Hey, what's up, guys?
So, you're probably thinking,
"This isn't Tom's normal backdrop."
And you would be right.
So this week, I'm actually in Portland, Oregon,
staying with my friend, Chase, and this is his
much cooler office than mine.
He's letting me use for a while.
And this week, I wanted to do a video
to follow up on last week's video
which went over that whole passion versus experience
and skills debate.
And I kind of just want to augment that video,
which is more general discussion,
with my own experience,
how I got to where I am today
and how I became a YouTuber.
Not a lot of people have done like these
"My You Tube" story videos, and they're really cool.
I like to watch them for the people
that I enjoy watching,
but I want to frame mine in the context of
how I got to here from where I was
as a student early on in my college career
and near the end of high school,
and kind of like show how my major selection,
which was totally different than
what I'm doing now,
progressed into me being a full-time YouTuber.
So, and I'm like away from home, so I don't have
access to my full computer,
but if I have pictures online, I'll kind of like
throw them up in here and kind of like
make the story a little bit more visual.
So, let's go back to like high school.
Um, actually, I'm going to go back a little bit
further than that.
Because my major selection was really, really different
than being a YouTuber.
I didn't go into film,
I didn't go into communications or journalism
or anything like that.
I went into a major called Management Information Systems.
And this is basically like the IT guy major.
So like if you think of the guy who's running
all the networks and systems at a big corporation
or like the dude who runs the computers at your school
and makes sure the computer labs are set up,
like that's what I wanted to be.
I grew up watching The Matrix, and like my
favorite character was Tank, the dude who had like
15 monitors and all the scrolling
text coming down.
And I wanted to be that.
I wanted to run all these systems
because when I was I think 12 years old,
I wanted to make a website.
And I found this site called like
Yahoo GeoCities, where you could drag and drop
elements onto a page,
and it was basically like Power Point.
So I made a website for like a favorite band of mine,
and it was terrible, it looked really terrible
and eventually, I was like so fed up with it
that I wanted to start changing things,
and the drag and drop editor wouldn't let me do it,
so I had to figure out how to start coding my own websites.
And I was reading tutorials and like these
super old websites.
One was called like Web Monkey I think,
and I just kind of learned HTML and CSS
and a lot of the other languages that like the web
is built upon,
and I was having fun building my own websites.
And I kind of put that aside for a while,
but then during my junior year of high school,
I met a friend in a math class,
and we got to talking about web design
because he said that he knew how to code,
and I was like, "Well, hey, dude, I also know how to code.
"Why don't we set up our own business
"and charge people to build websites?"
So that was actually what we did,
and right after high school ended,
I had like, I had so much trouble finding a summer job
because I was not yet 18,
and I was also going off to college,
so nobody wanted to hire me.
So we just went out and found clients
and built websites for them.
And sort of built this love of computers.
And the reason I went into Information Systems
rather than like computer science or computer engineering
is because Information Systems is more of a mix
between business and computers.
And the reason I loved the business is because
when I was a junior or maybe even a sophomore,
I can't remember the year now,
but I joined a club called
Business Professionals of America at my high school.
I basically did it because I needed stuff
to put on my resume for college applications.
But it was fun, and we got to go to these
like state conferences,
where we'd stay in a hotel,
and we'd have to do competitions,
and the competitions I entered were like
HTML coding and web design.
I did a business plan competition, which kind of
like got my appetite whetted for entrepreneurship,
and I ended up running for state office
and got elected as the state treasurer,
which let me travel to a different state,
I went to Reno and Nevada,
I went to the national conference,
and it was super cool,
and I was kind of getting these ideas in my head
that maybe someday I wanted to be
an entrepreneur or at least do something
involving business,
but I also wanted to kind of meld
technology into that with computer stuff.
So MIS it was.
I ended up declaring my major early in college.
I think most people declare their majors two years
after they start college,
so after their junior year starts.
But I ended up declaring my major
during my sophomore year, and I started getting
into these classes,
and right away on campus I got a job
at the campus tech support center,
so I got to learn how to remove viruses
and basically how computers worked like from the ground up,
and it was really cool.
And that led into an internship,
where I worked at a Fortune 500 company,
and I worked in the network department.
And this is kind of where things started to shift.
Because my preconceived notion of
the networking department was that I would a dude
who would like be wiring up servers
and hauling cable around this gigantic corporate campus
and I'd be able to kind of go through all
the secret tunnels
and be all over the place all day long.
And I'd always wanted to find a well-paying job
that was technical and like intellectually challenging
but also physically challenging.
I didn't want to be in a cubicle all day.
So I got this internship, and it turned out to be
nothing but cubicle work.
I was like in a box 40 hours a week,
just changing like configuration settings in servers.
And what I learned actually,
and this is what I elude to in the end of the video,
you kind of have to learn what you don't like to do
as well as what you do like to do.
What I learned is I really don't
like maintaining things.
I like to create things.
I had almost no opportunities to create things in that role.
It was all maintenance,
and it was all sitting in the cubicle, and it was like
almost a prison sentence to me.
