Does anyone else out there wanna escape? Am I the only one? Apparently not.
It's something a lot of (as much as I hate the term) millennials want to do. A close friend of mine and co-worker shares the same goal. While at work we would whine to each other about our dreams. Then one day, it hit us to work together. YouTube was where both of us wanted to start. Fortunately for us too, we both had a wide range of skills sets. Between the two of us, videography, writing, editing, topical information, the no how, art, business sense, and all the drive was there. But nothing happened for a while.
My first lesson I've learned on this Trek is to take a first step. Here we were, two talented guys with a shared vision, and all we did was talk. At first, talk is good and needed, but there comes a point where it's just talk. Stephen kept saying (oh yeah, his name's Stephen by the way),"We need to do something, we need to take the first step!" But it was too daunting. We didn't know where to start.
It's like eating an elephant. How the heck do you eat an elephant? The answer to the age of proverb is, "one bite at a time." We decided to take baby steps. Little tiny, itty bitty, steps. I went home that night and made the email. Stephen started work on the logo. Eventually I edited the logo into a video intro. One step at a time, we built the frame work for our dream.
We still didn't have time, though. Not a bit. We are both dad's with full time jobs. Stephen didn't even have weekends at the time. Editing can be done in bits and pieces. Making an email was chump change in terms of time cost. But filming, which is pretty needed for our YouTube series, needed time.
Five flippin' thirty that was and is our current solution. We cheat time. If our whole day is busy, we just make it longer. Right now, we both probably average 6 hours of sleep a night. Any less and we'd go stark raving mad. 6 is just enough to keep going every day. Waking up early fixes a lot of things. I get to meet with friends, work on projects, edit, or just read a book or listen to a podcast. It's productive time that doesn't cost family time or keep my grass from getting mowed.
Meeting once a month (sometimes more, sometimes less) was the last piece of the puzzle. Now, almost a year later, we average 150 views a day on youtube. We have 61 subscribers with a sharp incline on our success. It may not sound like much, but all our growth was hard to get. It's step one.
I want to encourage others who are trying to do the same thing. I'll be posting about my steps, my mis-steps, and my lessons learned about my Trek to leave the 9-5. If anyone is out there trying to escape, you're not alone.
