hi, my name is Ali. I'm a doctor turned entrepreneur, and I've been making YouTube videos for the last 7 years. I've made over 800 videos, which has required overcoming a lot of perfectionistic tendencies. I also recently wrote and published a book called Feelgood Productivity, and that also required overcoming a lot of perfectionistic tendencies. So, in this episode of Not Life Advice, we're going to be looking at a guy called Andy, and he's going to share some of his perfectionistic struggles as it relates to growing his YouTube channel, for example. I'm going to share my honest advice for someone who's a perfectionist in that sense. Now, just a quick caveat, Andy's problem specifically relates to feeling like overthinking and perfectionistic when it comes to making YouTube videos, but I think the same principles apply with whatever type of perfectionistic tendencies you're struggling with, not just if you're a content creator. So, let's get into Andy's question. Hey, my name is Andy. I am currently working

full-time. I have two kids. I lead a pretty busy life, and my goal is to develop a YouTube channel that helps busy people create space in their life to do what matters most. This has been something that's been on my heart and my mind for quite some time because I just want to help people. That's all I want to do. My problem right now is that I get caught in overthinking and overanalyzing the things that I want to post. So, I have a bit of perfectionism in there where I overthink all of my content, and I think, Is it good enough? Is anybody going to see this? And it takes me so long to actually post something. And I just want to post something, but it's never good enough. So, I have posted a few videos. Sometimes I just post because done is better than perfect. And yeah. So, how do you overcome overanalyzing and overthinking content or things that you need to do? Thank you so much for all the help that you've put out.

awesome by the way thanks for that still going through it highlighting for like the second or third time thanks have a good one all righty so that was Andy asking a question about how to overcome perfectionism how to stop overthinking and just doing the thing rather than thinking about doing the thing so let's talk about that before I answer this question I want to let you guys into a little bit of insight into my own mind around these things because you know people start people ask me for advice about this sort of stuff and yeah I think it's it it it might be useful for you to hear what's what's currently going through my mind so what's currently going through my mind is that it is 7:00 in the morning I'm here in Boise Idaho in the US uh to speak at the convert kit craft Commerce conference but because of jet lag flying in from London I woke up pretty early um and I decided to go for a little walk outside and then cuz it was a nice day

and I had this little mini camera with me. I thought, Oh, why don't I film a video? And I saw Andy's question and thought, Oh, okay, this could be a fun one to do. Now, what's currently going through my mind is, Oh, you know, maybe I need to actually be sat at my desk because when talking about imposter syndrome and perfectionism and overthinking, like, you know, I'd love to be able to draw like diagrams and stuff to think about it. So maybe now is not the right time to film this video. Another thing going through my mind is like, I'm in this random park in Boise, Idaho. I've never been before in my life, and it's a super nice park, but the freaking lawnmower people are like all around the park. Like there's a dude there and a dude there and a dude there, and there's this kind of background audio, and I can hear it really loudly. And I've got this thing, so I don't know how much it's like canceling the audio and so.

what was going through in my mind is, you know, maybe I have some things to say to Andy's question, but you know, there's lawnmowers in the background, so maybe I so so so maybe I shouldn't make this video right now. Why don't I wait until tomorrow, and then, you know, I'll just wake up early tomorrow and come for another walk, and then hopefully tomorrow, like, surely they can't be mowing the lawn two days in a row. Maybe it's just like, I don't know, on a Wednesday where they mow the lawn, so like maybe I shouldn't make this video. Then there was also part of me that was thinking, oh, you know, something like a a video like this, this, you know, I I really should film it in my desk because cuz then when I'm at my desk, I can sort of think about what what I want to say and what the the the points for preparing this video are. And all of these thoughts were going through my mind, and one thing that I've Gotten.

