How to create content: From finding inspiration to developing your ideas

It’s time to start fleshing out your concept and getting some ideas down on paper. Learn how to develop your ideas and create content that your audience will resonate with.

We’ll cover: a fine line between getting inspiration and copying, how to create content that’s shareable, relatable, and authentic, how to create amazing content without filming a single shot.

Let’s get inspired.

My name is Nick Hill. I run a personal development filmmaking and comedy channel with 500,000 subscribers at the time of this recording – 45 million views. But my process for making a video – whether it’s a comedy sketch or a more genuine video, it comes down to a couple of key habits that I implement as it pertains to taking in ideas, fleshing them out, highlighting the portions that are sort of interesting to me, or teasing out a particular joke. I use these tools consistently to always be creating, to always be innovating, and to be working on projects that I myself could be proud of. But my process for making a video no matter how exciting it is, it always begins with the idea. Story is king. And if you can lock in on an idea that you are genuinely very excited about that you think is cool, then that video will be that much better.

This portion of the course is about references and research. The journey to a great video – it begins with research. One of my favorite creators, Sean Tucker, he says that in order to be a great artist, you need to constantly be having inputs. You need to be taking in inspiration from so many sources. This could be books, podcasts, movies that you watch music that you listen to. I can’t tell you the number of times that I’ve been like listening to a song, and then that’s triggered the intro of a video. One thing you have to keep in mind is that there’s nothing totally original out there and giving yourself that pressure of having to make something original it could stifle your creativity. Instead, I sort of like to think of myself as a scratch artist mixing and synthesizing different sounds to create something new. And to do this, I read books, I listen to podcasts, I watch movies, I have conversations with my friends. I try new experiences like boxing or woodworking. And all of these experiences they become a breeding ground to come up with a great idea to hone in and make sense of where my mind is going. I often focus on extracting ideas from books. A well-written book represents like a year or even many years of a person’s research of a person’s efforts towards thinking in a clear manner. So if you can extract the ideas from a book, it’s like you’re taking in someone’s years’ worth of knowledge, experiences, trials, and errors and you’re taking those mistakes and learning from them far more quickly than you would if you had to go out and experience those things.

This is why I often reference books when writing my scripts and I break this process down of writing scripts from books into three parts. The first is just reading and highlighting. So highlighting as you go through a book if you come across a concept or a passage you really resonate with just highlighted it. I do this on a Kindle, either Kindle Cloud Reader or actually on my Kindle that’s next to my bed stand. There doesn’t even have to be any rhyme or reason as to why I’m highlighting a particular section. But if it sort of struck a chord in me, then I will highlight that portion of the book that I’m reading. Then when I finished a book or at least read as much of it as I want to I’ll let her come back on my widescreen monitor and sort by all of the parts of the book that I had highlighted on Kindle. On Kindles, Cloud Reader, this is like a built-in part of the software where you can just sort by all of the sections you highlighted in that book, but of course, you can manually go through a book and look at what you had highlighted.

And this seems kind of strange, but what I do with those highlighted sections is just rewrite them. I literally just retype out the portions of that book that I’ve written out. And this is because I find there’s something interesting that happens when you rewrite words that you already find compelling. It sort of triggers your own experiences, your own thoughts about that language, and you just naturally find yourself rewriting that script into your own language. Of course, when I give people this method of like how to come up with a YouTube script, they say, Well, I’m just regurgitating another person’s idea. Shouldn’t there be some sense of originality? Otherwise, I’m just plagiarizing another person’s work. But I find that this process of reading and then rewriting a lot of those fears about plagiarism naturally go away because you’re spending so much time putting those themes, ideas, into your own language, and through the lens of your own experiences. And the scripts naturally start to become yours as opposed to someone else’s.

For instance, in the personal development space on YouTube atomic habits by James clear is a book that many many YouTubers have referenced, and it sort of feels like if you’re making your atomic habits video, that you’re regurgitating the ideas in the book, but I found that every time I’ve used a book like that to make my own video somehow it does feel original in the end, just because when I take those ideas and I apply them in my own life, and when I add in even the visuals and the music that feels like it came from me. Something new emerges. It’s just like I said earlier, we’re like being a scratch artist. You’re not just starting fresh with a blank screen because that’s just too intimidating. Oftentimes using that input like a book, it gets you going.

