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I plan to 1. Be able to jog for 10 kilometers 2. Make a video that reaches 500.000 views on YouTube 3. Release at least one more app that brings in $2000 or

I plan to 1. Be able to jog for 10 kilometers 2. Make a video that reaches 500.000 views on YouTube 3. Release at least one more app that brings in $2000 or more a month Modest goals are easier to reach, and a goal that cannot be measured is no goal.

unalone 18y ago
Your first goal is a great one. The third may be also. But the second one? It's impossible to determine how good a video is based on the views it receives. The masses generally don't like the top-notch high-quality videos, they like bland-and-generic above everything. When I was 13, I got together a group of friends and released a video on Newgrounds that hit 100,000 views - quite a lot back then! The video itself was terrible, though: the fact that more people have seen that than anything else I've done online is not exactly a fun thought for me. And when you look at other popular videos, very rarely are they really smart, clever things. At best they're "cool." You don't have many instances of people creating something thoughtful and enlightening and getting half a million views. While measuring goals is a great thing, possibly figure out how to make a more useful goal for the video. Possibly even just "make X videos." The more you make, the more you'll learn about making them, and the better you'll end up with.
- Zev 18y ago
  Doing something to be able to say "I did that" is a goal in itself as far as I'm concerned.
  - unalone 18y ago
    But it's not. You don't gain anything from being watched 500,000 times. Smosh has been seen millions of times for acting like dicks and whipping Pikachu. There are funnier things on YouTube. There are cleverer, better things. Smosh is seen because they're bland enough to get spread around. That's not a virtue. They will never do anything outside of YouTube and I doubt they'd want to. They know they're just kids who got lucky. It's like wanting to be popular in school. Why bother? You get nothing out of it but the knowledge that other people think a certain thing about you. Better spend your time working towards quality.
    - Zev 18y ago
      By that logic, why bother doing anything? All you get is a pat on the head and a few slips of paper that happen to be assigned arbitrary values of worth by a body outside of your control.
      - unalone 18y ago
        You never ever do a thing for the reward you think you'll get. You never do it so that somebody tells you it was good, or writes about it. You do it because you care about creating something good. This is what splits the world, from what I've seen. Most of the world would rather be seen doing something wonderful than doing it. The rest are the people who I like, and who incidentally do things that I like. I don't know how it is for you, but if I ever thought the meaningfulness of my work depended on somebody else telling me it was good, I would shoot myself in an instant and never think twice about it. I sometimes feel that the kids who go on shooting sprees are the ones who don't get that other people don't matter. You could trace everything I do to the people who have inspired me. First and foremost among everything, that means you'd trace it back to Bill Watterson of Calvin & Hobbes fame. I read his comics when I was four and they inspired me. I laughed. I wept. Often I would weep laughing. I got the Complete Calvin & Hobbes for Christmas, which included hundreds of ones I'd never read before, and I found myself laughing and crying again. It's something truly magnificent, and, furthermore, it was the first masterpiece I ever came across as a kid. Bill Watterson didn't make Calvin & Hobbes so I would tell him it was good, or so I'd write this. He didn't do it to become famous. He did it because he figured if he was going to make a comic, he was going to make it as good as he possibly could make it. He drew hilarious pictures time and time again because he never let himself repeat something he'd done, and he never let himself settle for something that wasn't hilarious. Same goes with writing. When he drew the to-me-iconic picture of the dead bird that starts 6-year-old Calvin thinking about the meaning of life, he did it because it fit with the characters and expanded his world. His thoughts were first and foremost on his creation. That's why I say focus on quality. The OP thinks I'm saying it so that the "intellectuals" will judge him better. He misses the point just as much. My point is that you do things because you think they're good. You do it for the sake of doing a good job. The only penalty for your not going a good job is that you'll have done a bad job - and for me, and for a lot of others, that's enough. Harry Potter Revisited got 113,000 views in 4 years. 