Good at over time is to recognize when the voice of the sabur is holding me back. I talk a lot about this thing with my CEO coach, Eric Partaker. You should check him out on YouTube and Blinkist and stuff. Eric calls it the voice of the sabur. In all of our minds, in all of our brains, there is this voice that is hellbent on sabotaging whatever creative thing we are trying to do. In The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, he calls it the resistance, the voice of the sabur. It is not my voice that's saying, Oh, you know, maybe I should wait till tomorrow when the lawnmowers are gone. It's not my voice that's saying, You know, maybe I should wait until I'm at my desk so I can draw diagrams. It's the voice of the sabur that is trying to stop me from doing this creative thing. The thing with perfectionism, imposter syndrome, overthinking, generally it does get better when you have expertise in something, right? Like I no

longer feel that much impost of perfectionism overthinking when it comes to videos about about like how to grow on YouTube. Which I'm filming at my desk. Like I know how that works, right? It's not that hard. But this format of video to me is a little bit different. It's like I'm filming a video for the main Channel. I'm not doing it with the whole fancy camera setup. I'm doing it in a park while walking around. There's people running and cycling around me. Feels kind of awkward. And so this is an area where I have I don't have enough reps to be able to feel to feel ridiculously confident doing the thing. And therefore in those instances the voice of the sabator is coming online. So I wanted to share that first of all because I think it might be interesting to hear that like someone probably looks at at this YouTube channel we' Got 5 and a half million subscribers and think that oh yeah Al's made 800 plus videos over the last seven years he's got the

down but no like when it comes to when it comes to making a video that feels a little bit outside of my wheelhouse and even often for videos where I'm sitting at my desk. I also feel that voice of oh this isn't good enough oh maybe we shouldn't make this video oh maybe I need to prepare more. Oh by the way, in case you have not heard, my weekly email newsletter used to be called Sunday Snippets. It's having a bit of a rebrand. It's now called Life notes. It is a weekly-ish email that I send for free every single week where I'll be sharing notes that I am taking throughout life. So it's notes from books I'm reading, podcasts I'm listening to, videos I'm watching, conversations I'm having, and stuff that's going on in the business. There'll be a link down below if you want to subscribe or scan this QR code. And anyway, let's get back to the video. The voice of the sabur never says don't do the thing. It says we can do the thing.

but we need to work a lot harder. We need to prepare a lot more, and that's where all this sort of overthinking kind of stuff comes in. You know, if the saboteur was saying, Don't do the thing at all, you suck, it's actually easier to dismiss that. Either you just listen to it or you just dismiss it. And so you either do the thing or you don't do the thing, and it's like a lot easier to deal with the saboteur. But when the saboteur says things that are broad, reasonable like, Hey, this video might potentially be seen by a few tens of thousands of people, potentially even hundreds of thousands of people, holy, you know, we've got a responsibility here. We want to make sure the content is good. We don't just want to speak from the heart because like what the do we know. We don't want to do it while walking around in a park because like the lighting's a bit off and there's like sh lawn mowers in the background. Nah, we should totally wait.

should wait until tomorrow. We should wait until next week when we're back in London 'cause we can always film this video later. And you know what, it's like a 12-hour journey back to London. So why don't we... This is a really interesting video idea. How to think about perfectionism and overthinking, and like how to actually do the thing. So really, we should think about it for another 12 hours before we sit down and actually make the video. This is the voice of the saboteur. We all have this voice of the saboteur inside us. Andy, I know you have the voice of the saboteur inside you that's probably telling you with regards to your YouTube videos, It needs more preparation. I do not currently have enough value to give. What if people... What if I'm wasting people's time? What if they think... When you really start writing these things down, this is a strategy that can often help. Just like literally writing down what the saboteur is saying. Like Andy, if you were to figure

out like what the sabur is saying, and actually write it down. It might say something like, I must prepare this video for another 20 hours, otherwise it's not valuable enough. Huh, interesting. But like, if a friend were to ask you, Andy, you know, have you got any tips? And you know, you're a dad, you got two kids, you got a job, you want to, you're starting a YouTube channel, man, how, how do you make time for it all? What would you say to the friend, genuinely, over coffee? Oh, sorry mate, um, I've got to do 20 hours of preparation on that before I can even give you a vague semblance of an answer, 'cause I'm just really worried I'm not providing enough value to you. No, of course you wouldn't. If you were talking to a friend and that friend was asking you that specific question, you would be able to just give them a response. You would speak from the heart. You wouldn't be overthinking it. There's something about putting stuff out there on the Internet or submitting

