I found a happy marriage of the script and its visual representation, discovering lots of little moments in the footage that matched up nicely with the voiceover. It still took a lot of wrangling, but there are a number of choices I can point to that just worked.
As confident as I sound, though, I have no sense of having deliberately created a winner. Were these subtle editing choices responsible for the popularity of the video? I don’t know. Could I have achieved a similar result in 30 minutes of editing? I don’t know.
Though I did spend all that time fussing with the details of the video and its soundtrack, I wasn’t being a perfectionist. There was no angst. I just worked until the work was done, and apparently the version of me that does the schedule is in denial about how long it can take.
When I look at what I’ve accomplished on TikTok — the videos I’ve made, the relationships I’ve built, the skills I’ve learned — it feels like it’s been easy. And in a way, it has been. But it’s also been many, many hours of work. I know that some people can put videos up in fifteen minutes, and I am not one of them. It routinely takes me over an hour to write, film, and edit a video, and many of them have taken more than three hours.
If I didn’t like doing it, I wouldn’t do it. But I really love it. I love it even knowing that at least 90% of people will scroll past my video indifferently. For me, the best part is making the video, not the reception to it.
What I wish I could impart to the people I’ve taught and coached — what I hope that I have imparted to a degree — is the possibility of getting lost in the work. Of letting go of the outcome. Of forgetting whether you want to do it or not, and just doing it. That this place of detachment is the wellspring of joy.
At first, it might be a slog. When you’re not used to the work, it can be rough going. but if you strengthen not only the skills involved in the work you’re doing, but your stamina for work itself, you will be in a powerful position to achieve whatever you set out to do.
Of course, you won’t care. You’ll just work until the work is done, for the beauty of doing it.
In case you wanna see the video, it can be found here.
