I started my first YouTube channel when I was sixteen.
Me and two friends used to cram into our school’s music department rehearsal room, perch on two mismatched amplifiers and a wobbly drum stool, and record an hour of lunchtime footage in which we shared our incredibly sophisticated opinions on movies, TV shows, and video games. Our viewership was modest, to put it generously. Our sense of responsibility to that tiny audience was not. We built three-month schedules. We tried to watch and play everything the day it came out. We never compared notes beforehand, because we were convinced the reveal being live made the content better.
Back then, making things was easy. It was just hours of laughing with my friends and daring to care about things out loud. It never once occurred to me that people might not give a damn what I had to say, because of course they didn’t occur to me. I had that shining, bulletproof teenage certainty on my side. They’d care. How could they not?
That certainty fades as you get older, and mostly, that’s a good thing. You start to see people as more complicated than you used to. You become sharply, sometimes painfully, aware of your own limitations. You know, adult stuff.
But that adult stuff comes at a cost. Putting yourself out there stops being easy, and the moment you ask yourself why you shouldn’t do something, you find you’re suddenly very good at generating reasonable-sounding answers. Maybe I don’t have anything to say that’s smart enough, or original enough, or insightful enough. I go looking for something worthwhile and come up empty, and then I think: what kind of person has nothing to say? Am I even having thoughts in there, or is it just elevator music behind my eyes?
I want to be clear that this isn’t a small discomfort. It’s a genuinely destabilizing kind of anxiety, and it’s cost me long stretches of doing absolutely nothing, in that specific way where you’ll do anything except the one thing you’re supposed to be doing.
When I get like that, I watch old clips of Harlan Ellison ranting. I love that man’s mind, and the way that when the camera’s on him, you get the sense he’d be saying exactly the same thing whether it was rolling or not. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: I don’t watch those clips to inspire myself into action. I watch them to confirm what I already suspect, that I’m not built for this, that I never will be.
Then I came across a quote from the poet William Stafford, and it’s been sitting on my chest ever since. He said there’s no such thing as writer’s block for people whose standards are low enough.
And it took me right back to that rehearsal room. Three kids of wildly different heights, a fuzzy green screen, tin-can audio, and precisely zero interest in whether any of it was good. We all want the magic bullet idea, the one that lands so perfectly that a parade gets thrown in our honor. I picture myself outside Piccadilly Circus, looking up at a thirty-foot ad with my own face on it, and some part of me thinks, yes, that’s the one, that’s what I’m owed.
But no idea is ever big enough to earn that. And if that’s the bar you’ve set, you will never clear it, and worse, you’ll probably stop trying to clear anything at all.
So I’m trying, deliberately, to lower my standards. To commit to good enough. To put things out into the world simply because I can, and because I want to, and to let it be fine if nobody cares. If something I make is useful to even a handful of people, I’ll take that as a win.
Because the real victory was never going to be the parade. It was always just doing the thing at all, the way I did it at sixteen, riding on nothing but bravado and standards so low that anything I finished felt like an overachievement.
Turns out that’s still available to me. It’s still available to you too.