Curiosity didn’t kill the cat. Perfectionism did.

And that's when I started wondering:

At what point was I no longer improving the video...just finding more shit wrong with it?

I was definitely making this WAY harder than it needed to be

Here's the part that really got me:

Making a 10-minute YouTube video wasn't actually asking that much of me.

But somewhere underneath all the shit I thought the video needed was an even bigger expectation:

I needed people to think it was good.

I wanted people to be impressed. More specifically, I didn't want them watching my videos and thinking, “This looks amateur”.

So this one little video became a six-week test of whether I was good at YouTube before I really even gave myself a chance to learn how to be good at YouTube.

No wonder it felt so fucking hard.

This is what I mean when I talk about emotional capacity.

Sometimes it's not the thing we're doing that's taking so much out of us. It's all the extra shit we make ourselves carry while we're doing it.

The pressure. The expectations. The made-up urgency. The imaginary consequences of getting it wrong.

I added all of that to this video.

And then I exhausted myself trying to carry it.

I’m still gonna give a shit

I don't want the lesson here to be that I should care less about the work I put out.

I like that I give a shit.

I like caring about the quality of my work. I like pushing myself to get better. And I genuinely enjoy learning how to do new shit.

That's not something I wanna change about myself. What I don't want is to keep making myself miserable in the process.

The problem is that I don't always notice when “I can make this better” turns into “it's still not good enough.”

Because those two things feel VERY similar when I'm in them.

Both can look like spending another hour editing. Both can look like rewriting something for the tenth time. Both can look like noticing one tiny detail nobody else would probably notice and fixing it anyway.

But I'm starting to realize there's a difference.

Excellence makes the work better. Perfectionism keeps moving the point where I'm allowed to call the work done.

And with this video, I moved that point for six weeks.

Every new thing I learned became another thing I thought the video needed.

So I kept working.

And the longer I worked, the higher the standard got. Which meant I had to keep working.

Do you see the bullshit I needed to unlearn here?

Raph didn't actually give me permission to stop trying so hard. She just made me realize I could.

Because all those expectations about what the video needed to be? They were mine. Which means I get to decide when they're actually helping me make something better...and when they're just making it harder for me to finish.

I'm probably not going to get that right every time. But maybe that's the line I'm learning to look for:

Is this making the work better? Or is it just making the work harder?

And I have a feeling I'm gonna be asking myself that question a lot.

Because I'm probably always going to be the person who wants to make shit better. Who notices the tiny details. Who wants to learn a new skill and figure out how to do something I couldn't do before.

I actually really like that person.

I just don't think making great work has to cost her this much every time.

Maybe excellence doesn't require me to run myself into the ground to prove I gave it everything I had.

Maybe sometimes, the excellent thing to do is recognize when the work is good…

and let it be done.

I'm still unlearning that one.

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My goal to make a YouTube video “great” almost convinced me not to publish it at all. ‘Cuz the harder I worked to get it there, the harder it became to live up to the expectations I created for it.

I convinced myself that six grueling weeks of deep research, endless rewrites, and obsessing over every little detail meant this video couldn't be just “great” anymore.

That shit had to be AMAZING.

I mean, I had to justify all the time it took me to make it, right?!

You see, I pride myself on my work ethic — on my ability to produce high-quality, thoughtfully detailed work. And if you know me, you've probably heard me describe it as excellence. (Not humbly, either.)

Because not only is it true, but I care about doing things well. It’s part of who I am.

And honestly?

It's served me really well for a long time. It's why I've been able to survive — and even thrive — in so many different careers and chapters of my life. But the same thing that's helped me become really fucking good at what I do is also one of the biggest things that gets in my way.

Because the line between “excellent work” and “it’s not good enough yet” starts to blur.

And this video is a PERFECT example of that.

Apparently I needed to become an expert video editor before I could hit “Publish”

I don’t know when I decided that this video needed to be “Martin Scorsese” level good. But it’s exactly what got me six weeks deep.