a work assignment or a homework assignment or whatever the thing might be. Where that context of doing the thing is so different from us just being asked a question question by a friend. And if we were asked a question by a friend, of course, we'd have a great response to the thing. So that is one hack that I found really helpful. Like genuinely is thinking whenever the voice of the sabur, the voice of perfectionism is in my mind. Thinking to myself, okay, if I were to change the context, does that change how I feel about the thing I had so much perfectionism when it came to my book, right? Because a book is like a serious thing. It's like a a piece of paper that's out there in the real world and in bookstores and stuff. I still have yet to see it in a bookstore myself. I've had photos from friends send it to me from various different bookstores. Oh my goodness, people can review it on Amazon. Oh my goodness, what if people don't like the book? Then that's going to be absolutely terrible.

okay there's a lawnmower in that direction so let's go back this way. That's going to be absolutely terrible. What if people don't like the book holy. And so one thing I would say Andy or anyone else struggling with imposter syndrome, perfectionism is, what would it look like if you changed the format and does your perfectionism still hold true if you to change the context or the format of the thing that you are doing. Tactic number two for dealing with perfectionism essentially for me when I feel that sense of perfectionism, it's a sense of, okay, I am making something at this level of quality and I want the thing to be at that level of quality and it's not yet at that level of quality, therefore I must work to get it from here, which is a sh level quality, to there, which is a good level of quality, you know that kind of idea. And this idea is, you know, it's again reasonable. It is not unreasonable to say that like, you know, my work is here and I

want to get it to there, and therefore, I have to do more work to get the thing there. The way that I personally get over is I tell myself that the bar is: does this thing have the potential to help at least one person who is watching it, or reading it, or listening to it? Does this thing have the potential to help at least one person? It doesn't even have to help that one person, because actually helping them is outside of my control. But does it have the potential to help at least one person? Does this video that I'm filming from the heart, without really any preparation, just sort of answering this question that Andy's brought up, does my answer here, does my spiel, however long it ends up being, have the potential to help at least one person? Now, if you're watching this, then by definition, you have found the first bit of this video sufficiently valuable to keep watching, right? That's a weird kind of thought for me because right now I'm just here on my own in this random park in the middle of nowhere in Boise, Idaho.

and so I don't know how people are going to respond to this video, but all I know is my bar is: does this have the potential to help at least one person? And if it does, then I'll post the thing, and if it doesn't, then I won't post the thing. Me photographing a photo of my coffee and posting it on like a YouTube Community post, does that have the potential to help at least one person? Probably not, so I wouldn't post a random photo of my coffee on a YouTube Community post. This is an idea I stole from Austin Kleon's amazing book Show Your Work. Show Your Work is a book I read in 2016. I've reread it multiple times since then. I would really recommend Andy or whoever watching this if you haven't read Show Your Work by Austin Kleon. It's really, really good. That was the book that really helped me get over the fear, the perfectionism, the fear, you know, let's call it fear. Like, you know, perfectionism and fear are basically the

same thing. Um, it helped me get over the fear of starting a personal website 'cause I had all sorts of like overthinking about it, etc., etc., and your work taught me if your work has the potential to help at least one person along in their journey, then there is almost a moral obligation on you to share that thing and to do that thing and to post that thing. So, Andy, Andy, you who is overthinking these videos that you're posting on your YouTube channel, it's worth defining what is your bar for quality. Is the bar for quality, I think this has to be really good because that is actually a really hard bar to meet, especially if you're new to the thing, especially if you're, you know, a little bit harder on yourself than you would be on your friends. What is the bar really for me? The bar is: does this have the potential to help at least one person, and also am I proud of it? Um, for me, being proud of something, yeah, I put more work into it. Often I'm more proud of it, but often

