“If you don’t create content, you don’t exist”: My pledge to write
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I recently had the pleasure of being a guest on episode 32 of “Decode your 20s”, a weekly, video-documentary series produced by my friend Andrei Margeloiu on Facebook and Youtube, where he presents his views on the world and how they change as he navigates his 20s.
I thoroughly enjoyed the video production experience — from choosing a topic, to the in-depth pre-video debate, to spending 30 minutes (unsuccessfully) trying to find a scenic filming spot sheltered from the San Francisco Bay wind. The experience of talking unscripted on camera for around an hour (30 minutes of which made the final cut) was entirely new to me so it was a fantastic learning experience. However, I’ll be the first to admit that the video is far from perfect. My lack of experience speaking on camera manifests in stiffness, a tendency to ramble and the excessive use of hand gestures. This awkwardness is made worse by poor audio quality — a byproduct of filming on an iPhone, outside on a very windy day. Despite this, I still believe in the importance of the topic we discussed. Thus, in this article I present the first half (read part 2 here) of a more structured, coherent and in-depth summary of my thoughts on the importance of “content creation”.
I personally define content creation as:
the production and sharing of some recorded substance of value.
It doesn’t matter what you are producing or with whom you are sharing it, as long as someone (yourself or others) cares enough to document the value you are producing for the world. I felt this was an interesting topic to consider, given how the average person in today’s modern society is more focused on “content consumption” — reading, listening, watching and purchasing things created by others — than on producing content of their own. I’m not suggesting there is anything inherently wrong with consuming content, on the contrary, I think in order to produce anything of value we must first learn from others. That being said, there is great benefit to both the individual and to society if people strove for a better consumption : production balance.
“If you don’t create content you don’t exist”
Our title is admittedly very hyperbolic (read: clickbait). I want to emphasize that neither Andrei nor I actually believes that you don’t exist if you don’t produce content. There are many ways to find meaning in life and “exist”, content creation is but one of them. We decided to go with this aggressive video titling to emphasize three important benefits of content creation:
1. Historical Significance
The content you produce will define how you are remembered by others in history. Think about every famous person we learn about growing up, the inventors, explorers and artists. Other than the few who produced meaningful content to leave behind (recorded either by themselves or by their followers), history simply forgets the other hundreds of billions of human lives that have at one point in time existed on our planet. If you don’t create content, you will be forgotten too.
2. Personal History
Lets say you don’t care about being remembered by people you never met, long after your passing, fair enough. The second important role of content creation is as a record of your own personal history. Images and videos are one of the most common forms of content creation in 2019. We each generate anywhere between 1–100 pictures a day to record our holidays, important moments, or share selfies. While things like Instagram have merit in serving as valuable records of our physical and visual history, they don’t do much in recording something equally valuable but often under-looked — the personal history and evolution of our mind. By broadening the range of content you create to articles, videos, podcasts, scrapbooks, even memes and many other alternatives, you can create mental and emotional snapshots of yourself over the course of your life. Any content you create will be representative of the ideas you had in your head and the things you thought were important at that point in time.
3. Learning Experience
As a self-proclaimed life-long learner, for me this third benefit of content creation is by far the most important. The act of publishing content is an act of learning, regardless of what medium you are using to record your thoughts and ideas. We all have these thoughts in our heads and ideas of things we want to do. The hard part is transferring these thoughts and ideas into a recorded piece of content. This act of recording will force you to refine your ideas and structure your thoughts — it is no coincidence that some of the most eloquent, well-thought people in our world have been, and will always be writers, and content creators. The very process of making is absorbing and clarifying. It’s easy to consume content and think you have a grasp on a topic, but to produce, you actually need to have a understanding, and a good one at that. If not, the content you’ll be pushing out will wind up being utter garbage (I’ll let you the reader decide if this article falls into that category…).