And so after you’ve highlighted and then rewritten those highlighted sections, this is a very important step in the process. Sometimes I forget to do it and it often detracts from the video. But, that is to rehearse your scripts. On a platform like YouTube, there’s a sentiment that we want to get across. Which is that you know, I’m just sort of thinking of this in the moment. This is just coming out of me. And yeah, this was my thought about this thing. But the problem with being that authentic and not being planned out is that you’re inefficient with your language, you’re not concise, and that hurts watch time because it sounds like you don’t know what you’re saying. On the other hand, if you’re like reading off of a projector, which some YouTubers do, I find that it sort of makes your eyes feel dead. Like you need to have some sort of connection with the eyes of the viewer and it sort of needs to feel like the words are really emanating from you while still being planned. And the best way to do that is just to be like an actor to your own craft.

Rehearse your script. Reread it out loud. For me, the magical number, for some reason is seven times. I like to reread each script seven times. I’m actually pretty tired. But the end of rehearsing my script so many times and have to like make sure I drink a lot of water before I started filming. But you reread a script and you internalize that language and you also find the portions of that script that don’t feel right, like the words just don’t flow correctly. It feels off in some way. But once you reread that script a sufficient number of times and you’ve gone through some sort of rewriting naturally by rehearsing so much, you then sit down and record the video. And I’ve often found that I just remember my scripts so well. And I can speak as if it’s just coming fresh, but it’s actually very planned. So it ends up being the best of both worlds, between being an authentic script where it seems like the ideas are naturally just coming out of your lips. And also like thoughtful and planned out and concise all of that.

So what I’ve said above applies most for informational videos, but what about those creative edits? Things like comedy sketches or something else where perhaps you’re documenting and experience. How do you get yourself going on ideas in that category? So for comedy, I pay attention to my life experiences. No doubt experiences in life that you find absurd or frustrating. Comedic moments often emerge out of real-life pain. That’s what I found. So if I’m like at a grocery store waiting in line, and there’s something frustrating about that experience or something occurs to me in that moment, maybe I’m looking at like the Doritos and the gum on the panel right before I’m about to checkout. I will just note that down on my phone as soon as the thought occurs to me or so many times me and my videographer will be driving around and reflecting on something that happened earlier. And then as we’re getting into it, we realize oh, there’s a funny moment in that and we’ll just be laughing about it. It’s almost as if comedy is like this spark that just is gifted to you every once in a while. As long as you keep doing things that involve life, like you can’t just lay in your bed all day and expect comedy to occur to you. Like you have to find the comedic moments by living.

For example, my videographer Thomas, he made a sketch about online dating and the fact that most of the time, things don’t work out. In a way going on dates through these online dating apps is a way of extracting experiences from life. And so what he did was take a real-life concept but just dial up the absurdity of it to 11. He did this by making each subsequent date that the main character went on better and better, more cinematic – when they’re playing pool together. The hits of the cube over time to the cuts of the music is all so beautiful and dreamy bocha in the background. And as an audience member, we start to vibe with this cute romantic story that is unfolding. So then when the girl ultimately ghosts our lead character, the impact of that moment is that much harder. It’s something that probably a lot of people relate to. That sketch, it came from just paying attention to life.

Other sources of creativity – music, and movies. You might find that maybe you’re watching a movie and there’s just a particular moment, maybe one four-second clip from like a song that triggers something in you. Like well, that somehow is getting me going and you might find that moment enough to give you a concept. Stephen King had a quote, “if you don’t have time to read and you don’t have time to write.” But this actually goes for all inputs. One of my favorite videos from like the last 15 months, was actually set to the soundtrack from a movie I really loved, The Gentleman, and there was a drop in that soundtrack just as a sting that hit and it triggered an idea for like this military action movie that I’ve been wanting to make or at least talk about. And so I had my character turn the corner and sort of face an onslaught of bullets hypothetically, because of the sting in that song. These small little moments together. That’s what allows more creativity to emerge in the edit.