being proud of something for me I found a way to turn it into like. I am proud of a thing if it has the potential to help help at least one person. I don't overthink my kind of. I try not to overthink my production value or making sure I've got like multiple cinematic shots or making sure that like everything is super super tight in the edit cuz I've tried doing that and and I realized in in periods of my life where I was really overthinking my content the content was just worse and I was enjoying it less and one of the B one of the major principles of the book feel good productivity is that if you can enjoy your work you become better at it you become more creative you become less stressed become more productive but you also have more energy to give to the other important areas of your life. I was at this uh retreat thing in San Francisco a couple weeks ago and there's this executive coach whose name is Joe Hudson absolute Legend um he's

featuring on the Pod shortly. He is like an executive coach to some of Silicon Valley's biggest CEOs that you will have definitely heard of, and his whole shtick is that enjoyment is efficiency. If you can find a way to enjoy what you're doing and optimize for enjoyment of the process, you will actually do better work than if you are optimizing for trying to do better work. So, Andy, a question I would put to you or anyone else watching this: If you're struggling with perfectionism, is what if you weren't concerned about the quality of the thing, and your main goal was in just enjoying the process of creating the thing, whatever the thing might be? What if you weren't concerned about how good it was? What If instead you were only concerned with how can you personally enjoy that process as much as possible? Dar I say, what would it look like if it were fun? This is my phone wallpaper. What would this look like if it were fun? What would it look like if it were fun? You know, this is this is the

whole stick. What would it look like if it were fun? Finding the fun is another way of combating perfectionism and this overthinking that we get around posting stuff. There's a few other strategies I find helpful for dealing with this sort of thing 'cause I deal with it a lot. The microcosm of this video that you are now watching is a great example of dealing with dealing with perfectionism and stuff. The other thing I think is the voice of the sabur for me often stops me from even trying. Like before picking up this little camera to film this video, the voice of the sabur was in my mind saying, Nah, nah, nah, we don't need to film. Come on, like, you know it's 7:00 in the morning. We should wait until we get to the desk, etc., etc. The voice of the sabur was stopping me from hitting record. But once I've hit record, I've now been recording for 19 minutes. I've enjoyed myself. I'm getting the steps in. It's super nice scenery. It's

great vibes. And if I hadn't pressed record, I wouldn't have come. I wouldn't, I wouldn't have made this video, which by definition, if you are watching this, then you've found the last bit sufficiently valuable. In a bit of a, it's a bit of a trippy thought, but the voice of the sabur was stopping me from pressing record. And so, the thing that I've gotten really good at is just telling the voice of the sabur, like I'm just going to record it and I don't need to publish it. I'm going to create the thing, but I can always decide to scrap the thing if it sucks. And that often shuts up the sabur, 'cause then the sabur is like, oh, okay, well fine. Uh, but are you sure, like, aren't you really tired? Like, you've got a bit of a zit on your nose. Like, do you really want to film the thing right now? Can't we just wait till tomorrow? Oh, wow, look at this, it's a freaking

River this is so nice guys. Is this what every random American city is like town city Boise Idaho. The voice of the savitur is trying to Pro it's trying to stop me from H hitting record but if I can just convince the voice that hey um we don't need to publish this we're just going to create it and see what happens then you know it's it's hard for the sabot to stay in sabotaging mode. What I find with a lot of YouTubers is that there's a lot of resistance to pressing the record button. I get this as well even for filming filming proper videos uh when I'm sitting at my desk there a lot of resistance to just hitting record but once I hit record and once I start talking then like I don't know the creative spirit moves within me or whatever terminology you want to use for this. Now that I'm 20 minutes into the video I kind of know in my mind oh okay actually I think I think this might

actually be a reasonable video. Reasonable just being the bar for. I think this video might potentially add value to at least one person who's watching. This. One thing that I find when it comes to YouTube videos is that for more than 50% of the videos that I've ever filmed after filming it I have felt like, uh, that was terrible. But then for about 98% of videos, once it's been edited and I've had like a couple of weeks to not see the video and to not be so in my head about it, um, it then, I then think, oh, that's actually not bad. Because when, when we're filming videos and when we're doing a first draft of a book or a manuscript or a thing, whatever the thing might be, when you're in the creation of it, it's a very messy process. Process. This process right now of creating this video feels very messy to me. I'm sort of pulling stuff in from different, different areas of my life, from different parts of my brain, and I'm like, I don't, I don't really know how.

