It's January 15th, 2025, and it's my 4,979th day on YouTube. I'm feeling kind of uninspired today, wondering what to do to have fun. There's so much I can do with my music. I've got such a great setup in here. But at the same time, I'm asking myself: what is fun? What do I actually enjoy listening to? It's okay to be in that place where you just don't know. And if you're going to be something like a YouTuber, days like today are kind of annoying, because I feel like I'm just blowing the time I have to do stuff. I feel like the time is being wasted.
I am grateful I scheduled a live stream in about an hour, and I've come to feel that live streams are the best content I've ever done. I really want to focus on doing live streams, but I'm not sure what that looks like for fun. For a vlog channel, live streams don't make as much sense either. It just makes sense to record these vlogs and upload them. They don't work as well as a live stream when they're a 10 or 20 minute video, partly because the vlogs get to be so long-winded. But I want to do one main live stream that's work, for crypto. And then I want a fun stream where it's play, it's joyful, it's exploring. With the music, though, it's just stumping me so hard.
Music, gaming, and that no-man's-land of getting better
I've been thinking about whether I should go back to playing video games. My gaming streams were amazing. Somebody commented on one of my vlog videos last night that what I make isn't even music, and that I should go back to gaming, because my gaming videos were so good. But it's awesome, too, that I've made hundreds of songs. Some of them are pretty good. It seems like one of the best things I could make would be a dance music set in Ableton and just crank out dance music. I had a dance music set in the past, and then I quit making music right after that. I started working on one earlier, but I didn't even use it to make a song. Then I made an ambient set and used that. But today I'm just like, I don't know. I want to do live streams with the music too, and I want them to be explorative, playful live streams. The music is so annoying, though, because I feel like I'm so bad at it.
That said, I've certainly been very bad at video games as well, and I had to play a lot to start getting good at them. As much as I've been doing the music, I'm definitely getting better. The setup I've got in Ableton is decently complicated, and being able to use all this equipment together and make something I enjoy come out is its own reward. My son was listening to a bunch of my ambient music in the car yesterday, and he seemed to be enjoying it.
I keep thinking that with my music, sometimes when you're getting better at something, you get into this no-man's-land where you're better than you used to be, to the point where you can see how bad you've been. But at the same time, where you're going is kind of unclear anymore. There are so many things I could do with my music. I could just sit there and play piano. I could make dance music. I could put all these loops together from Splice and make music that rapidly evolves: four bars of this, four bars of that. I like listening to that. I'll just listen to 20 or 30 different dance loops in a row. You don't hear much music like that, where you go four bars straight into something else, where the whole thing changes every four to eight bars. It's constant. There's not as much tension and release, but it's interesting. It keeps moving.
What tennis taught me about execution
I played tennis earlier today, which was fun. I finally watched some professional tennis players and some videos on serving and hitting. I ran into this guy in some of the videos named Dustin Brown, I believe. He's a tennis player from Jamaica who played in Germany, and he retired recently. I ended up in the shorts feed watching his highlights, and they were so amazing. I've played tennis and had that same feeling of, oh, I'm so bad at tennis. But watching him play and hit these short shots that just crap out on his opponent, I do a lot of that. I like to hit a shot to the back of the court and then hit some crappy little shot. I like junk little shots that are hard to return, that make my opponent sprint up to the front of the net, and then I hit one behind them, or far to the left side. My tennis style doesn't look very pretty a lot of the time, but it's effective. You make your opponent run up to one side and then dink it over his head, and it goes.
I did a shot today where I ended up close to the net. The guy I was playing is better than me; he beat me 12 games to two. But a lot of our games were close and went to deuce. On one of the shots, he hit it back and I was right in the middle of the front of the net, so I jumped up and hit it sideways with my racket, and it went perfectly into the back of the court, completely unreturnable. That was so satisfying. I hit a lot of shots today that he couldn't return. But I also missed a lot of easy ones. And I had more fun playing tennis, thinking: I don't need to be upset about poor execution. If I have the right idea about something but I can't hit the ball there, that's fine. I'm going to go for shots my opponent can't return. I'm going to have fun playing. I missed a couple of game winners, like when I had ad-in and went for the finisher and missed it. And that's okay. If you missed the execution, you still had the right idea. The more you practice, the better you'll get.