The last tool that I find really helpful, especially when you’ve got immense writer’s block and you don’t know what to do with yourself – locations and props. If the above options don’t get you going a great location, or a prop could be a big help. For instance, a YouTuber friend of mine, Matt D’Avella, he made this video about how buying more things doesn’t necessarily make you happy. But to get himself going for that video, he actually just bought a really nice toaster. Now you wouldn’t think that a great toaster would be the impetus for an amazing script. But somehow he made this whole beautiful visual, amazing macro shots, of this toaster and this beautiful golden crusty toast emerging from this toaster. He even said inside that video he said this toaster I believe was gonna change my effing life. But what he did with this toaster is turn it into this piece about how overconsumption, spending money on items that should be considered simple, how it has led to a lot of unhappiness in the West. This metaphor for how we tried to change and improve our lives using trivial items, it began from a prop. A great prop. The concept for this video started with a toaster. It goes to show that your concept doesn’t need to be as grandiose as Interstellar, or 2001 A Space Odyssey. A great video can come from simply a toaster. You don’t need to travel or come up with a great concept, have a big budget. You just got to find the story.

Anyway, that’s it for this module. We’ll see in the next one.

This section of the course is about inspirations. What’s the difference between getting inspiration and then outright copying? And how can you use inspirational sources to make your videos amazing high quality videos that you actually like without outright stealing from other people? If I couldn’t pull from other people’s ideas, I don’t know if I would have been able to upload 290 videos to my channel and counting. Building off of what other people have created in the past, it has been a huge part of my creative journey. Oftentimes, I’ve been super stuck on the videos I’ve been making, and then I’ll watch something or read something and that’ll trigger the next video.

So there’s a couple of things I do to make sure that my work is sufficiently original where I’m using other people as inspiration, but my work is still my own. The first thing is simply to give credit when it’s due. This is super basic and obvious. But oftentimes, YouTubers get in trouble with this because they think everything they present has to come across as original as if they came up with it. And they fail to give attribution because they think it’s going to make them seem less authoritative, when in fact, giving proper attribution actually makes your videos more compelling than ever. The first thing you can do to safeguard against stealing, it’s just giving credit. Often when I’m starting a video essay, I will simply say things like the ideas from this video came from this book called so and so, or this video was inspired by an article written in The Art of Manliness or whatnot. When we wrote academic papers in high school or college, the bibliography was an important part of writing and you can constantly use the same idea in your videos. using sentences like, ‘as James clear, writes in his book, Atomic Habits,’ and so on.

I’ve solved the problem of stealing simply by saying who I’m stealing from and moments like these, in fact, make a video far better. in one of my favorite videos on my channel, I talk about how I was inspired by this movie 1917. Which if you don’t know, that movie was shot in its entirety to look like it was one shot. almost a two-hour runtime made to look like a singular tracking shot. I was so blown away by this film that I wanted to talk about How I wanted to attempt cinematography and filmmaking that made my video look like a single tracking shot. And so at the end of that video, I actually attempted this tracking shot, and the viewer went, Aha, that’s where he’s getting it from. He talked about this idea, this inspiration, and now that he’s attempting it. we can see where the inspiration came from, and it makes them feel like they’re part of this journey. This journey of me learning to be a better filmmaker. Using that source of inspiration and talking about it, it actually makes the video cooler.

The second way to use inspirations well, is to steal but then Remix. in another class I cover the topics of highlighting then rewriting. and when you’re rewriting, ensuring that you’re incorporating your own experiences or the ideas that are triggered from this other source you’re stealing from – how it triggers your own thought process. A good rule of thumb is that with every major idea that you come across, see if it triggers something within you. Perhaps you can talk about your own experiences related to the idea that you’ve been inspired by. So for instance, if you’re reading Mark Manson’s book, Models, and you’re making a video about his ideas from Models, which is a book about using honesty when you’re out in the dating world. You can talk about your own experiences dating using online apps to date and how it’s sometimes maybe is difficult to have radical honesty when you’re dating.