it's all going to fit together, but I've done this enough times now that I trust that from first rough cut, from first draft, from raw video recording to finished product, there is actually a large amount of magic that happens in post, that happens in the edit, where we can chop out any ums and rs and mistakes, and sometimes we'll artfully leave the mistakes in because the mistakes are nice and humanizing and stuff. I know that the end product post-editing is often quite reasonable, and so I've done this enough times that when the voice of the sabur says, don't film the video, it might suck, I'm like, I'm going to film the video anyway. If it sucks, I can always delete it. But generally, I would, if I were to put money on it, I would say that this video is a video that we're going to publish on the main Channel. Probably, it's probably going to be good enough, and you know what, if it's not, we'll put it on

the second Channel either way this video is going to get published somewhere on the internet, and I hope it'll add value to at least one person. That's a thought that's in my mind as I'm confronting the sabur principal, number six or seven or whatever we are now. I have even lost count, but that's okay cuz we're going to fix it in post, right editing team? Please, thank you. Um, principal number whatever I am on is a phrase I heard from Cal Newport, who is the Mega bestselling author of The book's deep work, and so good they can't ignore you, and most recently, slow productivity, which is a great book. Cal gave me some advice about book writing a couple years ago when I was in the throws of writing my own book. I asked him, you know, how often do you deal with perfectionism and like how do you, you know, don't you think that your work sucks, uh, in the sense like don't you think it sucks in the process of making it and like I

was I was having all of these thoughts um that my book was crap, and that it wasn't worth publishing and stuff, and Cal said to me, and he's been writing for like two decades, um so about 10 times longer than I have, he said to me, oh I get that all the time. I tell myself one thing: this one just needs to be reasonable, the next one is going to be good. This one just needs to be reasonable, the next one is going to be good. So when Cal was working on his books productivity, he told himself, you know what, slow productivity doesn't need to be a good book, it just needs to be reasonable, the next one is going to be good. And he says he, and he told me that he repeated that thing to himself for every book that he wrote, and he's written like six, seven of them now, and is super successful at it. This one just needs to be reasonable, the next one is going to be good. So Andy, when it comes to that thing that you are struggling with, that thing that you're feeling, the

perfectionism. The overthinking, the overanalyzing. I can't put this thing out there. What if you just lowered the bar? If you said, This one just needs to be reasonable. And reasonable, again, you can define as, it just needs to have the potential to help at least one person. That's reasonable. This video, I think, is going to be a reasonable video. I don't think it's going to be a good video because I don't like thinking of my videos as good. But that's fine. It just needs to be reasonable. The goal is not to make a good video. The goal is to add value to someone else's life, which leads me to the next point, which maybe the final point, which is that I think a lot of perfectionism stems from sort of a focus on the self and a focus on one's own ego. That, I can't possibly put this thing out there because if I put this thing out there, then people will think of me as bad in some way, because the thing might be bad.

whatever, it's not usually from speaking to people and from hearing it myself that it's not usually this thing would be completely useless to everyone who's watching it. It's not usually that because because usually that's an easy one to to eliminate like really. It's going to be completely useless so people will watch it, they'll sit through it, and they will find it. 100% of people are going to find it completely an UT useless to the point they're going to get zero shred of value from it. That seems a bit unlikely. Usually we're not actually being perfectionistic because we care about the audience so much because we really value their time. Like, Oh my goodness, I'm so perfectionistic about my PhD dissertation because I value the time of my examiner and I don't want to be mean to them in creating a shitty product. It's like it's usually not that, it's usually, I don't want this thing to go out there because I am afraid I will be thought of as bad for having put this thing out there.

