Episodes

  • Pointy Flat Cast 028 - Perceived Value

    Pointy Flat Cast 028 - Perceived Value
    May 16 2020
    Episode Notes Hi there. Ducky Obrien chilling like a fruit drop in a tin can. Today we go over the two most important questions in life: 1. Perception? 2. Something about DMT Show Notes Link: https://duckyobrien.com/2020/05/16/the-importance-of-perceived-value/ Show Notes Short: It's more important what people think of your content rather than the actual quality of your content. This means that marketing your content is more important to growth than actually creating content. Networking with other content creators is the fastest and most reliable path for growth. Show Notes Long: I don’t know about you but when I go shopping online, at a retailer such as Amazon, the first thing I check to help me make my purchasing decisions are the customer reviews. I’m sure most people probably do the same thing and check for the item with the most positive reviews for any product before making a purchase. This behavior deals with the concept known as perceived value. Perceived value is the customer’s evaluation of the value and ability of the product or service to meet their needs compared to other similar products or services. And in the present world where online shopping is prevalent, a customer is not able to observe the product in person for themselves. This in turn, lead to the growth of customer reviews having a huge influence on the perceived value of the product, especially for products from companies with weaker brand recognition. If you don’t believe me, this shift in purchases having a heavy reliance on customer reviews have created the problem of a massive flood of fake reviews from less then scrupulous companies taking advantage of this purchasing behavior. Fake reviews have become such a problem that sites like Fakespot are solely dedicated to determining the reliability of reviews. I won’t get into the details about how this works but generally speaking it analyzes the reviews to see if there are accounts spamming similar products from related companies and analyzing the text of the reviews to see if they are generated from bots. A surprising number of products listed on Amazon right now, that are best sellers, are products with fake reviews. So how does this concept tie in with the world of content creation? Content is a product. And the people who consume the content are your customers. Perceived value is especially important because without it, there is no reason for someone to check out your content over someone else’s. The world of content creation is very competitive because the barrier to entry is very low. Anyone with a computer or even a smart phone, an internet connection, some software, and an idea can create content for any of the existing platforms such as YouTube, Twitch, etc. Since these platforms are so saturated with content creators, people consuming content rely on perceived value to choose the creators they will want to support. I want take an aside here to note that some content creation “gurus” have this absurd notion that there is unlimited potential growth for every single content creator. This is a flat out lie. Just as people have limited incomes and they cannot purchase everything they want to, people also have limited time and cannot consume all the content they would like to, whether it be games, movies, music, books, etc. What this boils down to, is the fact that your content needs to have more perceived value over someone else’s for you to experience growth. This begs the question then, how do you increase the perceived value of your content? The sad reality is that perceived value is not necessarily tied to the actual value of your content. The old adage of “make quality content” has absolutely no correlation to growth. There are so many content creators out there, making content with either no originality and blatantly copying other people’s ideas or trends, poorly produced, lacking any artistic or academic value, and etc. that have a massive following. Whereas incredibly talented creators with well thought out, original, and well produced content are constantly passed over. This is due to the criteria that people have come to use to determine the perceived value of content. The bad news is that it is very similar to the criteria most people use to judge the perceived value of a product sold online, positive reviews. By positive reviews, I simply mean the number of followers, subscribers, views, likes, comments, favorites, etc. that you have for your content on that specific platform. This is more true than you realize. Many of the larger streamers on Twitch are actually not that great at playing games. They don’t really offer more insight, or a higher level of skill than most other streamers. There is no academic value whatsoever as watching these people will not make you better at playing the games. So then people might argue that they offer more entertainment or are more engaging than other streamers. This is not even true as well. You ...
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    14 mins
  • Pointy Flat Cast 027 - Don't Wait for Success

