Putting on some music (or sometimes ear plugs) and deconstructing an idea through the process of writing is usually more productive than doing that same thing with hundreds of people watching on a live stream. Just knowing I am being watched is enough to distract from the intense focus that happens when I get into a writing session. I have found that I am somewhat addicted to that intense focus. It is not unlike doing an absolutely perfect rep during strength training or a very exact interval session where I can just feel how effective it has been. That solid feeling cannot be accomplished when others are involved. It is good to run ideas by others and to brainstorm, of course. But in general it’s better to come up with a few ideas and have them be the focus of a discussion that might bring about different ideas which build on the originals that already had some good thought go into them. Starting with nothing and thinking a bunch of people in a group are going to suddenly come up with some good ideas works in some creative scenarios but first coming up with one or two that can serve as a starting point seems more productive to me.
And let’s be honest, most of the time I have discovered something that I want to capture or tell the world. I really don’t care what other people think. It’s become a habit because so often people haven’t given enough real thought to the question at hand that wasting time listening to their uninformed ideas about it is simply a waste of time, not always, of course, but I usually want to curate the opinions of others about something I’ve said from a select group of people whom I respect and know will always give informed feedback.
Writing also serves as a filter. People who aren’t willing to read what I write are likely not worth my time. Anyone who wants me to net the idea out for them because they are too intellectually lazy or busy to properly consume the prose I have carefully crafted is simply a distraction. They might be wonderful people, just not worth my time. In fact, the world is full of such people. Part of minimizing and simplifying it identifying such people and pruning them politely from my life, or at least creating a time and place to allow their distractions to be a part of an activity that focuses all these distractions (like the Beginner Boost).
Once I have an idea written down and saved to GitHub it lasts forever. Many of the live streams I have done do not.
For better or worse, writing anything and putting it on the Internet can be found through different search engines. That writing can also be searched locally as a form of note-taking.
While watching a video covering the same thing might be more enjoyable—especially while eating a meal—reading ideas that have been formed into some sort of organization is much more digestible than a bunch of long-winded, random ranting, and rubber-ducking. The best YouTube content is good because people have put a lot of thought into what is going to be in the video and then not deviated from the main point of the video. Live-streaming is usually the opposite of this. It’s about the experience of being together. That experience might have an organized format, but the content is usually not known in advance.
Live-streaming is about a bunch of people coming together. It’s like a party where that party has a particular format or goal, but without a specific objective, usually. This is why the music channels on Twitch do so well. People are just having fun together. There is live-streaming that is educational but it is usually like everyone being in an escape room together trying to figure something out. Other channels are just for voyeurism. Even the travel and tourism is about the feeling of being a group walking around the city together. Like getting together with a bunch of my mates and doing whatever we feel like.
Forgetting that live-streaming is entertainment is one of the biggest mistakes I have made in the last two years. My focus on organized educational content over a live-stream has always suffered from not being organized enough. By making the Boost live-streams into a place where we come together (like in a hackathon) and work on a common goal together still qualifies as entertainment. If people want structured learning there are plenty of other places to go for that.