My YouTube Story

Key Takeaways

hey what's up guys so you're probably thinking this isn't Tom's normal backdrop and you would be right so this week I'm actually in Portland Oregon staying with my friend Chase and this is his much cooler office than mine um he's let me use it for a while and this week I wanted to do a video to follow up on last week's video which went over that whole passion versus experience and skills debate and I kind of wanted to just augment that video which was a more General discussion with my own experience how I got to where I am today and how I became a YouTuber now I know a lot of people have done like these my YouTube Story videos and they're really cool I like to watch them for the people that I enjoy watching but I want to frame mine in the context of how I got to here from where I was as a student early on in my college career and near the end of high school and kind of like show how my major selection which was totally different than what I'm doing now progressed into me being a full-time YouTuber so and I'm like away from home so I don't have access to my full computer but if I have pictures online I'll kind of like throw them up in here and kind of like make the story a little bit more visual so let's go back to like high school um actually I'm GNA go back a little bit further than that because my major selection was was really really different than being a YouTuber like I didn't go into film I didn't go into Communications or journalism or anything like that I went into a major called management information systems and this is basically like the IT guy major so like if you think of the guy who's running all the networks and systems at a big Corporation or like the dude who runs all the computers at your school and makes sure the computer labs are set up like that's what I wanted to be I grew up watching The Matrix and like my favorite character was tank the dude who had like 15 monitors and all the scrolling text coming down and I wanted to be that I wanted to run all these systems because when I was I think 12 years old um I wanted to make a website and I found this site called like Yahoo geoc cities where you could drag and drop elements onto a page and it was basically like PowerPoint so I made a website for like a favorite band of mine and it was terrible it looked really terrible and uh eventually I was like so fed up with it that I wanted to start changing things and the drag and drop editor wouldn't let me do it so I had to figure out how to start coding my own websites and I was reading tutorials on like these super old websites one was called like web monkey I think and um I just kind of learned HTML and CSS and a lot of the other languages that like the web is built upon and I was having fun building my own websites and I kind of put that aside for a while but then during my junior year of high school I met a friend in a math class and uh we got talking about web design cuz he said that he knew how to code and I was like well hey dude I also know how to code uh why don't we set up our own business and charge people to build websites so that was actually what we did and uh right after high school ended I had like I had so much trouble finding a summer job because I was not yet 18 and I was also going off to college so nobody wanted to hire me so we just went out and found clients and built websites for them and that sort of Built This Love of computers and the reason I went into Information Systems rather than like computer science or computer engineering is because Information Systems is more of a mix between business and computers and the reason I love to business is because when I was a junior or maybe even a sophomore I can't remember the year now but I joined a club called business Professionals of America in my high school I basically did it because I needed stuff to put on my resume for college applications um but it was fun and we got to go to these like State conferences where we'd stay in a hotel and you'd have to do competitions and the competitions I entered were like HTML coding and web design and I did a business plan competition which kind of like got my appetite wetted for entrepreneurship and I ended up running for State office and got elected as the state treasurer which let me travel to a different state I went to Reno and Nevada went to the National Conference and it was super cool and I was kind of getting these ideas in my head that maybe someday I wanted to be an entrepreneur or at least do something involving business but I also wanted to kind of meld technology into that with computer stuff so M it was I ended up declaring my major early in College I think most people declare their Majors uh two years after they start college so after their junior year starts but I ended up declaring my major during my sophomore year and I started getting into these classes and uh right away on campus I got a job at the campus Tech Support Center so I got to learn how to remove viruses and basically how computers worked like from the ground up and it was really cool and that led into an internship where I worked at a Fortune 500 company and um I worked in the network department and this is kind of where things started started to shift because my preconceived notion of the networking Department was that I would be a dude who would like be wiring up servers and Hauling cable around this gigantic corporate campus and I'd be able to kind of go through all the secret tunnels and be all over the place all day long and I'd always wanted to find a well-paying job that was Technical and like intellectually challenging but also physically challenging I didn't want to be in a cubicle all day so I got this internship and it turned out to be nothing but cubicle work was like in a box 40 hours a week just changing like configuration settings in servers and what I learned actually and this is what I alluded to in the other video you kind of have to learn what you don't like to do as well as what you do like to do what I learned is I really don't like maintaining things I like to create things and I had almost no opportunities to create things in that role it was all maintenance and it was all sitting in the cubicle and it was like almost a prison sentence to me the co-workers were cool like they gave me a lot of opportunities and I hate to say it but like the work itself ended up being almost like a PR sentence which kind of motivated me further