BenjaminAs I am doing for my YouTube channel, I am setting myself a goal of posting 100 blog articles.
I learned about this challenge from Mr. Beast. He said that your first 100 videos would not be viewed by anybody and the quality therefore wouldn’t matter.
Sounded like the perfect spot for me to start.
However, I needed to adapt the challenge to my own circumstances and special needs.
You see, I do have a very strong need for solitude and alone time.
It’s when I think about things.
And a lot of magical things are happening to me in those times of tranquility.
I can hear my thoughts. And I can follow them.
And that’s very important for me.
There is a healing effect to it.
It’s only been a week or two that I got introduced to Human Design Reading and it’s where I have drawn a lot of inspiration from lately. Perhaps you’d like to Google it or check out this website here.
I don’t know about you, but I have suffered from childhood trauma and those wounds heal slowly.
Over time, more negative events build on top of those unresolved childhood traumas and before you know it, you find yourself in some deep emotional/social/financial/mental mud stuck.
And that’s when a lot of people give up and commit suicide or end up in a mental institution or perhaps give in to a lifestyle of violence, substance abuse, or depression.
Being a very pragmatic and practical person who enjoys working, my path has led me here to the 100 challenge.
And this is blog #1 about nothing in particular and yet about everything.
Mr. Beast’s career advice
In that video, Mr. Beast’s advice to novice content creators was to simply start producing content.
And his second piece of advice was to aspire to get better with every new video.
So in the case of a content creator, things like lighting come to mind. Audio. Editing. Background. Then perhaps the title of the video. The content. The description.
Of course, it doesn’t have to be in that order at all.
The important principle to follow is to simply strive to improve one aspect with every video.
And that is such a simple rule that I can completely obey it without feeling limited in my freedom to express myself.
So I decided to go ahead and try on for size the 100 challenge.
I committed to producing 100 YouTube shorts and I committed to improving as much as I could from video to video.
However, I instinctively told myself that I would not worry about any of the dimensions mentioned by Mr. Beast.
What was important for me was that I allowed myself to fail and not pull through with those 100 videos.
And I gave myself the benefit of the doubt by not expecting myself to improve anything.
All I expected of myself was to follow through with producing shorts AS LONG AS I HAD FUN DOING IT.
The experience of enjoying the activity was and still is more important than the actual result.
And that is a huge game changer for me.
Because you see, for all my life (I am turning 40 next year) I believed I had to be in a certain way.
And I struggled with my life.
How I avoided suicide
I struggled a lot to stay alive.
And at some point, I was in my late teens or early 20ies, I wanted to kill myself.
I wanted to end my life because it didn’t make sense to me anymore.
My parents had divorced when I was 16 and while I was living abroad, away from home, in a foreign country learning a new language.
I felt terribly alone. Forgotten. Left.
Coming home was a shock.
The cultural shift was unspeakable.
And all my ‘friends’ from school had grouped together and built different tribes.
A process I was not part of nor was I aware such a thing could happen.
Within a few months, the two most important social relationships in my life had vanished: my family and my friends.
And I felt more alone than ever before.
That’s how I ended up with alcohol and drugs.
Hadn’t I met a Buddhist teacher who taught about the nature of mind, I probably would have killed myself at some point.
But I found resolve in Buddhist meditation, philosophy and psychology and that got me over the hump.
And since I enjoy talking to people and getting to know people, I finally mustered the courage to start the adventure into the unknown and travel down the path of writing 100 blog articles with no specific end in mind other than to focus on writing. And feeling. And then see when the energy is there to write the next article.
Between SEO and Psychology
As I am writing this article, I struggle to put my finger on what it is that I am trying to achieve.
On the one hand, writing about my (inner) experiences surely helps me – it helps me relieve some of that anxiety and inner nervousness.
Sharing my inner world with the world is probably a good thing, as I have been advised.
Especially men don’t do it enough I am being told.
And whilst I haven’t done any research on it, I am sure that the link between sharing one’s feelings and worries and how one feels as a consequence is a positive one.
When it comes to Mr. Beast’s strategy, what comes to my mind is to improve my writing by optimizing the SEO aspects of my article.
Since I was a young teenager I have been fantasizing about the limitlessness of the internet – how this network of cables and satellites allows humans across the globe to set up relationships.
And as we all access the content of the internet through web browsers, Google has almost a monopoly on how we are found online by others.
And that’s where SEO comes into play.
This technical approach to content creation.
And I am fascinated by it.
I am fascinated by the fact that these machines are able to match and connect us together.
Creating a community – Finding my tribe
So it is about matching and finding each other?
That’s the psychology aspect of my writing.
I have this need to connect with other people and I can’t thing of anything more gratifying than to help people discover their own inner strength, helping them make sense of the world and inspiring them to live better lives, more meaningful lives.
That gives me this satisfying moment of writing for and sharing with you something that – hopefully – has a positive, perhaps transformative effect on you.
So getting better at writing post by post for me would mean to a) continue writing and therefore keep having fun doing it and b) eventually discovering how you discover this blog online and what content inspires you so I can produce more of it possibly and c) find this intriguing intersection where our interests and motivation line up in order for me to be able to benefit you in some way.
If you feel like there is a connection and you’d like to enter a safe healing space with me as your coach, please check out the section about the paid services here.