A third way to use your inspirations well, to make them original, is to combine storytelling elements to make old ideas new. There’s a video on my channel with over a million views in which I simply read from the opening of the book, The Obstacle Is The Way. And this could very easily have been plagiarism. In fact, I think I’m reading something like a full three paragraphs from that book, but there was a few key things I did to make that video feel fresh, make it original. And firstly, I started by saying, I am reading from The Obstacle Is The Way. “Lately I’ve been reading The Obstacle Is The Way by Ryan Holiday,” and I came across this paragraph. That passage was about Hurricane Carter, a man who was like a national successful famous boxer who was wrongly imprisoned for a crime, murdering someone, and he was imprisoned for many years. So what I did was simply pulled visuals from a movie that has that story. It was a movie starring Denzel Washington and no one had put the movie’s visuals over Ryan Holiday’s text. And I simply thought to do so. I also paired it with an atmospheric song that I really enjoyed.

And lastly, I ended the video by giving my own thoughts on similar experiences. The whole passage was about how this man used this traumatic, terrible, unjust experience to reinvent himself and make himself stronger and better. And even though I of course have never been wrongly imprisoned for anything, I did have my own thoughts to give on how I’ve used my obstacles in life to push forward. And so the video was largely pulling from other people’s works – passages from Ryan Holiday’s book, a Denzel Washington movie, a song that I did not compose. But combining these different elements was something that only I had done, and then ending the video with my own thoughts about everything we just talked about. made it an original. I could look back on that edit, and know that it was fresh because I remixed different storytelling elements and made it my own. I was the only one who pulled all of these elements together and ended this with my own thoughts. No one else had presented all of these elements together, and hence, this video was an original piece of work.

So as you’re working on your own edits, and maybe you’re using other sources as inspiration, ask yourself, can I present this in my own way, combining different storytelling elements to be sort of that scratch artist to make something new? If you can do those things, you can very resolutely know that your work is original, even if it’s inspired by other people’s work.

The last thing to keep in mind, you know, stealing. What does stealing look like? How is that different from making something original while still being inspired? And I’ll simply say this when you steal other people’s work, you’re not giving attribution. You’re taking someone’s work outright, and simply presenting it as your own. I think everyone gets a sort of gut feeling when their work is plagiarized. Unfortunately, on YouTube people do steal from each other all the time, but the thief is never able to build a long-term career. In a way, they’re never flexing and exercising that creativity muscle. creativity within them is probably atrophying because they’re just standing on other people’s work, not producing anything on their own. And dare I say there must be some cost to their creative spirit, knowing that they did not bring anything new to the table.

Hopefully, that gives you some new ideas on how to use inspiration to make your own works without stealing. But with that being said, that’s it for this module, and we’ll see you in the next one.

In this section of the course, we’re talking about creating content without filming, how does one even go about doing that?

You know, there was a time when getting in camera B-roll, it was considered as this huge way of increasing the quality of your content. For instance, a creator would be talking about doing deep work, and then the visual of them would be sitting at their computer with beautiful lighting, pretending to do deep work for the shot. in many ways on youtube today, the value of that shot of that B-roll image that you shoot, to pretend to be doing what you’re talking about. It has gone down tremendously. and this is where the rise of video essays has come in. in some ways, The fact that people don’t care as much about the quality of the visuals has leveled the playing field. Now it is even more about the script, about the words you have to say it the message you have to say inside of your video, that matters. and so using things like stock footage, graphic cards, after-effects templates, and movie clubs, many creators have made amazing video essays and grown enormous channels without actually shooting anything in-camera.

In this portion of the course, we’ll be discussing how you can use the video essay format to make compelling videos without filming in-camera. The first thing to know: the most important aspect of a video essay is audio. Actually whether or not you are recording an A-role or you’re just talking to the camera like I am now, audio is the most important part of raising the quality of your video. Some have said that audio accounts for 50% of the perceived quality of a video. in my opinion, is probably more like 80%. For instance, if you’re watching a movie, you can watch it in low resolution as long as you can hear everything clearly. But it doesn’t matter if you’re watching something in 8K on a Blu-ray drive on the perfect television screen or an IMAX projector. If you can’t hear what the characters are saying, it’s like impossible to watch that movie.