    Pointy Flat Cast 027 - Don't Wait for Success
    Apr 24 2020
    Episode Notes Hi there. Ducky Obrien chilling like a banana in a bunch. Today we go over the two most important questions in life: 1. Scorpion? 2. Something about DMT Show Notes Link: https://duckyobrien.com/2020/04/24/this-week-in-content-creation-dont-wait-for-success/ Show Video Link: https://youtu.be/KKvQ28r9OKA Show Sources: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitch-statistics/ Show Notes Short: This week we go over how to not just sit around and wait for success. You need to go out and actively chase down avenues that promote growth. You can make all the content you want and not grow at all. It's vital to spend just as much effort on increasing exposure and discoverability of your content. It doesn't happen overnight, you need to put in some elbow grease to make it happen. Show Notes Long: For today’s episode, I wanted to go over something that happened to me that made me think quite a bit about how I’m approaching content creation. I’m always a firm believer of working hard and working smart but that’s not always a recipe for success. Let’s take streaming for example. The vast majority of people can stream regularly for many hours every day and still not find an increase in viewership many years later. The same goes for YouTube as well. You can be uploading videos regularly and still not find an increase in subscribers. There are people who manage to find success just by working hard but they are far fewer in number than the people who do not. Here are some facts to show you the reality of the situation. In February of 2020, there were 3.8 million unique broadcasters on Twitch. As of March 2020, there were 41,100 Partners. 1.08% of the broadcaster base made partner. The literal 1%. If anything, that number should be a little bit lower because there will have been an increase to the number of unique broadcasters by March. To make partner, one of the toughest requirements to meet is to have 75 average concurrent viewers. So even if you did barely manage to make partner, there’s no guarantee for growth or a reliable income at those numbers. The reality is, it is very hard to find success as a content creator. It can seem a bit daunting when faced with how hard it is to actually find success. So the question remains, what can I do to increase my chances of finding success? Enter this week’s epiphany moment. I’ll start by telling you what happened to me earlier this week that got my brain working, where I saw a glimpse of light and had brief moment of clarity. As most people would probably not know, I am the host of four podcasts and I post regularly on the podcast subreddit on the weekly submission thread to see if I can get any more exposure. What happened instead, was a user contacted me to see if I was interested in doing a review swap. I told him, honestly, that I was more interested in getting reviews from actual listeners and that I would want to earn every positive review I received. We then went on to have a pleasant conversation, I checked out his podcast, and left it a positive review. I checked his show out later and it jumped from 2 positive reviews to 28 on the first week of releasing the show. I don’t even have one review! And there it was, the road to success opening up in front of me. This man had figured it out. The key to success for podcasting wasn’t in creating good content (although this definitely does help). The key to success was in increasing exposure for your show and getting enough views and reviews to make it to new and noteworthy on Apple Podcasts. This will net you even more views because of the increased exposure and discoverability due to being on the list. I had devoted all my time to making my podcasts, spending at least 3 hours editing every episode, and thinking of new shows to create. I used to even spend 3 hours or so making each episode’s album art. All of this, to no avail. I could spend years doing this and end up with the same result. Where as this guy, he spent a lot of his time (after making the show), in reaching out to others directly, making use of Reddit to target a specific audience group that would probably be open to leaving a review, and making sure his podcast was discoverable. He achieved a higher level of success in that one week, than I did in entire months. The key here, was that you have to go after success. You can’t just sit around and wait there for it to come to you. That happens very infrequently. I’m not saying it’s impossible, I’m just saying it’s highly unlikely. You can keep grinding, keep making content, and keep doing your thing but nothing may ever change. You have to go out there and chase after success. That means for whatever it is you are doing, you need to spend just as much time and effort on being discoverable and getting exposure. On Twitch, you need to spend just as much time streaming, as you do building a community. You need to go watch and network with other streamers, join discords, ...
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    8 mins
  • Pointy Flat Cast 026 - How to Avoid Burning Out

