YouTube blues and riding the dips

Hey there,

I've been thinking a lot this week about the inevitable ups and downs that come with doing anything for a long time.

I'm encroaching upon one year of making YouTube videos and I'm feeling a bit of conflicting emotions. On one hand, I've made a few videos recently that I thought would be smash hits with my audience that essentially just bombed. On the other hand, I am within spitting distance of my goal of 10,000 subscribers by the end of 2025.

Really, it has me thinking about how easy it is for us to move the goal posts on ourselves. If I'm being honest, 10,000 subscribers doesn't feel like that big of a milestone to me right now.

In reality, this milestone is massive. I probably had no more than 100 subscribers when I started uploading weekly last November. Just this past week, one of my longest subscribers left this comment on a video:

It's funny how seeing this knowledge externalized changes how I receive it. When I set my goal of 10,000 subscribers at the start of the year I assumed it would b a moonshot. A "go big so you can land somewhere happily in the middle" sort of scenario.

So why do I feel like this milestone it isn't that significant right now? That's because the growth has been gradual. When things change slowly over time, it's easy to miss the impact. It's your classic frog in a pot of boiling water scenario.

The other factor is the present moment. I would be lying to you if I said that I wasn't bummed that these recent videos aren't doing as well as I would've liked them to. How I feel about my channel every week changes with each upload. It's the blessing and the course of something like this.

But that comment is a reminder that context matters. When you're in a dip, zoom out. The big picture is almost always in your favor.

Til next time,

ZW