And this is indicative of how important audio is for your videos. In fact, the words you have to say and the quality of the sound when you’re saying them. If you can master those two things. You can grow a YouTube channel and the best way to get high-quality audio is to speak as close to the mic as possible. In fact, in this shot right here, I’m only about one finger span away from the shotgun mic. This mic is just out of frame but you’ll especially notice this in podcasts where the creator will be right next to the mic almost like their mouth is right on top of the mic so that that audio quality is as high as possible. You can write a YouTube script in the format where you highlight ideas, rewrite them in your own words, and then rehearse them. But instead of recording to camera if you don’t want to be on camera, or if you don’t have a great camera to film yourself from. You can just record that audio in voiceover. just take your mic, whatever it might be, and just talk directly into it.

voiceovers also have this strange added benefit of giving you a greater sense of authority. I don’t know why this is but it very much is true that if the viewer can’t see your face, as you’re presenting some ideas, it for some reason just makes it seem as if those ideas are like completely important, and very much true. Whereas if you can see the person who is saying those ideas, it makes it more relatable, but less authoritative. But it’s also important to know that because the viewer cannot connect to your eyes. When you’re doing a voiceover you have to exercise greater tonality and modulation In the voice-over. a good rule of thumb is to just overwrite the emotions of that script by 10 to 30%. So don’t just say James Bond the first movie was good but then in the subsequent films, the overarching story became underwhelming. say something like James Bond’s development over the course of five films was deeply mediocre.

Nerdwriter One, perhaps one of the first big video essayists on the platform is really well known for just over-enunciating, over-emoting, just slightly about what he’s getting into. and it does make his videos more watchable, more worthy of listening to.

The second idea that’s going to make edits much easier to work with is to make a shot list and to pull assets. video essays by nature are more labor intensive than speaking to camera because you have to pull so many clips to fill up that A-roll. Whereas if I’m actually just talking to camera, like this moment right now, we don’t have to put any clips over it. But if I was recording everything as a voiceover, then every moment would have to have an appropriate visuals that goes with it – car, boat, FedEx Office. So for each phrase in your voiceover, make a shot list of a visual that would be needed to cover up that portion of the script. The visual would need to describe what is being talked about in your voiceover at that moment.

For instance, if you’re talking about Ford Motors’ decline in the marketplace, you will pull visuals of Ford Motors or their headquarters or perhaps a man working on a car, a mechanic, to visually demonstrate that moment. In this sense, you’ll probably be spending hours pulling footage. This is actually an oddly annoyingly labor-intensive process. So it is best to make a shot list all at once of all the shots you’re going to need to pull. Ford Motors, a particular graph, some article from the New York Times, a man who was sad… Make a list of all of the shots you’re going to need all at once before starting your edit. I call this ‘pulling assets.’

Resources like ClipGrab can help you pull footage from YouTube, but you can also use a DVD burner to pull movie clips. And of course, stock footage in moments like these can be immensely helpful. oftentimes stock footage though it can look very cringy. so to keep your video high quality, it’s best to be discerning in deciding which visual is appropriate. For instance, if the actor in a stock footage clip is overacting, or if that image just looks very commercial-y or generic. It’s hard to describe but there’s a feeling that you get from bad stock footage and a lot of amateur YouTubers use stock footage very poorly. If something just looks cheap or cheesy, I would advise against using it. Naturally, I would recommend checking out Artgrid, they have an amazing stock footage library. Compared to many other stock footage sites, Artgrid stock footage is very very high quality. Nothing looks cheap. In fact, the images often look very contrast-y and rich.

I also find it’s best to jump between the style of visuals you’re using. So if you’ve been using a movie clip for too long maybe you can switch to a graphic card or an article. and even with images like using an article, maybe an article from the New York Times, There’s things you can do to make using that article look more high quality. For instance, you can put a stock background behind an article image and reduce the size of the article in the frame to make it look high resolution. Additionally, if you’re using text, attractive typography is very important. Now I’m not a master of typography, but there’s a few principles that I’ve learned or started paying attention to that makes things a little bit easier.

For instance, it’s been said that a black background and white text looks very amateur. It just doesn’t look good. which is kind of confusing because this is probably instinctive for a lot of people. If they have to put just text on a blank screen, They would make the background black and their text white. You should avoid doing this. That’s why you’ll see a lot of high-quality video essayists using off-white as their background and then an attractive typeface in black.

