I've found my genius. After yesterday spending the whole day wondering where it was and talking it through with the community, I figured it out, and I hope this is helpful for you to figure out your own genius too. What are you really good at? And I don't mean what are you decent at, or what can you get paid well to do. I mean what do you love doing so much that you would do it for free? Generally, other people are going to appreciate that gift from you more than anything else you could give them.
I've been wondering for a long time, what is it for me? Is it making YouTube videos? Is it live streaming? Is it competitive gaming? What is it? And I just had a light bulb moment go off, right after a day of being in the middle of the confusion. I hope that shows you something: sometimes being in the middle of the confusion, being lost, that's okay. What helps me is that I ask for a lot of advice from a lot of people, and then I latch on to whatever really feels right.
The advice that unlocked it
Someone in the community said today that it seems like I'm really excited when I first start something, but that excitement dwindles pretty quickly, so I always have to jump to something new and fresh. And that's exactly what I've observed in my own business over the years. I love starting the challenge of learning something new. For example, I loved jumping into Udemy and learning how to do that back in 2014 and 2015. But once I actually got it going, I didn't like it that much anymore. What was exciting was figuring out how it works and getting it started.
It's the same pattern everywhere. I loved learning how to do YouTube. I loved getting into crypto and learning how to do that. I loved getting into competitive gaming. I loved learning how to play music. I love grabbing on to some brand new adventure and learning it. So today I've been wondering, am I a competitive gamer? Is that where my genius is? I looked around at others who have Twitch channels, at the big streamers and the little streamers who are growing and the mid-sized streamers, and I realized I don't actually like a lot about being a competitive gamer.
What Warzone taught me about myself
What was really fun about playing Warzone in 2018, 2020, and 2021 was that it was fun when I didn't know how to play. I went through the whole learning process of figuring out how to win a game of Warzone Solos, and then I taught other people how to win games of Warzone Solos. Going through that pain and excitement of learning, figuring it out, and then explaining to you everything I just learned. That's the part I love.
When I look back over the course of my business, a lot of what looks like self-destruction is really just me giving my genius without consciously understanding it. I didn't understand that what I really like to do is learn something new and then teach it. And it's important to have some rigidity to keep things together, so I can see now where that rigidity belongs. The rigidity is to do whatever I'm doing live. I can do whatever I want live: I can play music, I can create vlogs, I can teach, I can talk crypto, we can play games. The key is to always bring everybody back to one central community.
That's the structure I need. Have a place where the community is centered, and then upload videos to YouTube. In my experience, the best way to work with me and to keep up with all of this is to join the Jerry Banfield Family, where we can go through these breakthroughs together instead of me just broadcasting them at you.
The vlog and the diary idea
I like the idea of having a vlog where I just talk about what I'm doing each day. It's a video for those of you who just love Jerry Banfield and can't get enough Jerry Banfield and want to keep up with what I'm doing. I can use it like a diary and then go back in the past and look at what I was doing before. Then I upload videos to YouTube covering what I'm doing and what I'm learning.
For example, I'm working on what'll be a five-to-six-hour crypto video with a hundred-and-some lessons learned in crypto. And here's what I've noticed now that I've gotten some really strong education. Crypto was really fun for me at different times. In the last three months, I had a lot of fun learning and researching crypto. But now that I've got a lot of the research done and I've learned a ton, crypto hasn't been fun for me recently, because I've figured out most of what I need to know to be effective in crypto investing.
What I've come to believe works for me is to buy things like Bitcoin and Ethereum, plus a couple of other alts that look good, and then just consistently invest and hold. That's really all I need to do, along with keeping up with the market. At this point my crypto is pretty easy; I just do a little bit of maintenance. The real masterpiece, the genius, was going in and learning crypto and then teaching it. And now I'm ready to move on, learn, and jump into some new adventure.
The structure I'm keeping
So I'm really grateful and excited for this breakthrough. I can see that the things I need to constantly stick with and stay on top of are live streaming and then putting the videos out. I want to be considerate with the videos I put out, and not just crank up rough drafts of everything. On my main channel I can do a vlog that's free-format, down to earth, not heavily edited. But on the other channels I can do things that are set up to be long-format, comprehensive education, sharing what I've learned, highlights, and so on. And then be there in the community when I'm offline. That's all the structure I need, and thank God for that breakthrough.
I've been reading a book called The Big Leap that's been really helpful for getting into and talking about some of these things. So if you're wondering how you can level up in your life, and if you're wondering where your genius is and what you're here to do, the book The Big Leap could be pretty helpful for you too. If you want to follow this whole journey of figuring it out, a lot of it lives in my Life playlist.
Thank God for this learning and revelation today, and I'm very grateful for all of you who keep showing up and watching. It's really nice to be able to do this. After a day of feeling kind of lost and wondering, I feel very found now. So thank you.