If you’re a young videographer, you might be wondering if it’s worth it to go to college. With all the information available through YouTube videos and online courses, college might seem like a debt you don’t need to incur. But don’t make a “dropping out of college” vlog just yet. Let me break down some of the peripheral benefits.

If you can swap out only a small portion of your entertainment time for education time, you’ll exponentially increase your value as an employee, or as a freelancer in the open market. Think of it this way: our skills and our knowledge are subject to inflation of information. Every year, technology makes our jobs easier, thousands of people gain the skills we already have, and the value of our knowledge diminishes.

“Your entire life happens inside your body. It's the one home you will always occupy and can never sell.”

“We can’t have anyone sign a contract, and there can’t be any required posts. But trust me. If we get all these guys together with no pressure, they’ll post dozens of times.” This is what I told a brand manager, pitching her on an influencer trip for my client.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed, or if you’re up against a creative block, it might be because of the invisible audience. You have an imaginary audience, with imaginary critics in the front row, in a grand stadium called “Microsoft Word Stadium.” None of that exists.

In his study, participants had to work through a difficult puzzle. Some were told they could eat freshly baked cookies before working on the puzzle, and others were told they had to refrain. Those who refrained worked on the puzzle for less time than those who didn’t have to spend their willpower and decision-making power on not eating cookies.

After a while, I changed the analytics view to only show me website traffic month over month, instead of day over day. This decision brought me less anxiety, while still showing me helpful trends that I could use to grow my community.

Recently, I created a full marketing tech stack for a client selling an online course using only Squarespace. We created the landing page, captured emails, sent email campaigns, and hosted the course on Squarespace with their new Member Areas. This made the process so much easier since we didn’t have to switch between multiple software interfaces, and integrate them all.

Your parents and professors may be pushing you to get a "stable" job. But stable jobs don't exist anymore. I wish I could tell you how many of my friends have gotten laid off in an instant, along with hundreds of others, from top tier companies like Tesla, Uber, Headspace, AT&T, etc. Corporations have no loyalty to employees like they used to.

IMDB lists over 500,000 unique feature-length movies. Spotify hosts over 82 million songs. Research center UNESCO states that over two million books are published each year. So what makes you think you can’t publish something?

Betting money on your strategy working? Bold move. But do you know what’s an even bolder move? Betting time on it. Betting emotional energy on it. Betting the chance that you might be wrong on it. This is much more difficult to do, because these are more valuable resources.

How often do you instinctively type the letters Y, T, or I into your web browser? And how quickly do those letters populate YouTube, Twitter, or Instagram? Too quickly. And then, before you know it, you’ve been scrolling for fifteen minutes that you’ll never be able to get back. Redirector puts a line of defense in between you and wasted time.

As exciting and compelling as it is to move to a big city, and make friends with all the big shots, and work with all the cool brands, it might not be the best way to run your business. I lived a quarter mile from Venice Beach’s Abbot Kinney, where all the hip new shops flock. I saw dozens of brands come and go in the years I lived there, spending fortunes on rent, and folding twelve months later.

Creative people who have trained their minds to vividly see what doesn’t yet exist are often susceptible to even more vivid anxieties and temptations than others.

Here’s an efficiency hack: spend less time on it. Seriously! What if the the things you want but don’t have time for could be achieved at an acceptable level in way less time? Even if it’s not perfect, 90% of the value will still be translated to the audience with the efficient version.

Set up next to a window or go outside, and use the natural light to illuminate your product. A really cheap way to increase the quality of your videos is to incorporate creative backgrounds. Colorful poster-boards, textured walls, and computer screens all work well.

You can find a lot of models for under $100 per hour in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. They have great search criteria for specialty, age, height, gender, ethnicity, weight, hair color, union status and more.

This inspiration was exciting, but it was distracting me from what I should have been working on. I’m a huge nerd for inspiration and motivation, but I’m coming to realize that there’s a time and a place for each. Below, I’ll break down each one, and discuss when it’s best to seek them out, and when it’s best to ignore them.

Don’t let the words of bad clients who said you were “too expensive” reverberate longer than they already have. Drown out these voices, or walk away from them until they fade. Sometimes, the most helpful thing you can do for a pitch is to stop working on it until you feel confident again.

Curation adds incredible value to an audience with very little effort in comparison to creating original content. And if you can curate premium content, adding thoughtful comments along with it, the public perception of your work will increase in value as well. People will associate your work with the work you’re curating.