A juvenile mystery at power yoga
I also went to the power yoga flow this morning, which was nice. Somebody ripped a big fart right next to me, though, and I was like, who did that? Often that's me, but it was more crowded. I really was so curious. Of course, I had my suspects: this butt was closest to me, this person seems like they would have done it. It's so juvenile, but for half the class I was trying to solve the mystery of who ripped that fart. Smell doesn't have a very good directional component to it. You just suddenly sniff and go, ah, somebody farted, but you can't tell which direction it came from. A lot of other things are very directional: sound, sight, feeling. I guess taste isn't very directional either. But smell, I got it in there, and then I'm trying to figure out which direction. I swear it came from this way or that way. Where did that fart come from?
What I do when I have zero inspiration: just record something
One of the big things I do when I'm uninspired on YouTube is just record something. Just get out there and do something. I read this book by Steven Pressfield called The War of Art, and it describes how it's often a battle to produce art. Anything will come up to try and stop you from producing. It's almost as if there's an inner part of you, an opponent, that doesn't want you to create. Don't make your music, don't make your videos, whatever it is, just don't do it. So one way I've gotten past that as a YouTuber is I just make a video, no matter how bad it is. That's why I'm really grateful this vlog is so helpful, because on any given day I can come up here and record a video talking about how I'm doing.
It takes more work to do the crypto live streams and to put something together musically. But I can always just do a video talking about my day, and that's a nice icebreaker. Okay, well, I did the video about my day, now maybe I'll make another one. It gets the momentum going. That's often the hardest and most important thing to do: just break the ice. Once you get that first video recorded, the ones after it kind of keep coming out.
My wife also made lunch, and we took a little nap and a shower in the middle of the day, which was really nice. I don't usually nap in the middle of the day, but it felt good to rest. What I've found helps me stay healthy is taking a rest when it feels good, because then I often don't get forced to rest by illness. I already go to bed consistently for eight or nine hours a night, so I'm in bed quite a bit. Then I'll occasionally take a nap in the afternoon, and my body stays so healthy that I don't get forced to rest by getting sick. I'm really grateful for that.
I'm glad I recorded this vlog, because one challenge I have as a YouTuber is thinking it should all be one thing: I should either do all live streams or all videos, with nothing in between. But there's definitely a place where live streams are so much better. For my crypto videos, live streams are a lot better, because I want to get the community more involved. It gets boring and repetitive for me to just say the same thing every day.
Looking 10 and 20 years down the road
The live streams really spark my ideas. The music is fun to live stream, too. Probably the main thing I watch on Twitch when I watch live streams is music. I'm in the process of figuring out what would make a good live show for my music. What would be fun to put together? And do I even want to produce songs out of it, or do I want the show itself to be the music? I don't know. As a YouTuber, there's a lot of thinking involved in trying to figure all this out. And do I want to do games too?
I think about what happens when this crypto bull run pays all my debt off, and then what? At that point, do I want to play video games anymore? Often our minds put up these things we did in the past, but there's no going back to them. There's no going back to playing Call of Duty Warzone for hours every single day. When I first played it, I sucked, and it was frustrating, but I kept playing until I got really good at it. Thinking 10 or 20 years into the future, I'd like to be really good at music, because there aren't a lot of YouTubers who go down the route of getting very good at it. Music is one of the harder things to do on YouTube. The space is totally captured by this popular-music crap and bots pushing fake streams, and actually making a living as a music producer is often pretty difficult. People want the same kind of stuff they've heard before. So right now, a lot of music YouTube is just people telling you how to make music far more than they make their own. If you want to see more of how I think through this kind of creative work, you can explore my YouTube Coaching playlist.
So those are my thoughts today. The kids are home from school, and now I'm off to do my crypto live stream.