At first, the work I was putting into it made sense. I was teaching a complex topic — emotional regulation. I wanted the information to feel easy to understand without getting too far into the weeds of the science behind it.

So I dug through research papers and statistics. I rewrote the script until all that complicated shit felt simple enough to follow. I even got a haircut before I shot it on my 4K webcam because yes, I wanted the video to look good, and I wanted to look good in it, too.

Honestly? I'm still good with all of that. That work actually made the video better. (Okay, maybe not the haircut, but the rest of it.)

The problem was that I didn't stop there.

I wanted news articles to pop up on screen documentary-style. I wanted the words to highlight as I read them aloud. I wanted B-roll and funny little clips perfectly timed throughout the video.

Did I know how to do any of that?

Nope.

So naturally, I decided I needed to learn ALL OF IT — right there and then.

I spent an entire week just looking for B-roll and funny clips. I watched tutorial after tutorial trying to figure out special effects I didn't even know how to make yet. And every time I figured out one thing, I'd come up with something else the video suddenly “needed”.

Three weeks turned into four.

Then five.

At one point, I was so desperate to finish that I frantically texted a friend who's a professional video editor asking him to help me. And apparently, pressuring myself wasn't enough, because I started pushing my completely made-up urgency onto him, too.

I texted him, “We need to get this video out ASAP.”

But ASAP according to what?

There was no deadline. No launch date. Nobody was waiting on this video.

The truth was that I spent so long trying to finish it that somewhere along the way, taking a long time started to feel like being behind.

Then my wife saw my YouTube search history

My wife, Raph, and I share a paid YouTube account (🤫shhhh), which means she can see everything I search.

And at this point, my search history was basically:

• How to add borders to a video in CapCut

• How to add an overlay How to make documentary-style text in CapCut

• How to highlight text as you read it aloud

Eventually, Raph looked at me and asked why I was trying to learn how to do all this shit. Because from her perspective, I was making this WAY harder than it needed to be.

“People put out the shittiest videos and get millions of views.”

I didn't believe her.

“Prove it.”

So she did.

She started pulling up channel after channel of people talking about the same kinds of things I wanted to talk about. Some of them were basically just brain-dumping into a camera. No fancy editing. No perfectly timed B-roll. Some didn't even seem particularly concerned about what was happening in the background. And they had tens of thousands — sometimes millions — of views.

Meanwhile, I was five weeks into a 10-minute video because I couldn't figure out how to make a fucking news article look cool enough on screen.

🙃

And listen, I wasn't about to start making shitty videos just because other people could. But I was starting to realize that maybe all the things I thought I needed to do to make a good video weren't actually necessary.

Three days later, I finished the video

I didn't suddenly become a better video editor. I didn't find some magical tutorial that taught me everything I spent the last five weeks trying to learn. I just stopped requiring myself to do all that shit before I could be done.

And three days later, the video was finished.

You'd think after spending six weeks on this thing, I'd feel proud. I didn't. I felt embarrassed. I looked at what I made and thought:

"It took you six weeks to make this weak-ass 10-minute video?

Are you serious?!

What a waste of your fucking time."

Which is kinda fucked up when you think about it. ‘Cuz I spent six weeks pushing myself because I wanted to make something I'd be proud of…only to use how long it took me as evidence that what I made wasn't good enough.

The video wasn’t even that bad

I didn't want to share it at first.

I published it, but I was so embarrassed by how long it took me to make that I couldn't see much beyond everything I thought was wrong with it.

So I basically left it alone.

Then a few weeks later, I watched it again.

And without six weeks of frustration, pressure, and THIS BETTER BE FUCKING AMAZING running through my head...

I actually liked it.

The editing I thought was so bad?

It wasn't.

Was it Martin Scorsese?

Abso-fuckin-lutely not.

But it was clear. It was entertaining. The information was solid. And honestly, the editing was better than some of the videos Raph showed me getting hundreds of thousands of views.

The video I'd spent weeks convincing myself wasn't good enough was actually...not bad at all — if I do say so myself.

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