The Daily 5's Origin Story

[00:00:00] Well hello, this is The Daily Five with Aurooba. That's me, where we reflect on creating our best lives a little bit every day. Here we go.

[00:00:15] I am really nervous about the release of my little free series on JavaScript Essentials, so today we're going to deviate from regular content and talk about the Daily 5 and content creation instead. It is related, I promise. I have not released any content at all since October, on YouTube that is. And I haven't done anything significant in the realm of content creation outside of viewSource, the podcast, and this podcast for at least a year, I would say.

[00:00:51] My last content sprint was a 24 hour challenge I set myself to create a mini course, which I turned into my first paid product. And you know, this is actually part of the origin story of The Daily Five. Not this particular course that's coming out, but the paralysis I have always felt when it comes to creating content.

[00:01:12] The problem of having really high standards and expectations sometimes is that you often can't make yourself release things you don't think are as perfect as you can make them. And yet, done is better than perfect if perfect never gets done. In order to try to overcome this problem, which seems to plague me specifically very, very intensely in the realm of content creation, I spontaneously started The Daily Five back in the day in an effort to get over this ridiculous paralysis.

[00:01:45] Do you know, I have coached and helped many people become content creators, quite a few. There are a bunch of people who can attribute to their start in content creation to getting a kick in the butt for me. And yet, somehow, I can never seem to do it for myself. And when other people try to be forceful with me, it tends to backfire very terribly for them. And for me.

[00:02:13] The first season of The Daily Five was wild. It was unplanned, highly stressful, and all over the place. But there were definitely good nuggets there. And probably the most important thing it taught me was my own capacity to commit and consistently show up given the right amount of motivation and incentive.

[00:02:34] You know, the Daily 5 is not some super popular podcast. The second season is more popular than the first, but that first season, I averaged about 20 downloads an episode at best. So, you know, there was really no external pressure. Who would notice if I missed a day or two? Maybe a couple people here and there.

[00:02:53] Certainly not enough to create any kind of external incentive for me to keep on track. So the fact that I showed up day in and day out and missed only a couple days here and there was entirely a testament to my own internal ability to do so. And that was a very big lesson for me.

[00:03:12] Now, by the end of the first season, I was fried, frustrated, tired, and I hated it. And the exercise of showing up every single day for nearly 98 days, doing something that felt incredibly difficult and sometimes pointless, given its lack of popularity, drained me of the ability to create any other content for a long time. But what I learned in that season firmly cemented itself into my brain, and it came out in other parts of my life that began to improve in ways I never anticipated.

[00:03:44] I did not do a lot of content creation last year after that first season, but I did create a mini course. I did release a YouTube video I was proud of, and I wrote a handful of small articles. It was something. Now as we all know, at the end of last year, I decided to bring back The Daily Five, this time with a plan.

[00:04:05] And I'm delighted to say that I have not missed a single day this far, this season, and I'm still enjoying myself. This time around, not only do I have a plan, but I also have a better support system. My spouse and I talked about the kind of encouragement I'm most receptive to so that he can help me when I lose energy or willpower. And he's in my corner in a way that helps me out a lot.

[00:04:30] And now I've got this free course thing coming out, and I'm already planning content that will come out after this series as well. So maybe, it took a full year or so, but maybe that lesson I was trying to teach myself is starting to sink in. Some things take time.

[00:04:48] It's frustrating, to be sure, but it's okay. If there's one takeaway from this episode, it is this: things sometimes happen in their own time, and we still need to strive for them and do things to make them happen. Thanks for listening. Same time tomorrow?