    Pointy Flat Cast 026 - How to Avoid Burning Out
    Mar 27 2020
    Episode Notes Hi there. Ducky Obrien chilling like a cookie in a tin. Today we go over the two most important questions in life: 1. Fire? 2. Something about DMT Show Notes Link: https://duckyobrien.com/2020/03/27/this-week-in-content-creation-how-to-avoid-burning-out/ Show Video Link: https://youtu.be/AYNhkuCcYkM Show Notes Short: To avoid burning out, fight negative thoughts by comparing yourself with yourself only. Stop comparing yourself against other people! Also keep in mind growth and improvement come with time. Secondly, keep doing what you're doing but always be willing to try out new things, to always keep you learning and changing. Finally, don't be always chasing that view and sub count and focus instead on making content that would make you happy. Show Notes Long: These past two weeks have been rough, as I am sure almost everyone else out there is having a rough time as well. Despite current circumstances, I’ve been churning out content nonstop, spending around seventeen straight hours a day. Some days, I even managed to work thirty hours at a time. And I’ve taken no breaks, no vacations, just the grind and the grind on my mind twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. But I’m slowly starting to burn out. Sometimes negative thoughts haunt me at the back of my mind, making me doubt why I’m putting in all this work. Maybe this is all for naught, maybe my time is better spent elsewhere. Maybe it’s time to get a more stable job. Why bother, I won’t make a difference anyways. I get no views, I see no growth, maybe I’m just a failure. Sometimes the repetition of what I’m doing gets to me. Making the same videos on the same topics and games. Spending so much time editing podcasts and videos everyday for an audience that doesn’t seem to care or notice the amount of effort put in. The sameness of it all, day after day, leaves me wanting something new. And then there’s always the fear of trying something new because that means you lose your primary audience group. The fear of losing relevancy, the fear of losing those view counts. Every small content creator knows that if you change the game or topic or tone of your content, you lose a large number of views, primarily because people want to see the same type of content from you. Even most of the largest content creators are subject to this. Maybe you guys can relate to what I’m going through, maybe you can’t. Either way, I’ll record my thoughts and experiences here in how I’m doing my best to overcome these obstacles in my journey as a content creator, in the hopes that it may be of some use to someone out there. First of all, in dealing negative thoughts, there’s really no easy way out. It’ll always be a fight. They will always come back to haunt you throughout your life. The key here, is to be able to live with them without it affecting your outlook on life. Start by focusing on the facts. Stop comparing yourself to other people and start comparing yourself, to well, yourself. Here’s what I mean by this. The data does not lie. It can be incorrectly interpreted and that will be a topic for another day. As long as you see growth, no matter how small, that is always a positive thing. That means you are doing better! You are getting better at making whatever content it is you set your sights on, whether it be music, videos, art, etc. Look at what you made, see if you improved from where you started. Use the facts, look at the data available, compare yourself to yourself. Be honest. Be patient. Growth and improvement does not happen immediately, it always takes time. There are no shortcuts. Always try to improve on one small skill at a time. You have an abundance of high quality resources on almost every topic available on the internet nowadays and most of it is available for free! Always be learning, always be improving, failing is part of the process. Don’t ignore the things you are doing well in either! Everyone has something they alone can do, some unique quality that can’t be replicated exactly. The reality is that no one is great at doing something when they first start out. Sure, there may be a handful of people in the entire world that are natural geniuses, but 99.99% of the world is in the same boat as you. It takes time, it takes practice, it takes effort to learn and refine skills, and it takes blood, sweat, and tears to create something beautiful. If the negative thoughts come, let them and face them head on. See if they are true. Use the data, not your emotions. Sometimes they are. It’s true, I’m not the best at making content. I’m very limited in the skillset I have now. My podcasts aren’t the best, my videos aren’t either, and so are my articles on my blog. But that’s ok. I can improve. With each piece of content I make, I can see myself improving a little bit at a time. And with time, you gain something important, perseverance. The ability to withstand and survive, and even thrive ...
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    11 mins
  • Pointy Flat Cast 025 - How to Evolve Your Content