to keep working on college infogeek so go back like a year before that internship started I got a summer job on campus and I don't really know what to call this job because they called us Cyclone AIDS since uh Sai is the mascot of Iowa State University where I went I'm just going to call it like student orientation assistant basically my job was to give tours to the campus to other students and parents and help them sign up for classes and also answer any and all questions people had about the college and about the like experience of going to college itself so I was learning all this stuff and at the same time I was reading blogs like life hacker and other things like that and there was this one like college specific blog that I was a huge fan of and near the end of my freshman year they actually were hiring some new writers so I applied but I got rejected and I had like this whole application and i' had written this whole post for them as part of that application I didn't want it to go to waste so I just figured I would put up my own blog and it was just like another one of these attempts to kind of bolster my resume and have a personal project that would look good to employers and I just sort of did it for fun for like a full year until right around the time I did that internship a year later uh one of my posts kind of blew up and got shared all around the web and since I was like hating that job so much I decided to pour all of my time into trying to make this website as big as it possibly could be and it was just writing at first but I actually ended up finding out that I liked to write and there was a lot of C activity in it I got to create things I got to share things with people and help people out and I found out that was much more conducive to my personal traits than changing configurations and servers in a cubicle for 40 hours a week so that's what I ended up doing like all throughout College whenever I had free time I would work on articles and I would soak up as much knowledge as I possibly could from people like mentors of mine and people I looked up to and eventually I found out that I was really liking to listen to podcasts when I was at the gym or driving and I found that I was like listening to podcasts more often than I was reading blogs maybe a couple years after I started the blog so beginning of 2013 I was like I can start my own podcast and that is exactly what I did started the college infogeek podcast uh which you can find down in the description for this video and then I think it was like the middle of 2014 the same thing happened again where I noticed like I'm watching a lot of YouTube videos I'm not reading very many blog posts anymore I'm listening to fewer podcasts and I'm putting a lot of my time into YouTube for whatever reason reason and I'd found creators like cat Icarus and my friend Satchel Dres and my friend Youngtown like I was watching video game channels cuz I really like video games but I was also really fascinated with how they edited their videos and kind of like put it all together and I was really curious about how all that worked so just like with podcasting I figured what the heck I'll just try doing some videos I I didn't even want to become a YouTuber really I just wanted to have some videos to throw on my blog as like a way to shake things up but the response to the videos was way better like way way better than I had ever gotten for podcast or for blog post for anything else and so here we are and what I found with videos is every week I can kind of push myself to learn something new and like use a new editing technique or do some different kind of Animation or light the set a little bit differently like it never gets old so I ended up kind of finding my passion through this long progression of just adding different types of content to my website and that's kind of how I got to where I am now today I really didn't have a whole lot of experience making videos uh before I became a YouTuber the only real experience I had besides like making dumb videos with my brother as a kid was uh I think it was the summer after my junior year I had spoken at this event called ignite which is a an event where you do like five minute talks and every slide progresses every 15 seconds so you like have to know your slides perfectly and they had not yet posted the videos of the talks online and I wanted to see mine so I just emailed the department who had put the event on I was like hey if you guys want uh I could help edit those videos I don't really know how to edit very well but I'm willing to learn and they told me well we're already done editing those videos but we have another video project and pays if you want to learn will teach you so I said heck yes let's do it it was like a few week project really wasn't a long thing at all but they taught me how to use Final Cut and they taught me kind of like how to do lighting for uh setups like documentary setups and that kind of like built a little bit of a foundation that I was able to apply to my YouTube videos and I actually don't use Final Cut anymore but a lot of a lot of the concepts were the same and I was able to sort of apply them to what I was doing so that's kind of my YouTube story and hopefully this gives a little bit of context to the video from last week about you know passions and experiences for me my passion really came out of like five full years of just working on this website and adding new things and also doing other part-time jobs and internships and finding out what I didn't want to do and really getting this motivation to make this work so I didn't have to do that kind of stuff in the future so hopefully this has provided some sort of context or helped you in some way and uh I'll see you next week hey there guys thanks so much for watching this video If you want to get new tips on being a more effective student every single week you can click that big red subscribe button right there also I wrote a free book on how to get better grades so if you want to get a free copy of it click the picture of the book and I'll send you one and if you want to check out the article for this video click the orange button right there and it'll take you to that page you missed last week's video again we talked about that passion versus skills and effort debate so check it out if you missed it and I'm on Twitter or Instagram at tomf frankley if you would like to connect see you next week [Music]