220 people wrote to tell me what they thought about it - and none of them mattered. The ones who liked it liked it for what was good. The ones who didn't didn't like it for what wasn't. It most likely inspired nobody. It wasn't anything more than amusing to people who were old enough to have a really firm grounding in comedy. The only comments I ever cared about were the few people who got addicted to Newgrounds after watching the video. Introducing those people to something new was a nice feeling. On the other hand, when I published my novel last year, I got less than 6,000 views on Scribd. A handful of sales. By a metric, that matters far less than the video that gave me Internet fame. On the other hand, my CA borrowed my copy of the book, read it through in a weekend, and, handing it back, told me that I'd described the ways she felt about things and had never told people. And tonight, my girlfriend told me that her mother, while reading, kept nudging her on the plan and saying, "I know how this feels! This is exactly what it's like!" So, I managed to use words and reach out to people, which isn't easy to do. (I'd argue it's harder than almost anything else in the world.) That's the achievement, for me. It's knowing that I did something well.
- markessien 18y ago
  The point of the video is the page views. One of my philosophies is this - I don't care about pleasing smart people. How are they better than people who are less smart? If my goal is to create an intellectually stimulating video, then I would work on that. While that is a worthy goal, it's different from trying to create a video that has a lot of hits. I'd actually say that for the average user on this site, considering that most of us have university degrees, it would be much harder to create something that appeals to a person who only has a very basic education than it would be to create something that would be appreciated by people that went through the same educational system that we did. It's great to be smart, but that does not mean you should insulate yourself from the human condition. It does not mean that simple pleasures are somehow lesser pleasures. If you can make a video 500.000 or more, it means you understand the how a lot of people think, and this is more important than understand how people very similar to you think.
  - unalone 18y ago
    I don't care about pleasing smart people. How are they better than people who are less smart? They're better because they're lucky enough to be born with greater faculty for comprehension. I understand you not wanting to appeal exclusively to bright people, but don't make the mistake of putting down bright people because they've got something going for them. And you missed my point. You can't go out and easily devise something that will get lots of page views. To quote Roger Ebert, a person in a funny hat is not funny unless they don't know it's a funny hat. Look at the big YouTube "indie" successes and you'll see the the biggest ones are usually entirely unintentionally up there. The laughing baby. The kid playing Canon in D on his guitar. Yeah, they're great videos. But you can't put up a video expecting it to reach a certain threshold. And if you make videos specifically to meet said threshold, you're fighting against greater odds than if you just go out trying to better yourself as a filmmaker. The point I was trying to make, more succinctly, is this. You can't rely on quantity. If and when you get that many views, it will be entirely by accident on your part. The only thing you can control in your videos is quality. And, incidentally, quality means a better chance at getting quantitative views. Quality isn't about "pleasing smart people." It's about bettering yourself through mastering the skills required to make a film. You can go out and make shoddy film after shoddy film and eventually hit a lucky break, or you can go out and try to make your movies as good as possible, and when you get your break it'll be more deserved and, for that matter, attract a better crowd. (When I made my big Harry Potter redub, I got IMs from "fans" for a long, long time. I still do, on occasion. It's incredibly annoying because none of them have anything more to say than "make another one just like that last one," and I've given up on the scene entirely. Later works I've done have attracted much brighter, interesting people, and that's a reward unto itself.) It does not mean that simple pleasures are somehow lesser pleasures. There is intelligence in simplicity. And not all simplicity is good simplicity, either. Don't let that let you think that there's no such thing as quality. There's eating a piece of fruit as opposed to eating a gourmet meal, and there's replacing the gourmet meal with a Big Mac. Both simpler, but with one there's something significantly lost. If you can make a video 500.000 or more, it means you understand the how a lot of people think, and this is more important than understand how people very similar to you think. You're only ever going to understand your own mind to any significant degree. If you become popular, you most likely won't know exactly how you do. If you do understand it, then you'll derive from the experience either a knowledge of a gimmick - "These people love me acting stupid, let's do it again" - or you'll understand it because you're creating a quality experience. It's why the best way of making a good movie is to adhere to your own standards and to focus on making, plain and simple, good movies. Any other way is riskier and will eventually demean you. Quality, on the other hand, always has an audience.