    Pointy Flat Cast 025 - How to Evolve Your Content
    Mar 11 2020
    Episode Notes Hi there. Ducky Obrien chilling like a dog in a blanket. Today we go over the two most important questions in life: 1. Metapod? 2. Something about DMT Show Notes Link: https://duckyobrien.com/2020/03/11/how-to-evolve-as-a-creator/ Show Video Link: https://youtu.be/1G83rN0nYmM Show Notes Short: Trying out new things is necessary for growth as a creator and to increase your audience as well. You can head in two basic directions: 1. The direction the audience wants your content to go. 2. The direction you want your content to go. Show Notes Long: Recently I’ve been thinking about one thing, how to evolve as a creator and improve the content I’m creating, or even make new types of content. I don’t want to keep making the same videos over and over again, record the same podcasts, and write the same articles. Not only will it burn me out and not satisfy any of my creative urges, it will be harder to foster growth, both for myself as a creator and for my audience, as well. So that begs the question, how does one change? What direction should we go in? How do we grow in terms of creative effort? I don’t have solid answers to these questions that will satisfy everyone but I can share my thoughts that have been percolating in the ole noggin so far. I basically have two main destinations that I set for myself when trying to come up with new ideas: Head in a direction that satisfies the audience’s desires Head in a direction that satisfies my own personal creative desires Now I’ll explain in detail my thought processes for meeting the two criteria above but it should be noted here that you should focus on these two things separately or one at a time. They may take your content in conflicting directions so it’s best not to mesh them together into one unachievable goal. For example, let’s take a look at streaming on Twitch. The strongest, most unique identifying feature that sets the content on Twitch apart from everything else is the real time user interaction. Other platforms are very limited in this regard and rely on asynchronous interactions between the creator and the consumer. Making static content devoid of reacting to user interactions will likely not stand out very much on a live streaming platform such as Twitch, Mixer, Facebook Gaming, etc. The key here, in terms of satisfying the audience’s desires, is to shift the focus more onto the user interactions themselves. It’s important to note here my goal is to shift the focus to the user interactions, and not the users, as most would probably feel uncomfortable with too much attention on themselves. One method I came up with, was to make use of the new viewer point system available on Twitch. Viewers are given points to your channel as they keep watching and interacting, and those points can be used to redeem preset rewards or custom ones created by you. The preset rewards can range from unlocking an emote to your channel, to highlighting one of their messages. The custom rewards are only limited by your imagination and creativity. It is also important to note here, that you are not bound by the limitations put in place by Twitch and you can use your own custom bot to implement feature sets that best suit your type of content and audience. By creating unique rewards that shift the focus to the user’s interaction, and make it the highlight of the stream, you not only encourage it, you reward it. Some of the custom rewards I made include giving out mediocre advice, feigning to pay attention, and showing a Star Wars meme (I love prequel memes). Now these rewards are best suited to myself and my own creative desires, meeting both criteria one and two. They are also suited to the audience I have. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. The viewers enjoy having more ways to interact with the stream and have their interactions made the focus, not the backdrop. This can be applied even further to evolve your content. I don’t have a solid concrete idea yet, but I do want to do things like highlight follows and subs in some way to show appreciation with some creativity. I also have some rough ideas on how to implement this further into my streams and change the nature of how I’m playing games. Some ideas that I’ll implement in the far future will include shifting the focus from playing games, to making something more akin to a television show but with that key ingredient, immediate reaction to user interactions and changing the content based on those interactions in real time. One possible implementation, and I often think about this idea, is to create a cooking show but with some added chaos by letting the viewers add or subtract ingredients and cooking utensils, and etc. There is no platform that comes even close to this massive potential in creating new types of content that live streaming has. Another example is related to last week’s episode. I changed the format of this article, which has an audio podcast ...
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    8 mins
  • Pointy Flat Cast 024 - Know the Win Conditions

