A topic that I’ve seen come up quite a bit recently with students in the Part-Time YouTube Academy (PTYA) and LBA actually and that’s the issue of overthinking when it comes to content creation.
As a little bit of context, before I posted my first YouTube video in 2017, I spent about seven years waiting to post my first video. My ambitions to start a YouTube channel really began way back in 2010, I just didn’t get over that initial hurdle until I began posting content consistently in 2017 and even then I started off posting music content.
But in those seven years, I researched cameras obsessively. I read every guide I could find on editing. I watched dozens of other creators and tried to reverse-engineer exactly what made them successful. I wrote outlines for videos I never filmed and had long internal debates about whether my content was sufficiently defined.
At the time, I told myself this was all necessary groundwork and I’d start for real once I felt ready but now I know the reality that I was never going to feel ready.
Readiness, when it comes to creative work, isn’t a state you arrive at before you start. It’s a state you work yourself into by starting. The confidence to post comes from posting, not from preparing to post.
I’ve thought a lot about why creators – including me, including people I know who’ve been putting off starting or posting more consistently for months – fall into this trap. And I think there are two things going on.
The first is that research and planning feels productive. Watching other creators, studying thumbnails, reading about the algorithm – it all gives you the sensation of making progress without actually requiring you to put something into the world that can be judged. It’s activity that looks like work but functions, at least partly, as a delay mechanism.
The second is that our brains are remarkably good at generating reasons why conditions aren’t quite right yet. “I’ll start once I’ve figured out my niche.” “Once my editing is better.” “Once I’ve got better equipment.” These feel like sensible preconditions. They’re almost always excuses dressed up as requirements.
The cure I’ve found isn’t to stop thinking – it’s to limit it.
Give yourself a defined window to research and prepare. The constraint forces a decision that open-ended deliberation never will. I’ve seen people who’ve spent 6 months “getting ready” publish something in the first week of joining PTYA and immediately wonder what they were waiting for.
The other thing that helped me enormously was lowering the stakes of the first attempt. My first YouTube video wasn’t meant to be my best YouTube video. It was meant to be my first one – something to learn from, iterate on, and build on. Framing it that way made pressing record feel much less like a high-stakes performance. What I’ve increasingly come to realise is that the gap between where you start and where you want to be as a creator can only be closed by making things. Every video, every post, every piece of content you publish is a rep and reps are how you get good.
Put another way, the version of you who has posted 20 imperfect videos will always outperform the version who spent that same time preparing for one perfect first attempt. It goes back to the whole meaning behind the parable of the Pottery Class which I know I’ve mentioned numerous times before but it’s true.
If you also receive ProductiveNotes on a Monday, you’ll know that I talked about procrastination this week and I appreciate this is a similar point, but I’ve writing about it again because I’m really keen to encourage people towards taking action and learn through doing rather than thinking or planning. (So if this is a second reminder this week to take that action, I hope it’s helped!).
So my challenge for you this week is to ask yourself what’s one piece of content you’ve been “getting ready” to make? Set a timer for 30 minutes and just make a start – even a rough one. You’ll be amazed what happens when you remove the pressure of it being good.
Let me know how you get on and we’ll speak again next week.
Talk soon,
Ali xx