Life is Never Binary
As much as I’ve made my living over the past four decades from computers, an inherently binary system, my successes or failures have never been binary. I’ve written about breadcrumbs in my life before and, in retrospect, I can see how a positive has come out of a negative situation. Nothing that has happened has ever been completely good or absolutely bad. Sometimes it has taken years to see how one event has lead to another, but perspective is everything in our world.
So what’s my point? My point is that we cannot dwell on what has just happened in total isolation. The sooner we can see the non-binary essence of life experiences, the sooner we can find peace, hope, love, clarity, or whatever we need at that moment in our lives.
In my most recent reboot of how I see myself, I’ve been exploring my creative side by playing instruments, writing scripts, publishing videos, and all the related skills required for those activities. Unlike math or writing code, creative work cannot be labeled as correct or wrong — or even optimized like the more numeric skills. Content produced from a creative effort can be loved, hated — or worse — completely ignored.
My Whisky Riffs YouTube channel was barely watched by anyone for 20 months. Then a single video took off and my channel went from 600 subscribers to 3,500. Instead of 100 views in 48 hours, it was hitting almost 10,000 views during that same timeframe. But just as quickly as that ramp up happened, the numbers plummeted after only 3 months. My emotional highs and lows were wired directly to the stats and I had to step back and remember that life is never binary.
It’s going to take me a while to compile and analyze all the data from the past couple of years — my engineer side of my brain will never let the creative side run solo — but I’m already learning from it. What did I do right? What have I done wrong? What can I gain from both types of outcomes?
Some of the negatives are:
I assumed the boost in numbers would last longer and I had more time to do the next big video.
Connected videos didn’t perform anywhere near my top one.
I have limits to how much content I can produce during weekends and evenings.
Some of the positives are:
The YouTube algorithm doesn’t control my destiny.
I am getting better at core skills like talking to a camera, editing videos, and content-related skills.
I know who my audience is better than I did a year ago.
Because I can’t know how my past 24 months of effort will affect my future, I have to decide on a path knowing that it may only make sense when I write about this time a decade from now. I do know that it was neither completely good or absolutely bad, but I am hopeful that there will be many breadcrumbs that lead back to it.