    Pointy Flat Cast 024 - Know the Win Conditions
    Mar 1 2020
    Episode Notes Hi there. Ducky Obrien chilling like a carrot buried in dirt. Today we go over the two most important questions in life: 1. How to win? 2. Something about DMT Show Notes Link: https://duckyobrien.com/2020/02/29/know-the-game-youre-playing/ Show Video Link: https://youtu.be/4UQUE0pce08 Show Notes Short: Know the game you are playing! You can't force the way you want to play a game onto the game itself. You need to understand the rules, the mechanics involved, and most importantly, the win conditions. Then you can start working towards achieving a win state. Show Notes Long: So recently I’ve been playing a lot of The Cycle and there’s just one small problem. The people I’m playing with don’t know how to play the game correctly! It’s infuriating to watch as my teammates engage in pointless combat only to waste a lot of time and effort. That time could have been spent farming objectives and now our squad is falling behind. This is because those people are playing the wrong game. The Cycle’s win condition is based on farming objectives efficiently. Engaging in combat with the first squad you see will slow down your overall rate at which you are acquiring points. This is similar to the world of content creation. In order to succeed, you need to know the game you are playing. You need to know the rules of the system and in doing so, you can determine the win conditions available and focus solely on working towards those conditions. I see a lot of smaller content creators with the same complaint, and it’s a complaint I make myself as well from time to time. And that complaint is that the platforms are rigged to make you fail. There certainly is some truth in this complaint, and I’m certainly not excusing the obvious flaws in these platforms that heavily favor the largest content creators and corporations. However, I think it’s rather unfair and illogical to claim that success is unattainable on these platforms. It only requires one to realize the rules on which each platform operates and identify the necessary win conditions for success. For example, for smaller content creators who are struggling on YouTube, I often see the same type of behavior and content put forth. They oftentimes release unedited Let’s Play series and are confounded when those videos don’t succeed, oftentimes blaming the algorithm for their lack of exposure. This is far from the painful truth, as one would only need to look at many smaller channels producing unique and visually stunning content that are succeeding to this day. The truth is, Let’s Play series are one of the hardest types of content to succeed with on YouTube for one simple reason, there is absolutely no incentive and perceived value for the average viewer to watch a fellow average person play the game. There has to be some added value to the content to attract potential viewers, as well as being visually pleasing to behold. There needs to be either educational value added by providing viewers a look at a higher level of play or a deep understanding of game mechanics, or have an onscreen persona that is unique and adds value through entertainment. On top of this, a considerable amount of time and effort is needed to edit and produce a video that is visually pleasing to behold. This requires more planning and effort than simply just playing a game. One channel I consider a pinnacle of production and a combination of both entertainment and education is Game Theory. Compare the amount of effort put into each video from Game Theory and compare it to a smaller content creator’s Let’s Play series. The difference is night and day. Value must be provided to the viewer in order to incentivize them to watch your video over someone else’s. Once the main body of your content is improved through this lens, then everything else will fall into place, such as choosing the right title and thumbnail, and performing tests such as thumbnail splits and etc. but those will be a topic for another day. I want to encourage all of those struggling content creators out there, of which I am also one of, to take a step back and really look at what it takes to succeed on whatever platform you are on, be it YouTube, Twitch, Mixer, etc. You can’t project your own idea of how you want the system to work onto the platform itself because that will only lead to inevitable failure and frustration. It’s going to take an incredible amount of time, effort, planning, making mistakes and failing, and learning from those failures to attain any level of success. Simply coasting along and generating mediocre content will not get you anywhere. As they often say, don’t hate the player, hate the game. I think that statement is not applicable here but it sounded nice so I’m going to use it to end today’s post. In the words of Captain Taggart, Never Give Up, Never Surrender! Anyways hope y'all enjoy the show, thanks so much for dropping by! If you want us to cover a ...
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    20 mins
  • Pointy Flat Cast 023 - Linear Growth vs Exponential

