Why are you procrastinating to take action on your projects?
In today's video, I'll answer an email from a reader of the blog. He says that he wanted to start creating online courses but he is unsure about what is the best way to start. Should he record his face? Should he use chroma key? Should he record only his screen? While these questions are indeed important, I think this might not be his main issue. In fact, he might be procrastinating because of a deeper issue of his.
Watch this video and find out why you may be procrastinating on your projects too and find out how you can stop doing that.
John: Hey, John Sonmez from simpleprogrammer.com. I got a question here about—I've gotten a lot of questions about doing video courses. As you probably know I do a lot of courses for PluralSight. I did about 55 courses for them and so I've had a lot of experience doing online training courses. Of course I do these videos but I've also done training courses so I often get some questions about that. If you want to you can check out of course my PluralSight courses here and you can check those out if you're interested.
But I thought I'd answer a question here. It's sort of a long email but I'm going to summarize it. I'm not going to go into too much stuff but I want to give a basic strategy for all of you that are asking like how to do these online training or online tutorial courses.
This email is from Antonio and he says, “I've written to you last year and I keep following you on Twitter. I've also read your really cool Soft Skills book” which you can get right there, Soft Skills: A Software Developer's Life Manual. “Being a trainer on mobile development and getting inspiration in what you did with PluralSight I'd like to start to teach online and create video courses I've already all the tech stuff you suggested Logitech Cam, Rode Podcaster Mic and I know the topic because I already teach this in class.”
He goes on to say he has watched some training videos online, he knows how to break things into 5 to 10 short minute clips. He wants to know should I record a script ahead of time or should I put my face in the video, should I use a Chroma Key in background. He goes on to say that he's past one year and haven't recorded any videos so he wants to know how to do this.
I'm not going to tell you how to do this. I will do a course eventually on how exactly that I do the process and do this, but knowing how to execute is not your problem that's why I'm not going to help you by telling you all of those steps because I could give you my guide of how to do it and maybe that would help you, but you already have what you need. You already have the knowledge. So many people they get all the tools, they get all the stuff that they need and they wonder whether or not—they're trying to differentiate between good and great. Good is good enough. Start with good. You always got to start it with good.
In fact, I did a video here on why you got to suck first. Sometimes you've got to start with suck. So be willing to start with suck. Just go ahead and do it. From your email Antonio I can tell you already know enough to get started. You've already debated the questions, just make decisions on all these things. This is one thing that also—just to sidetrack here, you can put into practice is this habit of making decisions. Here's how you can exercise this. The next time someone asks you where should we go to eat, you just decide and you make a decision and you give the opinion. Don't say, “Oh, I don't know. Where do you want to go?” You decide, you decide what you want. They don't have to agree with you and you don't have to always do what you want but that will get you in the habit of making decisions.
That's what you need right now is you just need to make a decision. Just decide. It's okay to pick the good from the great. You have enough knowledge to do this. Trust yourself. Trust also that if you fail that's not the end. It doesn’t matter. Failure doesn't mean that you're done. It just means that you're taking another step. Go forward. Go ahead and do it. It really doesn't matter all of these questions at this point.
Like I said, I will do a video or a course probably at some point on how to do courses but go with your gut on this one. You've got enough knowledge. The biggest thing is just to execute because you're never going to get better, you're never going to figure this stuff out until you just start doing it on your own.
Anyway, if you like this video, if you like this channel definitely subscribe and I will talk to you next time. Take care.