It may sound strange that a man who's maintained pretty much daily blog posting for over a year and made nigh on 350 videos in even less time proclaims himself to be lazy, but in many important ways that's what I am: lazy. Not least in ways that society finds useful, namely my job.
Sometimes I feel like they barely get 2 productive hours out of me in a day at work. I'm so easily distracted. I'm always reading things that are nothing to do with work, aimlessly web surfing or writing in this blog (although I usually limit blogging to my lunch hour). The bizarre thing is, nobody at my current job seems to share my low opinion of my productivity.
Most days I expect sometime to finally go "Hey, he's been fooling us! He doesn't do anything here, let's fire his lazy arse!" And yet each day I get treated with respect and congratulated on the quality of the work I actually manage to produce. The thing is, to my great surprise, I seem to have landed in almost the perfect role for me.
Not only do all my strengths work here, but they are strengths and experience that nobody else here has so even when I think I'm a lazy shit I'm actually making contributions that nobody else can. Far more often I've experienced workplaces where I was subjected to enourmous amounts of unwarranted negative behaviour from management so I frequently find it hard to believe I'm not always on the verge of receiving more of the same.
Today, my manager dragged me into a closed door meeting without warning to discuss some "important matters". I thought, this is it, I'm fucked. Somebody's been tracking my net usage and I'm about to get boned. Instead, I was asked to help with some important high-level management decisions. All that fun strategy stuff.
Weird.
I'm lazy in my life outside work too. I feel like there's some sort of hump I can't get over with both this blog and my video making. I've made more headway in terms of readership/ viewership than I ever thought I would but there are plenty of people getting way more attention. That wouldn't bother me so much apart from the fact that so many of them are shit. I mean I am really, really sick of people whose output is utterly fucked getting more attention than me.
Blogs that are pointless, badly written, unintelligent, not funny. Videos that are uninspired, poorly executed, show no talent or originality whatsoever. You know, 99.999% of the internet. It's all fucked and it's pissing me off.
I think my biggest problem is I'm no good at self promotion. I've done some basic self promotion which has gotten me this far but there's no doubt that the highest profile online personas (even the genuinely talented ones) got where they are because they're way better at marketing than I am.
My other problem is that I absolutely suck at time management. I essentially know they things I should be doing to self-promote but most of the time I can't be bothered doing them. I think I reached a low point with motivation on about Sunday when I noticed that I was rapidly approaching my one year anniversary on YouTube.
I've always been invigorated by reaching milestones with this blog but this particular milestone depressed me. The main difference between promoting this blog and promoting videos on YouTube is that promoting the blog is all down to me while the single biggest promotion tool on YouTube, being "featured", is totally beyond my control.
And when I considered that one year milestone all I could think was what other sucker has put in so much effort for so long without being featured even once? I like to think while my videos may not be timeless classics of art, they're pretty fucking good for one person working pretty much alone with zero budget. If every video featured by YouTube was better than mine I wouldn't feel bad, I'd simply work at getting better.
But when about 90% of the featured videos are utterly fucked I get a bit down. Some very, very good work is featured. Stuff that I don't reckon I have a hope of competing with comes up every now and then. But cute fucking animal videos? Worse still, badly shot, shitty sound, not even vaguely fucking interesting fucking animal videos? And it isn't even the swearing (which is what I kept telling myself for a while to make myself feel better). They featured videos with heaps of swearing - not often, but they've done it.
It's hard at this point to not feel like someone at YouTube has made a conscious decision to exclude me from being featured. I have no evidence whatsoever for this of course, just my bad mood. As my angry attitude is what guides me through most of my life decisions, it seems only right to apply it here as well.
Anyway, fuck YouTube. Or to be fair, YouTube already does more for me than I have any right to expect (free hosting, a platform with a potential reach that I couldn't hope to match without them) so I won't obsess about it too much. But seriously, fuck them anyway.
I don't expect anyone to pity me, I vent as self-therapy, not as a cry for help. Besides which, I've been clawing my way out of my bad mood since Sunday. The first positive came when I received my latest pay notification from The Fizz Newzz. Oh yeah, I thought, there have been some worthwhile developments in the last year. During the week I was finding it difficult to make videos because of my general mood, made worse when I noticed the average number of views for my videos had been going down.
I needed some external motivation so I set about doing something. I am meeting up with my friend who's a director tonight to talk about things in general and he's always a good source of motivation. Then I have to start working with other people more. I have a few ideas that require involvement from other people (sorry I haven't advanced our plans Gruntski but the collaboration we were discussing is definitely one I want to do) and I think simply being involved with other people will improve my mood.
And although I might sound rather negative in this post, I didn't start writing it until I actually started feeling better. One thing that considerably improved my mood was reading this article. I'm not sure what it is about the article in general, but it's certainly funny and well written. Quite a bit of thought behind it too. The only downside is what seems like an excessive amount of ads to me but, hey, they guy's gotta make a living. It might brighten your day up too.
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