Vsauce, I’m Jake and the hardest part of making a video is not making one at all.
What you do see is a finished product.
The culmination of hours that turn into days, that turn into weeks and, in some cases, turn
into months.
But we aren’t going to be talking about those movies you end up watching, we are going
to talk about the ones you don’t.
For every video of mine that goes public there at least 2 or 3 that never make it that far.
And the usually long space between movies can be viewed as procrastination, but it isn’t.
It’s a process.
It starts with researching, trying to answer a question by reading books, articles, scientific
journals, watching documentaries.
This part of the process generally takes a few weeks.
Then comes writing the script.
Condensing every relevant piece of information I’ve gathered and forming it into a narrative.
A cohesive structure that expresses the story I want to tell.
This takes about a week.
Then I film it with my friend Eric.
This is the fastest part of the process since I know exactly what I need to say and what
I need to show.
A day long endeavor.
And lastly we get to editing.
Putting all those pieces together visually.
Layering in music and graphics and those little moments that make a complete story.
But along the way, there will likely be a glitch.
During the researching process it might come to the point where what I wanted to talk about
doesn’t make sense.
It doesn’t fit the narrative I want to tell so I stop.
Or when I’m writing the script it falls apart.
And I think to myself how do I make this?
Why do I make this?
Is there a point?
What am I trying to say that needs to be told this way?
Will anyone care?
And then there is the occasion, the rare occasion, where I’ve filmed and edited a video and
I decided that it isn’t good enough.
So I never release it.
I abandon something I’ve put everything I had into.
It there it sits.
Stuck forever.
Alone.
And you start to think to yourself that maybe it's not that the video isn’t good enough
but that I am not good enough.
I’m a hack, a fake, and the next movie I start will end the same way because I can’t
do this anymore.
And you beat yourself up.
You’re terrible.
And you’re a failure.
And you just want to punch the ground and the voice in your head is screaming at you,
trapped inside, so you just want to let it out and go [musical cue].
And then you take a breath.
That voice inside you now telling you to get up.
Get up.
But you don’t want to.
You can’t.
You like the comfort of slipping into that black hole, further and further.
It is so much easier to do nothing than to risk another failure.
Just keep slipping.
Down and down you go.
Breathe.
But then it hits you.
There is more to do.
These perceived failures don’t define you.
It’s only when you decide that you’re a failure that you have failed.
So you get up.
You sit back down and you work.
It’s not money or perceived popularity or fame that drives you.
It’s that this is the only thing you know how to do.
It’s the only way to quell that voice in you.
Those claws that ring your stomach into knots and force you to create, not because you want
to but because you have to.
There is no finish line in this race.
It continues on...forever, a fractal image of success.
The reason a video dies isn’t because I’m not good enough, it’s because my idea of
good enough gets elevated every time I make a video.
I need to push myself.
I need to be better, make better.
So I ask myself every time I sit down to work on one of these movies the question that I
have embedded with ink into my flesh...why are you here...to make something I never thought
I could.
Things that are easy are never as rewarding as those that are hard.
And, as always, thanks for watching.