The third key to making a video essay high quality is sound design. Sound design is such an important part of elevating your video and it’s especially important in the video essay format because you can never come back to a human face to relate to, to make eye contact with, so you need to use every tool in your toolbox to immerse your viewer inside that experience. If text is appearing on the screen, it might be interesting to have a typewriter sound effect running in the background as that text appears. Or if you’re highlighting a particular element inside a video, and maybe you’re zooming in on something, maybe an article, you can use a whoosh sound effect. All of these subtle little sound design moments help immerse the viewer. These are subtle things to do. And sound design is something that develops through practice and it’s something that requires creativity inside the edit. So it’s just something to pay attention to. Once you’ve covered up your voiceover with the appropriate visuals ask yourself, ‘how can I use sound to make this experience more immersive?’

And the last aspect to pay attention to is music. In the video essay format, music is more important than ever. I personally think it’s a good practice to change your song inside every thematic change of your video. So for instance, in this very chorus, you’ll notice that every time we move on to a new point, the song changes. It’s pretty subtle we fade in and out. But to sort of subconsciously signify to the viewer that we’ve moved on to a new idea. We just changed the beat. We change the song. Keep in mind with sound design and music, you want your music to be accentuating and scoring the ideas you’re presenting. So try to make the music line up thematically with what you’re saying. If you’re talking about something awful or really sad, you don’t want the music to be really happy and chipper.

I’ve actually seen YouTubers do this and I wonder what their thought process was behind it because to me, it feels so instinctive. If you’re talking about something that’s like a conspiracy theory, requires investigative journalism, don’t make the music uplifting. make it seem kind of ominous or like something like a murder mystery. You want the music to score, accentuate highlight, bloom the ideas that you’re presenting, rather than just serve as white noise. Keep in mind though, with sound design, the music even the visuals, these should not overpower the voiceover, the actual words you were saying in your edit, story does come first. But you should use these tools to accentuate and develop your ideas.

Once again, Artlist has an amazing library of music that you can check out. But all of these components – visuals through stock footage, movie clips, graphic cards, articles, the sound design, and music, these all can help you tell a great story, make an amazing video without actually having to film in-camera. That’s it for this module. See you guys in the next.

This section of the course is about something that is very, very important to your success as a creator. It’s something that we’ve been hinting at all this time. And that’s to keep things shareable, relatable, authentic. video quality is important. Of course, sound is important. But if you don’t have an honest message that really connects with the viewer, then you don’t have the soul of great content. Despite everything I’ve said about image quality, the heart of everything’s your ability to connect with someone else. And so here are a few things that I tried to keep in mind to be as authentic as possible when I’m making videos.

And the first is to tell the truth, even if it’s ugly. there’s a temptation on YouTube to come across as perfect. This is especially true I think, in the productivity YouTuber niche where we might make a day in the life of a YouTuber video and show us waking up early and making a perfect cup of coffee being productive all day. And oftentimes, this isn’t true. In fact, one of my YouTube friends Joey, he made this video that was really successful about how to be miserable for the rest of your life in which he talked about what not to do. But he told me in private that the reason he even came up with that topic is because he had been lazy and unproductive for almost a month. He was in a bit of a rut. And so what compelled him to make this video was actually what he was struggling with, which is why I think it was so successful.

You’ll see perfectly edited videos, productivity hack videos in which people talk about their million-dollar businesses, and whatnot. But every viewer has an amazing register, barometer, for the truth. And when someone is saying something, honestly, authentically, even being a little bit vulnerable, it’s just so refreshing. We can tell immediately, they’re just speaking from the heart. They’re not BS-ing you. That will win the loyalty of the viewer more than any B-roll shot ever could.

