Video starts to feel precious. Something that requires preparation, better equipment, better lighting, a better version of yourself.
The gap between what I want to make and what I can make today becomes an excuse to make nothing.
This is a way out of that trap.
Today's. With whatever battery I have left. With the messy desk, the unfinished thought, the uncertain direction.
This is a constraint I chose. Not because I don't care, but because caring too much was stopping me from making anything.
The video is a forcing function. It creates stakes. It compresses sprawling intentions into something that has to exist by the time I hit stop.
But that's just the surface.
Most of life is lived inside a fog of possibilities. What should I work on? What do I actually think? What kind of person am I becoming?
Those questions don't get answered by thinking harder. They get answered by doing something and seeing what happens.
The video is the action. Each one is a small experiment.
I press record, I find out what I have to say, and when I stop, something that didn't exist before now exists.
One fewer hypothetical. One more data point.
Everyone talks about attention as the currency of this era. They usually mean capturing other people's attention.
This is about something different. The video is a tool for paying attention to my own life and work.
The audience is secondary. The first viewer is me.
When I watch myself think, I see where I'm confident and where I'm faking it. I see the pauses, the hedges, the moments where I lose the thread.
I can't hide from the tape.
Writing can be edited into smoothness. Audio can be cleaned up.
But video captures hesitation, posture, the face I make when I'm not sure.
The medium is part of the constraint.
Recording changes experience. The camera creates a split. I'm here, but I'm also watching myself be here.
That split can be deadening. It can also be clarifying.
I live inside that tension. I don't have it solved.
The content is the practice. The practice is the content.
I'm making videos about making videos. The process documents itself.
There's a recursive honesty to this. There's nowhere to hide, because the hiding would also be on camera.
"I am someone who makes videos" isn't an affirmation. It's a pile of proof. Each video is evidence. Over time, the stack becomes undeniable.
I'm not claiming an identity. I'm constructing one, slowly, through repetition.
Because private work drifts. It loses urgency. It dies in drafts folders and notes apps and "someday" lists.
Publishing is a form of compression. When something has to ship, decisions get made. When someone might see it, I try a little harder to be clear.
I'd rather be seen failing than succeed invisibly.
Screen recordings of me thinking with AI. Footage from the road. The van, the landscape, the weight of a slow afternoon. Getting stuck. Getting unstuck. Sometimes the same problem for twenty minutes.
All of it is the same thing: paying attention, on camera.
Drafts. Attempts. Stuff that didn't work.
This doesn't have an ending.
There's no arc I'm building toward. No reveal. No transformation montage.
The practice is returning. Not streak-counting. Just coming back.
If any of this resonates, the door is open.
This isn't a method I invented. It's just what happens when you stop waiting and start recording. The barrier isn't equipment or skill or permission. The barrier is pressing record.
You could start today.
One video, then another.
Now I'm going to go make the video.
January 9, 2025