I also want to emphasize the importance of actually sharing your records, hence why I was particular to include the word “sharing” in my definition of content creation. Even if you write, film, draw or photograph your ideas, there is a huge difference in quality between doing it for yourself versus putting it out there for others to see. Even if you don’t think anyone is realistically going to view your content, maybe you’re just starting out like I am, or maybe your content isn’t meant for broad audience consumption, the fact that you are exposing yourself to the wider world forces you to refine, retune and redefine. You can use the act of sharing for accountability and forced quality control. Moreover, should you be lucky enough to actually develop an audience (even if it’s only friends and family), conversation and feedback from others can help to clarify misconceptions or develop further confidence in your beliefs — these are both crucial elements of learning. At the end of the day life is one big learning experience, and content creation is a pretty cool way to work towards maximizing it.
Creating the video episode with Andrei that inspired this article was a huge personal learning experience for me. I’ve always considered myself a confident public speaker, however, staring into a camera, on many occasions I froze up and my thoughts just wouldn’t flow as naturally as they usually would do in natural conversation or even with a live in-person audience. It opened my eyes to a weakness I now know I need to work on. On a more superficial note I also learned that my haircut is not particularly amenable to windy conditions blowing in the wrong direction… you can learn a wide variety of things from recording yourself on video it seems. Moreover, I’m far more confident in my understanding of content creation and its key benefits, thus strengthening my resolve to produce content as a result. I personally had my opinions changed on prioritizing quality over quantity and am now forcing myself to care less about what others think of what I publish (I’m going to be writing a Part 2 to this article focusing on these topics in particular, so keep an eye out for that).
To put my actions where my mouth (or I guess my fingers & keyboard) is, I pledge to use filming this video and writing this article as a learning experience, and formally pledge to personally produce content more frequently, as highlighted by my plan below — published publicly for the world (a.k.a. the 3 people that actually read this — hello parents and girlfriend) to see:
My Personal Content Creation Plan
The informal approach to content creation that I’ve utilized so far has been entirely guided by questions:
- Someone asks me a question that is somewhat unique to me i.e. that you can’t easily Google search. This indicates a lack of existing knowledge online — a gap I can fill due to some kind of expertise I have.
- More people then ask me the same question (including strangers that mutual friends will connect to me). This indicates a demand for this niche knowledge beyond a single person and even my direct social circle.
- Hey, I’m tired of repeating the same answers and advice every time — lets write this up and share it because people actually care about this!
This has resulted in 2 published articles (Guide to switching majors from Chemical Engineering to Computer Science & Super unofficial Thailand travel guide) and 2 more in my drafts right now. I definitely plan to continue this series of “Frequently Asked Questions” articles, but will also supplement this (as there are only so many unique, repeat questions one will get in daily life) with additional, unrelated article series I currently have interest in writing:
- Conversational Insights: Why limit myself to questions I’m getting? Why limit myself to things that I have unique expertise in? I’m thankful to have a diverse group of intellectually curious friends, many of whom are passionate and experts in very different things than I am. If we happen to be hanging out and a discussion we have teaches me something new, leads a change of belief, or alters the way I view the world, I’m sure if I write it up and share it online, at least one other person could feel the same way.
- Science Stuff: My current primary passion is in science and research, thus the primary content I hope to be producing is research publications. In terms of creating more blog-type scientific content, a project I want to work on is in spreading a love for science and a general familiarity with what is happening at the cutting edge of scientific discovery. Too many of my friends and family have absolutely no idea what researchers actually work on, and what is happening in the field of science. I think this is an absolute travesty. I enjoy reading research papers as a learning experience, but I understand how daunting they can be as a format of content to consume (I still find many of the more technically heavy publications extremely unapproachable). Thus, I plan on starting a series that aims to summarize cool scientific publications I come across, sharing the excitement and my opinions on it, and abstracting away the heavy technical details.
- Webcomics: Finally, I hope to eventually go back to all these articles I’m writing and supplement them with small webcomic style sketches — another interest of mine that I want to push myself to create content for.
