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How to Make Money from your Passion

2020-08-04 · Compilation of other people's clips · Ali, Sarah Dietschy · recording, 12:06 · watch on YouTube

Topic: YouTube, writing online and creators (also: Goals, purpose and life design, Work and career) · mode: Conversation and interview · tags: His own numbers, Sponsor segment present

Ali compiles five lessons from his conversation with the YouTuber Sarah Dietschy, with his own commentary: finding and developing a passion, whether to make it your job, starting on YouTube, originality as remix, and personal branding, where he advises making your real name the brand.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Intro: lessons from Sarah Dietschy, one of Ali's favourite YouTubers

  • ★★ Ali calls Sarah Dietschy one of his favourite YouTubers and one of the people who most inspired him when he was starting his channel. — 00:00:00
  • ★★ Ali says Sarah Dietschy dropped out of college to become a full-time filmmaker and now has over 650,000 subscribers on YouTube. — 00:00:00
  • ★★ Ali was a guest a few months earlier on Sarah Dietschy's podcast That Creative Life. — 00:00:00
  • ★★★ Sarah Dietschy: With many passions, Sarah Dietschy focuses on one at a time and then figures out whether it is the one. — 00:00:29
  • ★ Sarah Dietschy: Basketball was once Sarah Dietschy's entire life, and she thought she would go into the WNBA. — 00:00:29

00:00:36 — Passion: focus on one at a time, and exploration if you have none

  • ★★ Sarah Dietschy says having found a passion is a great thing; the actual problem is wandering aimlessly with nothing lighting a fire under you. — 00:00:58
  • ★★ Angela Duckworth (quoted): Angela Duckworth's line in Grit: passion for your work is a little discovery, followed by a lot of development and then a lifetime of deepening. — 00:01:27 · first in: 2020-07-14, Is Success Luck or Hard Work?
  • ★★★ If you have not yet found what you are passionate about, Ali suggests exploring and stepping outside your comfort zone until you find something to throw yourself into. (hedged) — 00:01:57

00:02:15 — Self-awareness and fulfilment: a nine-to-five or your passion as your job

  • ★★★ Sarah Dietschy says there is nothing wrong with finding a nine-to-five job: whether to pursue a passion as your job comes down to your personality type and what you enjoy. — 00:02:49
  • ★★ Sarah Dietschy calls herself a very full-on person: she works every Saturday and Sunday and past 6 p.m., and gets a lot of joy from the freedom and from building. — 00:02:49
  • ★★ Sarah Dietschy calls "know thyself" the most important thing in choosing such a life. — 00:03:18
  • ★★ Ali thinks many people talk themselves out of starting a YouTube channel, podcast or blog by looking at an extreme example like Sarah Dietschy and not wanting to be a full-time YouTuber. — 00:03:18
  • ★★★ Ali says you need not be a full-time YouTuber to get the benefits of sharing your work and building an audience, as you need not compete in bodybuilding to benefit from exercise. — 00:03:47
  • ★★★ Sarah Dietschy says it is always the right time to start on YouTube if something drives you to create so strongly that a piece of you would die inside without it. — 00:03:47

00:04:07 — Getting started: always the right time, and the algorithm helps newcomers

  • ★★ Sarah Dietschy says you have to start with what you are good at: she had a passion for video and was obsessed with video editing, so she did not go all in on blogging. — 00:04:32
  • ★★ Sarah Dietschy says that once a YouTuber has a certain audience, they feel like a product of the algorithm and have to cater to its needs. — 00:04:32 · YouTube
  • ★★★ Sarah Dietschy says platforms with an algorithm help people who start with nothing: a new YouTuber a few months in can have one video pop off and suddenly gain momentum. — 00:05:01
  • ★★ Ali says Hani, a new YouTuber whose video on an important subject popped, already has 30,000 subscribers after a month of making videos. — 00:05:30
  • ★★ Ali says it took him a whole year of making two or three videos a week to reach 30,000 subscribers. — 00:05:30
  • ★★★ Ali says that even in the very saturated YouTube market, starting today and making things people find valuable and useful can completely change your life. — 00:05:30 · YouTube
  • ★★ Sarah Dietschy says the internet is remix culture, as the early days of Tumblr show. — 00:06:00
  • ★★ Sarah Dietschy says she hopped on the vlogging bandwagon, which Casey Neistat did not create either: he got big by putting his own spin on popular vlogging, making it beautiful with b-roll to music. — 00:06:00

00:06:05 — Creativity and originality: the internet is remix culture

  • ★★ Sarah Dietschy says originality is what you make of the things you are into, with your own spin: the corner of YouTube of Ali and Thomas Frank was not even a thing five years ago. — 00:06:42 · Thomas Frank
  • ★★ After making his videos on how to study for exams, Ali realised Thomas Frank had made the identical video three years earlier, with about 5 million views. — 00:07:11 · Thomas Frank

  • ★★★ A quote Ali always comes back to when he worries about originality: there are no unique messages, only unique messengers. — 00:07:11

    “there are no unique messages, only unique messengers”

  • ★★★ Ali tells people held back from starting a channel, blog or podcast because others have done it not to worry: everything is a remix, and what you create is unique because you are the only you. — 00:07:40

  • ★ Ali says he still struggles with the worry about originality. — 00:07:40
  • ★★ Sarah Dietschy's line "Sara Dietschy rhymes with peachy" came from a need: people did not know how to pronounce her name. — 00:08:09
  • ★★★ Sarah Dietschy says the most important thing for a brand is that people know how to spell it and how to say it. — 00:08:09

00:08:18 — Branding: a name people can say, and your real name as the brand

  • ★★ Sarah Dietschy says that if everything moves to voice, people will need to know how to say her name to find her podcast. (hedged) — 00:08:39
  • ★★ Ali found it really hard to decide to name his channel with his real name, but is really glad he did. — 00:09:08
  • ★★★ Ali advises making your real name the brand: it has much more future potential than a brand name, which could typecast you, while your content evolves with you. — 00:09:37 · Peter McKinnon

00:10:00 — The extended version on Nebula and the CuriosityStream sponsor read

  • ★★ Sarah Dietschy says a viral video is less about getting it perfect one time than about making a video every single week and hoping one of the 50 strikes. — 00:10:12

Threads in this video

Mentioned

Central: personal brand · Sarah Dietschy

Also: People: Angela Duckworth · Casey Neistat · Marques Brownlee · Matt D'Avella · Peter McKinnon · Thomas Frank

Projects: Workflow series

Works: Grit (book) · That Creative Life

Also centred on personal brand: Monthly Favourites #2 - Ali Abdaal

Also centred on Sarah Dietschy: How Twitter Changed my Life #Shorts

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