The Second Stumbling Step
When I was a kid, the dream career was to become a professional athlete. As an athlete, you don’t have to be good at school. You just have to be good at the sport. If you make it big, you make millions just by having fun. Our parents encouraged us to pick more practical careers, but we hoped for careers that were lucrative, easy, and flashy.
Once I hit high school, everyone wanted to be a rapper. How hard could it be to write a few lyrics and rap them into a microphone? Every aspiring rapper carried with them a notebook containing chicken-scratch verses about drugs, whores, and a gang life they had never really experienced. The fame and fortune were there, and it didn’t matter if you had nothing to your name as long as you could speak.
The current generation of adolescents now seem to have their sights set on becoming YouTubers. People still want to be athletes and rappers, but the new dream is to sit in front of a computer, talk, and make bank. For the aspiring YouTuber, all they need is a camera, a computer, and the rest will take care of itself. When I mention to some youth at my work that I have a YouTube channel, their immediate reaction was to question how much money I make. For them, YouTube is a weekly paycheck as long as you have a video.
With my second published video, I have intimately discovered how difficult it is to “be a YouTuber.” Multi-tasking, editing, wit, timing, and execution are all acquired skills, and a microphone and a capture card aren’t going to learn them for you. With this video, I continue to struggle with audio and video quality as I grapple with delivering jokes in coherent sentences. I see progress from my first video, but celebrity status is a long way away. As with being an athlete or rapper, YouTubing can be just as difficult and demanding as any other job.
As always, if you have pointers, let me know. I’ve got adolescents to impress.