Casey Neistat Made Me Do It

I have been wanting to do this for over a year now…

Backstory

In April 2016 I dusted off the GoPro that my wife’s parents gave me for my birthday and pressed record. It was a GoPro Hero 4 Silver and I had no clue how to use it. I’ve loved taking pictures my whole life but video was never something that appealed to me.

Until now.

You see a month before, I discovered Casey Neistat on YouTube. I’ve never heard of the guy and it wasn’t love at first sight. But after watching a few of his videos, he started to grow on me. His personality, the way he cut and framed shots really appealed to me — in fact, I never really noticed these things until now. But most important was his message.

Work Hard and Be Brave

I always knew that working hard is something one must do to achieve great things. But being brave, taking risks and challenging yourself is only something I started realizing later on in life.

I was raised in an immigrant family. My parents worked hard their whole life in a communist country which we eventually fled when I was 10 years old. Working hard was the norm, but being brave could get you in jail. My parents tried their best to stay out of trouble.

That mentality, to some degree, stayed with me while growing up. I worked hard on things I wanted to achieve, but I always stayed within my comfort zone doing my best to avoid any possible confrontation with anything or anyone. I always equated being brave to looking for trouble.

Fast Forward to Now

Its been a year since I’ve been creating video content. Most of it is on a YouTube channel I started called Everything is Amazing. It’s a personal creative discovery project.

I don’t have a final goal, all I know is that I want to express my self in a creative way. I always believed doing so takes guts.

Picking up a camera and trying to convert your ideas into a video without any formal school or training is far from easy. Putting it out on the internet for everyone to see, is terrifying. But in my eyes, I wouldn’t want to do this any other way.

I am finally trying to be brave.

Everything Is Amazing is a lifestyle vlog/blog & YouTube channel with weekly(ish) episodes and mini documentaries exploring existentialism and everyday life. If you enjoyed this post, check us out on YouTube.