字幕列表 影片播放 列印英文字幕 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. He's letting me use 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 just want to augment that video, which is more general discussion, with my own experience, how I got to where I am today and how I became a YouTuber. Not a lot of people have done like these "My You Tube" 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 going to go back a little bit further than that. Because my major selection was really, really different than being a YouTuber. 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 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, I wanted to make a website. And I found this site called like Yahoo GeoCities, where you could drag and drop elements onto a page, and it was basically like Power Point. So I made a website for like a favorite band of mine, and it was terrible, it looked really terrible and 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 and like these super old websites. One was called like Web Monkey I think, and 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 we got to talking about web design because he said that he knew how to code, and I was like, "Well, hey, dude, I also know how to code. "Why don't we set up our own business "and charge people to build websites?" So that was actually what we did, and 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 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 loved the 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 at my high school. I basically did it because I needed stuff to put on my resume for college applications. But it was fun, and we got to go to these like state conferences, where we'd stay in a hotel, and we'd have to do competitions, and the competitions I entered were like HTML coding and web design. I did a business plan competition, which kind of like got my appetite whetted 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, I 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 MIS it was. I ended up declaring my major early in college. I think most people declare their majors 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 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 I worked in the network department. And this is kind of where things started to shift. Because my preconceived notion of the networking department was that I would 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. I 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 elude to in the end of the 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. 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, but like the work itself ended up being almost like a prison sentence. Which kind of motivated me further to keep working on College Info Geek. So go back like a year before that internship started, I got a summer job on on campus, and I don't really know what to call this job, because they called us cyclone aides since Cy 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 of 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 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, and I didn't want it go to waste, so I just figured I would put up my own blog. And was just like another one of these attempts to kind of like bolster my resume and have a personal project that'd look good to employers, and I just soft of did it for fun for like a full year until right around the time I did that internship a year later. 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 creativity 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 in 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 who 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 out I was like listening to podcasts more often than I was reading blogs, maybe a couple of years after I had started the blog. So at the beginning of 2013, I was like, "I can start my own podcast," and that is exactly what I did. I started the College Info Geek Podcast, which you can find down in the description for this video. And then I think it was like 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. And I found creators like Caddicarus , my friend Satchell Drakes, and my friend, YoungTown, like I was watching video game channels because I really liked 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 pod casting, I figured what the heck, let's try doing some videos. 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 podcasts or for blog posts or 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 before I became a YouTuber. The only real experience I had besides like making dumb videos with my brother as kid was I think it was the summer after my junior year. I had spoken at this event called "Ignite," which is 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 they wanted to see mine, so I just emailed the department who had put the event on, and I was like, "Hey, if you guys want, I could help edit "those videos. "I don't 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 it pays if you want to learn, we'll teach you." So I said, "Heck yes, let's do it." It was like a few-week project. It 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 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 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 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 I'll see you next week. (lively music) 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 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. If you missed last week's video, again we talked about that passion versus skills and effort debate, so check that if you missed it. And I'm on Twitter or Instagram @TomFrankly if you would like to connect. See you next week.