    Pointy Flat Cast 023 - Linear Growth vs Exponential
    Feb 22 2020
    Episode Notes Hi there. Ducky Obrien chilling like an ant on a log. Today we go over the two most important questions in life: 1. Linear Growth? 2. Something about DMT Show Notes Link: https://duckyobrien.com/2020/02/21/the-key-to-turning-linear-growth-into-exponential-growth/ Show Notes Short: Linear growth is a great thing. It means that you'll reach your goal, eventually. There are steps you can take, however, to turn that linear growth into exponential growth for certain milestones. Overall growth will always look closer to linear. For milestone growth, take a step back and analyze which pieces of content are getting the most engagement and feedback from users. Put in a lot of time and effort to create one more piece of content of that type on top of your foundation of content. Show Notes Long: There’s one topic that’s been weighing heavily on my mind and heart lately, my growth trend curve for YouTube. It’s linear. A little too linear for my taste. My future projections place my channel hitting one thousand subscribers in almost two years. One thousand is a vital number because that is when you can apply for the partnership program on YouTube and start earning ad revenue on your videos. I don’t have two years to wait before I start generating revenue. So I’ve been spending a lot of time reflecting on how to change that growth curve from linear to exponential for hitting one thousand subscribers. Now linear growth is a great thing. I’m incredibly grateful to see that on my channel because that means that given enough time, I’ll eventually hit critical mass. And the truth is that there are no short cuts to success. You can, however, expedite growth in terms of reaching certain short term milestones. Honestly speaking, I can’t afford to keep making content for two years before I start to see any income at all on YouTube. Hitting that one thousand subscriber mark as soon as possible would be a wise thing to do. So after analyzing all the data that I had available to me, I realized the key to exponential growth for the short term. You need a few quality pieces of content with high user engagement. There’s no trick to figuring this out. You can try following trends, you can try random things. In the end, there’s no real obvious factor in determining what will do well other than trying out new things and looking at the data. I was lucky enough to have stumbled upon two pieces of content that managed to generate huge spikes of traffic to my channel and drive subscriptions and user engagement, my Astroneer base video and my No Man’s Sky exocraft guide video. Now I have no idea why these two pieces of content are doing so well but they are. The key here is to look at your own analytics for your content and see what is driving the most user engagement and focus on distilling what makes it so marketable. It’ll be different for each person even if they are making the same type of content on the same platform. Once you spend time figuring out the key elements on why that piece of content did so well, you need to spend a lot of time and effort making one piece of similar high quality content. Just focus on one! Your goal is to increase the production value on this one key piece and then use the traffic from the original body of work to redirect it to your new work in order to increase it’s initial exposure. Since they should be similar in nature, the traffic should grow organically after that. Now you have two pieces of key content that are driving traffic to your brand. For me, that means making an even bigger and better base and making an even better looking video covering it. It’s worth it to spend months on this video because it will increase traffic considerably to my channel and increase user engagement. This doesn’t mean abandoning everything you are doing. It just means adding a few things on top of it. If you are experience a linear growth trend, that means you are doing something right. The content you are making right now is the foundation to everything you are doing. You just need to build a few key pieces on top of that foundation of solid growth. In the words of Captain Taggart, Never Give Up, Never Surrender! Anyways hope y'all enjoy the show, thanks so much for dropping by! If you want us to cover a topic in the future, send us an email! Opening/Closing song - Cascade by Kubbi - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4ZjUoEKiLs If you want to catch me on Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/duckyobrien Here's my Twitter: https://twitter.com/stirthebulgogi My blog: https://duckyobrien.com/
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    23 mins
  • Pointy Flat Cast 022 - Organize Your Workflow

    Pointy Flat Cast 022 - Organize Your Workflow
    Feb 15 2020
    Episode Notes Hi there. Ducky Obrien chilling like left tea in a tea pot. Today we go over the two most important questions in life: 1. Trello? 2. Something about DMT Show Notes Link: https://duckyobrien.com/2020/02/15/the-importance-of-organizing-your-workflow/ Show Notes Short: You cannot afford to waste time! Starting from the bottom in any endeavor requires a lot of time so organize your workflow. By organizing, you increase efficiency and effectively accomplish more in the same time. Personally, I use Trello but each person thinks and works differently so take the time and pick something that works for you. Show Notes Long: There is a theory out there that in order to become successful in any endeavor, that it requires at least ten thousand hours of work before you reach your goal. That roughly translates into twenty hours of work per week for ten years. Ten years. An entire decade. This is not an outrageous statement. If you study other content creators, other artists, musicians, actors that start from the bottom, many of them have the same tried and true tale. They were on the grind everyday for around five to ten years. This is the norm. If you started out in chasing your dreams and making something of yourself today, it's going to take a lot of time. Time is the number one resource you cannot afford to be wasteful with. One simple thing to save you as much time as possible is to spend each day efficiently. So there are a couple of ways to do this. The first thing to do is to have a general plan for that day. If you know what you want to accomplish for that day, you have a course of action to follow. If you don't have a plan, you'll end up doing a lot of things but accomplishing nothing of worth. Once you have your plan, you need to sit down and analyze your own workflow. You need to be absolutely honest and record how you do things, in what order, and how much time each step takes. It takes some brutal self awareness and the willingness to admit flaws for the next step to be useful. After analyzing your own workflow, you need be willing to cut out things that don't add value to the process and final outcome. For a personal example, I know uploading all my podcasts to YouTube is not worth the effort. I want to believe it'll succeed someday on that platform but all the analytics show that doing this one action adds no value and accomplishes nothing. I'm wasting my time. I need to cut this step out in my podcast creation process. Now you can modify a step to increase value. Continuing on with the previous example, for a video to succeed on YouTube, I need to have a short and concise script and some compelling video footage. I can take my podcast, condense it down into a key idea, and produce a decent looking video for it. This takes a bit more time but now I'm making content that will succeed on YouTube and also direct additional traffic to my podcast. It'll be worth doing in the long run. I changed a step with no value to something that added value. The alternative is to just cut it out if I don't have enough time in my workflow. Record data and analyze it, the data will not lie to you. Another key thing you can do to increase efficiency is to change the order in which you do things. I'll use making coffee as an example. When I make coffee, I have some necessary tasks to accomplish before I can enjoy my bolt of morning energy. I need to boil the water, I need to grind my beans, and I need to setup my brewing device (could be pour over, Moka pot, French press, Aeropress etc.). Before you do anything else, you need to start boiling the water. It's the step that takes the longest but also requires the least amount of user input. As the water is boiling, you can grind your beans, set up your device, and have it ready once the water is nice and hot. If you started all of these steps and then started to boil the water, you would essentially have doubled the amount of time spent making your cup of Joe. I know spending a few more minutes to make a cup of coffee is not the biggest waste of time but wasting time in a similar fashion here and there in your workflow adds up to hours a day gone. Take the time to sit down, analyze how you work, and be willing to change the order in how you do things. Identify key tasks that are important but require almost no user input and observation. For content creators, the times you render and upload videos are valuable periods where you can work on another task in parallel. You're effectively doubling the amount of work being accomplished during those times. Finally, after taking the time to identify your own workflow and organize it by cutting out steps that don't add value and changing the order in which you accomplish your tasks, you need a way to visualize your workflow. You need something concrete that shows you what you need to do and in what order. Don't leave it as an abstract idea and hope that things get done. They certainly will but you waste so much time by...
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    20 mins
  • Pointy Flat Cast 021 - Thinking Outside the Box

