Do Not Seek Perfection
I’m very close to completing my 2023 recap video and I’m pretty excited to share it with the world. Having said that it’s also been a challenging experience for a variety of reasons and is taking longer than it probably should. However, I do think I’ve learned some important lessons by working on this project and I thought I’d summarize them and share them here.
The first challenge was just sorting through the vast amount of footage I captured over the past year. It’s spread over two external hard drives and I’m trying to find all the clips I’m looking for and condense them into a cohesive-ish narrative. This just highlights the importance of having a good organizational structure when doing video projects. It’s normally not too much of a problem if it’s a small project but for something like this, it slows things down and kills my momentum.
The other thing that’s been slowing me down a ton is just poor editing techniques. I don’t think I’m importing my footage onto the timeline very efficiently and I’m not using things like hotkeys and shortcuts that make the small repetitive tasks go a lot quicker.
Both of these things I think can be corrected by just taking some courses or tutorials online. Best practices exist for a reason and I think this whole process would be far more enjoyable if I was better at the specifics of editing like organizing my footage and using Final Cut to its fullest potential.
Another thing that has been in the back of my mind is how unsustainable working this way is. This level of effort and attention is only possible during this time of year because work is a bit slower and I don’t have as much going on. Going forward though these types of montages, as cool as they may be, are just impractical if I want to make a career out of creating videos. Ultimately I’ll need more structure and a better process all around, but it’s tough to see what that looks like at this point.
I’m reassured by a quote by Paul Graham though from Y-combinator where he advises startups to “Do things that don’t scale.” I think the sentiment he’s trying to convey is that it’s okay to rapidly prototype iterate things in a way that wouldn’t be feasible to mass produce since it’s a lot harder to create an assembly line that churns those things out versus just creating a single one of a given product (that product being videos in this example).
And finally, there’s a bit of psychological fear I have whenever I’m working on all of my videos. It’s weird reliving a year’s worth of experiences, and feeling both the good and bad emotions that went along with all those memories. I also get impatient and try to rush things in unhealthy ways, or in ways that would make the final result not turn out as good as it would have had I taken a more patient approach. I guess the fear of leaving a project lingering for years again is still fresh in my mind. I think there’s also a fear the video won’t turn out well or will come across as too narcissistic and attention-seeking, or that it won’t get the reaction I’m hoping for (even though I can’t exactly say what reaction would be satisfying).
Luckily I’ve found that just taking care of the basics, like food, exercise and rest helps a ton. Also talking about it here and defining the problem makes it seem a lot more manageable (shoutout to the Andrew Huberman video about journaling I saw recently). But most importantly I think every creative should remember what Salvador Dali had to say about perfectionism:
“Have no fear of perfection — you’ll never reach it.”
