Keeping track of my discoveries, progress, and inspiration.

Plough One Field At A Time

In 2019 I sent a long email to best-selling author Ryan Holiday explaining how his book The Obstacle Is The Way had impacted my life. I noticed that he had recently started a podcast and YouTube channel so I also mentioned that I could edit audio, videos, thumbnails, whatever he needed. Now after hundreds of podcasts, videos, and hours behind a camera I’ve helped grow the Daily Stoic YouTube and watched how Ryan has strategically built his platform.

Last week he wanted to post a video about some lessons he’s learned from the band Iron Maiden. “What does Iron Maiden have to do with Stoic philosophy?” Ryan asks in the intro of the video, “Nothing, but this is my channel and I’m going to talk about what I want to talk about,”

It might not seem like it has anything to do with Stoicism, but as he says, it’s his channel and he wants to talk about it. Which is a great lesson in building a platform and very similar to how Bruce Dickinson sees being in Iron Maiden. He says:

“We have our field and we’ve got to plough it and that’s it. What’s going on in the next field is of no interest to us; we can only plough one field at a time.”

Be more concerned with what you’re doing and less about what everyone else is doing.

Helter Skelter

When I first published that video, YouTube blocked it. There was a 3rd party ad so we weren’t worried about it getting blocked from monetization which meant using as much Iron Maiden footage and music as possible. But after uploading, YouTube wouldn’t let the video be seen. Mostly because of two parts where longer pieces of music were played. I cut them out and the video went live but a similar thing happened when I tried to post this clip of me playing the Helter Skelter guitar riff to TikTok. I had the music pretty low compared to my guitar but it still got muted the first time I posted. So I distorted the song to where it was almost unrecognizable, still muted. Tried it one more time where you could barely hear the song and it uploaded but the algorithm wasn’t having it. I posted the same video without making the song unrecognizable to Instagram and it had no problems.

Lesson learned: Instagram doesn’t care about copyrighted music. TikTok and YouTube do.

Go A Long Way Round

Doing what matters to you, following the rules of the algorithm, and creating great content are all things that will contribute to building a platform, but that’s not what really does it. Doing it over and over and over again for a long time is.

C.S. Lewis used the terms nearness-by-likeness and nearness-of-approach to distinguish between these two ideas. To help explain he uses an analogy:

“Let us suppose that we are doing a mountain walk to the village which is our home. At mid-day we come to the top of a cliff where we are, in space, very near to it because it is just below us. We could drop a stone into it. But as we are no cragsmen we can’t get down. We must go a long way round; five miles, maybe.”

Making a great video that you are really excited about is the exact same thing you’ll be doing when you have millions of subscribers, but it doesn’t mean that it’ll happen overnight. Perfectly fine tuning your YouTube and TikTok videos so that they have the best chances of getting pushed by the algorithm is exactly what you should be doing now with 13 followers, but it’s also what you’ll be doing when there are hundreds of thousands. The important thing is that you do it for a long time. That you go the long way round.

Talk to you next week,

Dawson