which does not meet some arbitrary standard, and usually, we find that our own standards for ourselves are like ridiculously high, and often excessively high, and often unhelpfully high. It's a focus on the self, and at least for me, what I found as a way of combating perfectionism is to remove the focus from myself and put it on someone else again. Just this idea of I'm not creating this video for myself, you know. I can do other things for fun. If I were trying to have fun, I'd be watching YouTube videos. I'd be watching finishing the last of us, the TV show. I'd be, I don't know, playing on my Nintendo Switch. That's what I do for fun. I am not doing this video for me. I'm doing this video because I think it potentially has the potential, potentially has the potential to help at least one person. It is about the other person that I could potentially help with this video. It doesn't matter if the

thing is not perfect. Um, you can just ask yourself, like, have you ever gotten value from a YouTube video that the Creator might have thought is not perfect? Probably maybe. If you're watching this, Andy, or whoever you are watching this, this is not a perfect YouTube video. This is not the sort of YouTube video a YouTube guru, i.e., me, would tell people that, Oh yeah, you should make this video to grow your channel. But the fact you're here and watching this means that you have found enough value from this video to continue watching it, which is very gratifying. So thank you for being here so far. So, Andy, again, it just comes down to this thing. When you're being perfectionistic about your YouTube videos, I suspect if you're anything like me, it's because, uh, you don't want your ego to be bruised from the thought that, God forbid, you might put something out there, but you might put out something there that, uh, is not meeting some arbitrary Quality Bar that you've created for

yourself in your own mind. But if you were to remove that focus from the self and think about it from the context of the people that you're serving, because this is an act of service making a YouTube video. It's not an act of selfishness, it's an act of service. And when you do anything in the spirit of service, that is also one of the things that stops the voice of the sabur from creating these perfectionistic narratives that eventually end up leading to lives that we don't particularly enjoy. Anyway, one of the things about being a YouTuber, one of the things about doing any creative act, is that there is a balancing act between the soul and the numbers, or the sto or or the or the soul and the statistics. And often soul comes from being under optimized in how you do things. I hope that when this video comes out and when I see the edited version, it will feel like a soulful video. It'll be like, Oh, this was merely oi talking from the heart, going for a walk, and sharing.

stuff that he's found useful that's nice. This video is not going to go viral, right? The goal of this video is not to try and get 5 million views. The goal of this video, as I've said repeatedly, is simply to potentially provide value to at least one person who's watching it. And so as I was thinking about huh, what should my end screen sales pitch be for this particular video, because that's what you should do as a YouTuber. I'm like, you know what, actually, I can let go of that. I can let go of that need for the statistics, you know. Obviously we'll still title and thumbnail this video in a reasonable way, and we'll do like a bit of a hook at the start and stuff like fine. There are sensible things we can do to increase the reach of this video because then it helps more people, and framing it, framing it in that sense helps me feel less icky about doing like algorithm hacky type stuff, retention hacking, and like trying to keep people

interested in the video. Um, so if you are here at the end of this ridiculously long video, you are the sort of person that I would probably vibe with because we probably have good things to talk about. But I'd love to hear in a comment down below, what is one thing you're struggling with? 'Cause I love making these sorts of videos where I'm just sort of speaking from the heart and sharing stuff that I found useful. And often a lot of the struggles of you guys, um, are things that I've been through various stages of my life and still probably go through today. And so I like being able to share from the heart and just chatting about things that might potentially, as I said, help at least one person. So what is something that you are struggling with that you might like my take on? If you can leave that as a in in in a comment as a question, that would be super helpful. Um, also if you would like to submit a video question in the same way that Andy did, we'll put a link to

that video submission thingy. I want to do more content like this, where it's just really fun for me to be able to answer someone's question directly and turn it into like a freaking 35-minute long sermon. It's just fun, you know? What would this look like if it were fun? I asked myself this question about my YouTube channel a lot, and one of the things I've landed on is, Oh, well, if it were fun, I'd be answering questions from the audience. I wouldn't just be coming up with a video topic and then deciding to make videos about it. I would be like, yeah, answering a question from the audience so that I can feel that there's genuinely someone on the other end, because it's otherwise it's hard to appreciate like the numbers and what that means, in terms of there being real-life people on the other end. And now, because we might as well do the retention thing, if you have not yet seen my video, my honest advice for someone wanting Financial Freedom, you

might like to check out that video over there. Otherwise, thank you very much for watching, and hopefully you got some value out of this. I'll see you in the next one. Bye-bye.

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