The co-workers were cool,
like they gave me a lot of opportunities,
and I hate to say, but like the work itself
ended up being almost like a prison sentence.
Which kind of motivated me further
to keep working on College Info Geek.
So go back like a year before
that internship started,
I got a summer job on on campus,
and I don't really know what to call this job,
because they called us cyclone aides
since Cy is the mascot of Iowa State University
where I went.
I'm just going to call it like
student orientation assistant.
Basically, my job was to give tours of the campus
to other students and parents
and help them sign up for classes,
and also answer any and all questions people had
about the college and about the like experience
of going to college itself.
So I was learning all this stuff,
and the same time I was reading blogs like
Life Hacker and other things like that,
and there was this one like college-specific blog
that I was a huge fan of.
And near the end of my freshman year,
they actually were hiring some new writers,
so I applied, but I got rejected.
And I had like this whole application and I had written
this whole post for them
as part of that application,
and I didn't want it go to waste,
so I just figured I would put up my own blog.
And was just like another one of these attempts
to kind of like bolster my resume
and have a personal project that'd look good to employers,
and I just soft of did it for fun
for like a full year until right around the time
I did that internship a year later.
One of my posts kind of blew up
and got shared all around the web,
and since I was like hating that job so much,
I decided to pour all of my time into
trying to make this website as big as it possibly could be.
And it was just writing at first,
but I actually ended up finding out
that I liked to write,
and there was a lot of creativity in it.
I got to create things, I got to share things
with people and help people out,
and I found out that was much more conducive to
my personal traits than changing configurations
in servers in a cubicle for 40 hours a week.
So that's what I ended up doing like
all throughout college.
Whenever I had free time, I would work on articles,
and I would soak up as much knowledge
as I possibly could from people like
mentors of mine and people who I looked up to.
And eventually, I found out that I was
really liking to listen to podcasts
when I was at the gym or driving,
and I found out I was
like listening to podcasts more often
than I was reading blogs,
maybe a couple of years after I had started the blog.
So at the beginning of 2013, I was like,
"I can start my own podcast,"
and that is exactly what I did.
I started the College Info Geek Podcast,
which you can find down in the description
for this video.
And then I think it was like
middle of 2014, the same thing happened again
where I noticed like I'm watching a lot of
YouTube videos.
I'm not reading very many blog posts anymore.
I'm listening to fewer podcasts,
and I'm putting a lot of my time into YouTube
for whatever reason.
And I found creators like Caddicarus ,
my friend Satchell Drakes,
and my friend, YoungTown,
like I was watching video game channels
because I really liked video games,
but I was also really fascinated
with how they edited their videos
and kind of like put it all together
and I was really curious about how all that worked,
so just like with pod casting, I figured
what the heck, let's try doing some videos.
I didn't even want to become a YouTuber really.
I just wanted to have some videos to throw on my blog
as like a way to shake things up.
But the response to the videos
was way better, like way, way better than
I had ever gotten for podcasts or for blog posts
or for anything else, and so here we are.
And what I found with videos is
every week I can kind of push myself
to learn something new and like use a new editing technique
or do some different kind of animation
or light the set a little bit differently.
Like it never gets old, so
I ended up kind of finding my passion
through this long progression of just adding
different types of content to my website.
And that's kind of how I got to where I am now today.
I really didn't have a whole lot of experience
making videos before I became a YouTuber.
The only real experience I had besides
like making dumb videos with my brother as kid
was I think it was the summer after my junior year.
I had spoken at this event called "Ignite,"
which is an event where you do like five-minute talks,
and every slide progresses every 15 seconds,
so you like have to know your slides perfectly.
And they had not yet posted the videos
of the talks online,
and they wanted to see mine,
so I just emailed the department
who had put the event on, and I was like,
"Hey, if you guys want, I could help edit
"those videos.
"I don't know how to edit very well,
"but I'm willing to learn."
And they told me,
"Well, we're already done editing those videos,
"but we have another video project,
"and it pays if you want to learn, we'll teach you."
So I said, "Heck yes, let's do it."
It was like a few-week project.
It really wasn't a long thing at all,
but they taught me how to use Final Cut,
and they taught me kind of like how to do lighting
for setups, like documentary setups,
and that kind of like built a little bit
of a foundation that I was able to apply
to my YouTube videos.
And I actually don't use Final Cut anymore,
but a lot of the concepts were the same,
and I was able to sort of apply them
to what I was doing.
So, that's kind of my YouTube story,
and hopefully, this gives a little bit of context
to the video from last week about, you know,
passions and experiences.
For me, my passion really came out of five full years
of just working on this website and adding new things
and also doing other part-time jobs
and internships and finding out
what I didn't want to do
and really getting this motivation to make this work
so I didn't have to do that kind of stuff in the future.
So, hopefully this has provided some sort of context
or helped you in some way,
and I'll see you next week.
(lively music)
Hey there, guys.
Thanks so much for watching this video.
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and it'll take you to that page.
If you missed last week's video,
again we talked about that passion versus
skills and effort debate, so check that
if you missed it.
And I'm on Twitter or Instagram @TomFrankly
if you would like to connect.
See you next week.