The second principle is that you should leave things unresolved if need be. For instance, if you’re making a video about how you quit sugar for 30 days, and it ultimately didn’t lead to any great insights, just say that in the video. I quit sugar for 30 days and not that much happened. The temptation is to make every lifestyle challenge, every experience that you’re talking about seem like this transformative thing. You know, this changed my life. but one of my favorite videos from my friend Matt D’Avella was when he woke up at 5 AM every day for 30 days. And at the end of it, he said it didn’t actually make him more productive. It actually dropped his productivity because the sleep schedule and the rhythm of his life just never aligned with going to sleep that early and waking up at five and so he was actually just tired and miserable for the whole duration of the challenge.

When I heard him say that inside that video, it gave me such a sense of relief because all this time as I’ve been watching productivity YouTube for several years out of college, I thought waking up at 5 AM was like this one elusive thing that if I could only bring into my life everything would be different. I’d be happier and more productive, more fit. And the reason maybe I was stuck in life is because I couldn’t get myself to wake up early. This was the one habit that was always a struggle for me. And I realized, you know, maybe some people were just not meant to be such dramatically early risers. And hearing the truth of what he said inside the challenge – you know, he didn’t make it a video where he said this changed my life. In 30 days waking up at 5 AM is changing my life, even though videos like that had been getting millions of views on YouTube prior to that. It was wonderfully refreshing to see. and so you can leave things unresolved. And this goes for a variety of topics. pretty much any style of content that you’re making. If you leave things unresolved And if you see the truth, even if it’s ugly, it’s just nice. It gives the sense that there is a real person on the other side of the screen who’s watching what you’re saying. And when you speak the truth to them, It makes you so much more likable as a creator. and being likable and being honest and authentic, It’s actually just good for business.

The third idea, very similar to the prior ones, is to be imperfect. Lately, I’ve been wanting to get more into fitness content, even though you know I’m ultimately not that fit. In fact, I have way more experience being an unfit guy who would meet up with friends, meet up with the lads, have a couple of pints, and not really prioritize working out or strength training. these last six months it has become a huge interest of mine. And even though I’m not all that fit, I was feeling a little bit sheepish at first about making videos like this. But my videographer, some of my friends, they made a good point. In a way, it’s even better, more compelling to be a sort of unfit or just average fitness person on the journey to good health than it is to be this perfectly fit ab-tacular all knowing fitness influencer, who’s telling viewers what to do. I mean, there’s a bunch of content creators like this on the platform and some of them are great.

But it doesn’t take away from your strength as a creator, to not be an expert. What you can do is sell yourself as on a journey. You’re on the journey with the viewer to discovering great health and that can be a great strength of yours as a creator actually. You could be on the journey to finding success alongside your viewer to make something incredible happen.

There’s one last point that sort of ties all of this together. And that’s to be consistent. Authenticity it’s something that you can build up with a viewer over time by staying consistent. In fact, there’s many things we covered over this course like making a shot-list, writing a great script, being original and now being relatable that it actually is an iterative process. You can’t really expect to master these ideas right away. But what you can do is tell yourself, I’m going to keep generating new ideas. I’m going to keep coming up with ideas and just the process of learning how to execute on an idea. You come up with something, you make it. You try to minimize the gap between a thought that might come in your head about a video you want to make a video that you could be really excited about figuring out what shots are needed, what the script will look like, how you can tie in different storytelling elements like the sound design, the music, the edit the pacing, and now how you can make things relatable by always coming back to the truth, always coming back to an authentic source of communicating something.

Practicing all those things consistently is actually what is going to make you a great creator. James Clear had once said something to the effect of (see how I’m getting credit?), he said something to the effect of, ‘people think that to get to the next level of success you need to do new things. And sometimes that’s true. But oftentimes what you actually need to do is just keep doing the five things that you’ve been doing all along to get as successful as you are now. The main thing is to just keep doing them.’

So often the difference between failure and success or success at a good level and then getting to an exceptional level is just to press on and to keep making the thing to keep doing the thing to keep working the system. And so all of these principles, they only work and they only work better and better for you if you stay in the game if you stay on the journey and you’ll find that the more you make the more you do, the more you practice these ideas, the better you get at being authentic and developing your ideas and in turn being a great creator.

We hope you enjoyed this course. Artlist is one of my favorite platforms both for stock footage and for music. And so we hope this has been helpful on your journey to developing great ideas and executing them. That’s it for me. Greatness is coming. Cheers.