July 24th, 2020 | Mum, Dad, I'm a YouTuber!

The Darkest Times.

In the darkest times during graduate school, when I was out of energy and I saw no light in the tunnel, I used to think to myself, “Hey, don’t worry. It’s not that bad of a job. It could have been much worse—you could have been a YouTuber.” But, the irony will prevail.

As we all know, the depression rates among young academics are dreadful. However, it’s not the professional group that is the most burdened with mental health problems among young people. There are professions with even worse statistics, including the aforementioned YouTubers. Namely, most YouTubers are under the constant pressure associated with creating new content, outperforming themselves, and fighting for attention.

According to some research studies, those who treat their online activity as play perform better than those who perceive it as work. But, how can you perceive what you do as play if your future depends on it? Even the most successful people on YouTube often report burnout to the public and disconnect. While, the majority of content creators who are not wealthy and popular, suffer even more than the YouTube elite. They just suffer in silence.

How Did This Happen?

I consume quite a lot of YouTube content daily. This occupies my mind to such an extent that I even wrote two blog posts dedicated to YouTube on this blog in 2017 (“YouTube“ and “YouTube culture“). However, for all the aforementioned reasons, it never crossed my mind to start a YouTube channel myself. Why would I ever pack myself into this?

I currently live a peaceful life in a relatively small town somewhere in the East of the Netherlands. I developed a career orientation course for PhDs that I use to cast in Amsterdam once a month (or at least, I do it whenever the corona is not around) I teach courses online, I write books, and I occasionally jump on the train to meet with friends and with potential collaborators or subcontractors. Or, I jump on the train to attend some interesting meetups and conferences around the country.

I have a huge garden (well, huge according to Dutch standards to be real.) the supermarket is just behind the corner, and a huge, beautiful park is situated just a few minutes’ walks from my house. And, I use to spend Sunday middays chilling in the nearby spa. I have a habitat that I enjoy—my safe harbour, my circle(s) of friends, and my peace of mind. And, I don’t need any extra attention. There is nothing that could ever let me change this lifestyle unless some global catastrophe or a pandemic happens. Oh, wait…

When The Pandemic Comes…

So, since the corona and the associated lockdown have happened, I’ve got into trouble. The sales quickly went down to zero. I couldn’t do the on-site courses anymore. Moreover, after less than 2 months after the lockdown had started, people were too tired from working at home to go for the online courses. 

Also, all my efforts to do a good job as a content creator and a teacher were not enough; there is such a wild amount of online courses and webinars that—even if you offer a really good quality—you won’t get noticed. Today, to reach out to a wider audience, it’s also necessary to produce some free and openly available content regularly.

Thus, I first thought of organizing some open webinars that anyone could join—webinars in which I could talk with PhD graduates who have developed interesting careers in the industry. I thought that this might be a good idea for a few reasons. Firstly, there are so many people out there with interesting stories behind them! Every new person is like a new book to read. 

Plus, I have a natural interest in talking to people so it’s just a great pleasure to me rather than just a mere duty. Now, after three months, I can say that indeed, it’s much more of an energizing and inspiring activity than stress.

Secondly, as mentioned in the recent blog post, “The Nosedive,” the knowledge about the job market is street knowledge. You just can’t learn about the job market in any better way than by talking to a large number of people. Thirdly, from what I see, such content is really necessary. 

I mean, there are lots of online webinars and free events. But I know from experience that many of them are quite empty and boil down to sharing slogans such as, “Transferrable skills are important. Work on your transferrable skills.” I felt that there is a lot of room for improvement and that the standards for the quality of online career events of all kinds, including open webinars, could be much higher than they are now.

When You Have No Disc Space.

I was initially thinking of posting the videos from these open webinars on my company’s website. I meant to share the content and at the same time, attract some traffic to this website. But then, I realized that my hosting provider puts a limit of 128MB on the media files. 

Unfortunately, this is not enough to post a 1-hour long video of good quality. Thus, I would either need to compromise on the quality, start cutting movies into pieces or upgrade my hosting plan. It was an off-putting and stressful vision to increase the steady costs of the company at this stage though. At that moment, I didn’t know yet how much longer the corona crisis would last.

Thus, I decided to create a private channel on YouTube instead, post movies there, and link them to the company’s website. “What’s the difference?”—I thought. “Hosting is hosting.” But then, a few weeks after I started doing this, I discovered that other people in the space (who have similar businesses to mine) started doing the same thing, namely organising online webinars where they speak with PhD graduates in the industry.

Thus, I quickly rethought the situation. I concluded that if I don’t change the status of the channel to an open channel, no one would ever notice this material. I spoke with my guests and asked them for permission to post in public. Surprisingly, they were all very supportive of the idea.

Thus, I eventually reposted almost all the episodes in the open mode. To small companies, YouTube is a great way to promote content as it recommends your movies to YouTube users from outside your circle of family and friends. These people would probably never have heard about what you do otherwise. And, sometimes, it’s just better to have little time to make a decision. You just have no time left for creating black scenarios in your head then.

The Starting Point.

And, that’s how I ended up on YouTube—the platform where I had never planned to find myself. In normal circumstances, I would probably never do it. But now, in the crisis, I decided to take a shot as I felt responsible for my company. A company is like an infant; you need to constantly get out of your comfort zone to let it survive. 

And it’s weirdly funny; most people think that you write books because you want to be famous and stand on the stage—but in fact, it’s exactly the opposite: you need to stand on stage sometimes so that you can afford to go home and write your books.

Starting on YouTube is not easy if you are a researcher who has never exposed yourself to a broad audience before. At research conferences, we use to talk to some audience, yes. But it’s always the same audience—between a few hundred and a few thousand people worldwide who recognize and comprehend your work. And typically, it’s people who do the same type of research as you. 

Thus, this relation is symmetrical and mutual: they learn about your research and you learn about theirs. On the contrary, YouTube gives scalability. This implies that your relations with many people will no longer be mutual: they will find out about you while you never really learn who they are. This notion was scaring me to death.

When I realized what had just happened, I started laughing hard at myself. I thought, “You’ve just made huge personal progress; from the second most stressful job for young people right to the most stressful job. One step closer to the very bottom.”

The Fear of Failure.

Was I afraid? Oh, yes. YouTube has an opinion of a jungle packed with haters. Meaning all those people who do nothing else than dislike other people’s work just because they can. I was very afraid of this, not only regarding my well-being but also because I minded the well-being of the guests. I just felt unsafe. 

But, my friend, Jana, once said, “You know, there are always 10% of haters—so what’s the difference if you are speaking to 100 people or 100,000 people?” And I had to admit that… she was right. What’s the difference?

Safety.