I didn't start making videos because I wanted to be a film maker. I never wanted to be a videographer or a cinematographer. As much as I love the art form, as creatively invigorating as it is to film and edit, it's not my primary aspiration. It's not my passion. And yet, I've found myself becoming increasingly obsessed with camera angles, camera settings, lenses, aperture, frame rates, lighting, audio, mic placement, B-roll, cinematic sequences, setting, background, etc, etc, etc.  In other words, I've become overwhelmingly obsessed with the production, the "quality".

I've also been unhealthily obsessed with "the numbers"; the subscriber count, the views, the listens, the plays, the likes, the shares, the comments, and the things. We all know the numbers shouldn't matter. We've all either said ourselves or heard other creatives say "don't create for the numbers", "the numbers don't matter" but, saying it and believing it are two different things. Implicitly, in the back of nearly every creators mind, the numbers matter. A lot of us, especially me, will attach our value as a creator, the value of what we create to those numbers. We will interpret those numbers as a numeric representation of how much our work matters, and we start judging the quality of our work based on those numbers. At least, that's what's happened for me.

I think I lost my connection to an even more important question, "why did I start?" "What did I start doing this for?" It's so easy to get lost in the minutia of techniques and all the things that touch the thing you're doing but, what's the core of what you're doing? What's the heart beat of why you do what you do? If you lose touch with the thing that made you want to start doing what you're doing then you've lost the whole drive, you've lost the whole aspiration, the whole motivation, the whole operative significance of the thing.

I started doing this because I'm in love with ideas. I'm in love with the kind of ideas that James Victore might call "Dangerous Ideas". Oscar Wilde said that " An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all". That is my core. It's gotten buried in the process but, its still there, and I'm trying to find my way back to it.

How do I get back? I don't know. I don't have it all figured out yet. But, this is an attempt to get back to the dangerous ideas, and maybe that's a dangerous idea in itself. I hope that it is. I don't know what comes next, but i never have. All I can tell you is that I'm still in the process. If you're still here then, we're in the process together.

Keep showing up, Keep doing the work, FAIL BOLDLY, and let's make something meaningful.

Shout out to my Patrons and Supporters:

Jim Martin - https://theunusualbuddha.com/

Ben Bridges - https://www.myfpvstore.com/

Rev. Jerry Maynard - https://www.facebook.com/revjerryhtx/?epa=SEARCH_BOX

Jerome Shaw - https://anchor.fm/jshaw

Rajan Shankara - https://rajanshankara.com/

If you want shout outs in podcasts and videos, if you want access to all my behind-the-scenes, patron only content, if you want early access to all my videos, and if you want to be a part of a community of creativity and curiosity, the check out my Patreon page -

https://www.patreon.com/duanetoops