Why Youtube?

I mean that we are starting from the very bottom but let’s get into it. Why Youtube?

But a couple of ideas sprang to mind recently.

The first is its potential to earn money from it one day. Let’s not lie. People often think when I say earn money it is just due to AdSense, but I think it is more than that. I think it is a platform to earn as well. A good example right now, I am applying for PhDs. In some of my applications, I mentioned my channel and some videos I had done, and a couple of the interviewers had checked it out.

But there’s way more to it than that.

The second reason is that it’s become pretty clear the power content has. I think the last election was largely swung due to content, so at least learning to make it and the skills associated like marketing, advertising they’re almost universal and they’re quite useful for a lot of skills. You know, and also (I want to avoid politics where possible) content allows you to control your own narrative. It always struck me as weird that politicians don’t use media more to their advantage. I was a big fan of the government when they had broadcasts during covid (Ignore the covid part). They could turn on the camera, make their point directly on their own terms. That is powerful. I want the content and ecosystem I create to be able to speak for itself and help to understand the why of a lot of my decisions.

It’s hard to get the balance right explaining this but how I look at it is you often hear popular science books: do you want to be a generalist, do you want to be a specialist? I’m of the camp that you kind of want to be a specialist but you also want to have some general skills. I know it’s not a great answer but let me try to unpack this. I started to code properly a little before covid maybe the 2020s, so it’s been roughly 5 years as I am writing this article. If I could go and become a 7 figure developer tomorrow but the only condition was you make no content, I would. Or think of it this way: a path to become said developer from where you are might be 2000 hours of programming, so let’s say 3 years to gain that technical finish, but if I were to add content in that journey it may take me 5 years (in this example I am assuming content adds no value).

Where I am now at 30 years of age I think I can take both approaches concurrently. This article has taken 10 minutes to write so far, let’s say 30 mins altogether. That is 30 mins of not coding. Still, I think some combination of technical excellence and content is a balanced well-thought-out strategy.

I think there is a way to balance content based on what you want to do. So I was thinking I could use content to enhance what I do because I’ve seen many cases where an AI YouTuber mentioned he got a job in DeepMind mainly due to his content, you know, so it’s something that I think I can integrate into my life without sacrificing how good a programmer I can be.

If I was to make it a bit clearer I would say that the 10,000 hour rule, which is oversimplified—if you put 10,000 hours of progressive practice into a field you’re going to get better, and that is true:

a) I think 10,000 hours of pure programming
b) 10,000 hours of content
c) 8,000 hours programming, 2,000 hours content

I think something like c is the best approach for me.

In one line:

I think content still has room to grow and provide you with opportunity and can be done in a way that is sustainable and does not take away from the technical skill I want to learn.

*I wrote the article myself with text to speech and used chatgpt to fix the errors.