    Pointy Flat Cast 021 - Thinking Outside the Box
    Feb 8 2020
    Episode Notes

    Hi there. Ducky Obrien chilling like left over candy after valentines.

    Today we go over the two most important questions in life: 1. Outside the box? 2. Something about DMT

    Show Notes Short: Think outside the box! It's a muscle most people don't use. So 1. Do your research. 2. Practice what you see others doing. 3. Sit in, face, and grow from failure. 4. Flex your creative muscle after all that practice.

    Show Notes Long: So I was playing Temtem. Yes Temtem. It's a Pokemon clone and it's fantastic. I'm in love with this game and I already know that I'm going to play it for thousands of hours. So as a content creator, my mind goes immediately to how can I make content for this game.

    My friend Wooptydo informed me of other content creators doing some very creative and imaginative things such as running an auction house and arranging competitive tournaments. This made me realize how small my thinking was. So how does one learn to think outside the box? How does one identify a need that's not being met?

    Research. You need to do your research. The only real way to learn how to think outside the box is to see how others do it. Go deep and research all the ways people are making content for a game you're focusing on. You can do this for anything, music, art, business, etc.

    Practice. After your research, you need to put it to practice. Try what others are doing. You need to practice by mimicking what others are doing until you are comfortable enough to come up with your own methods. Creativity is a muscle that needs to be worked out as well. You don't go from having no muscle to being a body builder in a short time. You need to exercise all those muscles!

    Failure. You will fail, a lot. Don't be afraid of that uncomfortable feeling of facing uncharted territory and the possibility of failure. Sit in it, face it, realize that you do lack certain things, and then move on and see what you can learn from it, take out one thing you can improve on even a little bit. Forward progress is success. The lack of failure only means you are not evolving.

    Results. Once you have put into practice trying out different things, failing, and improving, you'll find that you will be able to flex that muscle and think outside the box much easier on demand. You'll often find that you don't need an incredibly new or brilliant idea. Even something slightly different and unique is what you need and that will help provide value to an audience that isn't having their needs catered to.

    In the words of Captain Taggart, Never Give Up, Never Surrender!

    Anyways hope y'all enjoy the show, thanks so much for dropping by! If you want us to cover a topic in the future, send us an email!

    Opening/Closing song - Cascade by Kubbi - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4ZjUoEKiLs If you want to catch me on Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/duckyobrien Here's my Twitter: https://twitter.com/stirthebulgogi
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