I hope for you these next few weeks are a chance to relax, reflect and most importantly spend quality time with the important people in your life, ones that perhaps you don’t give enough of yourselves too when life gets hectic. (I know for a fact this is one of my main flaws).
In the content creation industry the winter months are traditionally quieter than any other season and for many it’s a time for us to get our heads down in the edit suite, finish any outstanding work and look ahead to what we want to achieve in the upcoming year.
Last week I touched on the idea that it’s all so easy these days to get caught in comparison with colleagues and competitors, especially with everyone so eager to share their work far and wide on social media platforms.
Although you might log on in your coffee break intending purely to catch up with your friends social lives, it’s near impossible as a content creator to escape seeing the latest video or behind the scenes shot that you wish you were working on.
To me, creating content often feels like being on a treadmill and if you’re busy, most of the time you’re not thinking about improving your work, but instead are solely focused on the logistics of the productions, meeting deadlines and ultimately making sure that the work gets done.
After working on over 110 video productions this year, I feel like I’ve spent the year in ‘survival mode’, waking up everyday and thinking only about how everything is going to get done, not how am I going to improve .
I’m incredibly thankful to have this amount of work and more importantly grateful for the lessons having to deal with so many different production scenarios, in this and previous years, has taught me.
For any aspiring content creators out there reading this, my intuition says that you can watch all the YouTube tutorials and study all you like but there’s no better learning experience than actually getting out in the field and having to deliver something great with a client over your shoulder and their budget on the line.
And this brings me to the theme of this week’s blog and hopefully the part that will be most helpful for you…
This year I’ve feel I’ve plateau’d. I’ve done loads of work, but it’s all at one very similar standard. Sure there’s been a couple of standout projects I’m proud of, but ultimately there’s things I want to be working on and doing that I’m not.
And that has to change.
It’s in the bad times like this that I feel we become our best.
If everything is easy and we’re completely satisfied in ourselves, we have no reason to improve, no motivation to try something different and no passion and drive to get out of bed in the morning and make sure when you return that night, you’re just a little bit better at whatever you were doing.
Although many of us will go through intense lows in life, my intuition says that we need these experiences to set us on a path to where we can reach and fully enjoy the soaring highs of success and happiness.
What’s more, as a content creator it can be all too easy to get caught up in our little world and think that the quality of our latest piece of work is the be all and end all. But this week I’ve been thinking a lot about the grand scheme of life, how we all have a bigger purpose and how at the end of the day there’s absolutely no shame in doing work that puts food on our tables.
We all have to survive in this world and if we don’t have the money to pay our bills, put a roof over our heads and have something to eat, then it’s going to be pretty difficult to make the kind of content you want to.
And if you like me, are perhaps feeling a little disparaged right now about your own work, maybe how you’ve got bigger ambitions that you just quite can’t seem to reach yet, don’t give up.
Because it’s funny how things work out.
Maybe you need to be doing what you are doing right now to springboard you to success you never thought possible.
So remember, in the bad times we become our best.
Although the cold, dark times of winter may be getting you down right now, summer will always be right around the corner.
I wish you every success.
Jack
About Me
I help people, brands and business communicate more effectively with their customers through visual, audio and written content.
I do this through Southpaw Sport, the sports content marketing company I’m currently building as well as on a freelance basis working for agencies and production companies.
Visit www.jacktompkins.co
You can follow me on YouTube where I post videos and vlogs sharing my experience and opinion on content production.
YouTube — https://www.youtube.com/user/jackt18
And my social media for behind the scenes look at what I’m up to
Instagram — @jackwrtompkins
Twitter — @jackwrtompkins