unalone 18y ago

Your first goal is a great one. The third may be also. But the second one? It's impossible to determine how good a video is based on the views it receives. The masses generally don't like the top-notch high-quality videos, they like bland-and-generic above everything. When I was 13, I got together a group of friends and released a video on Newgrounds that hit 100,000 views - quite a lot back then! The video itself was terrible, though: the fact that more people have seen that than anything else I've done online is not exactly a fun thought for me. And when you look at other popular videos, very rarely are they really smart, clever things. At best they're "cool." You don't have many instances of people creating something thoughtful and enlightening and getting half a million views. While measuring goals is a great thing, possibly figure out how to make a more useful goal for the video. Possibly even just "make X videos." The more you make, the more you'll learn about making them, and the better you'll end up with.

Zev 18y ago
Doing something to be able to say "I did that" is a goal in itself as far as I'm concerned.
- unalone 18y ago
  But it's not. You don't gain anything from being watched 500,000 times. Smosh has been seen millions of times for acting like dicks and whipping Pikachu. There are funnier things on YouTube. There are cleverer, better things. Smosh is seen because they're bland enough to get spread around. That's not a virtue. They will never do anything outside of YouTube and I doubt they'd want to. They know they're just kids who got lucky. It's like wanting to be popular in school. Why bother? You get nothing out of it but the knowledge that other people think a certain thing about you. Better spend your time working towards quality.
  - Zev 18y ago
    By that logic, why bother doing anything? All you get is a pat on the head and a few slips of paper that happen to be assigned arbitrary values of worth by a body outside of your control.
    - unalone 18y ago
      You never ever do a thing for the reward you think you'll get. You never do it so that somebody tells you it was good, or writes about it. You do it because you care about creating something good. This is what splits the world, from what I've seen. Most of the world would rather be seen doing something wonderful than doing it. The rest are the people who I like, and who incidentally do things that I like. I don't know how it is for you, but if I ever thought the meaningfulness of my work depended on somebody else telling me it was good, I would shoot myself in an instant and never think twice about it. I sometimes feel that the kids who go on shooting sprees are the ones who don't get that other people don't matter. You could trace everything I do to the people who have inspired me. First and foremost among everything, that means you'd trace it back to Bill Watterson of Calvin & Hobbes fame. I read his comics when I was four and they inspired me. I laughed. I wept. Often I would weep laughing. I got the Complete Calvin & Hobbes for Christmas, which included hundreds of ones I'd never read before, and I found myself laughing and crying again. It's something truly magnificent, and, furthermore, it was the first masterpiece I ever came across as a kid. Bill Watterson didn't make Calvin & Hobbes so I would tell him it was good, or so I'd write this. He didn't do it to become famous. He did it because he figured if he was going to make a comic, he was going to make it as good as he possibly could make it. He drew hilarious pictures time and time again because he never let himself repeat something he'd done, and he never let himself settle for something that wasn't hilarious. Same goes with writing. When he drew the to-me-iconic picture of the dead bird that starts 6-year-old Calvin thinking about the meaning of life, he did it because it fit with the characters and expanded his world. His thoughts were first and foremost on his creation. That's why I say focus on quality. The OP thinks I'm saying it so that the "intellectuals" will judge him better. He misses the point just as much. My point is that you do things because you think they're good. You do it for the sake of doing a good job. The only penalty for your not going a good job is that you'll have done a bad job - and for me, and for a lot of others, that's enough. Harry Potter Revisited got 113,000 views in 4 years. 220 people wrote to tell me what they thought about it - and none of them mattered. The ones who liked it liked it for what was good. The ones who didn't didn't like it for what wasn't. It most likely inspired nobody. It wasn't anything more than amusing to people who were old enough to have a really firm grounding in comedy. The only comments I ever cared about were the few people who got addicted to Newgrounds after watching the video. Introducing those people to something new was a nice feeling. On the other hand, when I published my novel last year, I got less than 6,000 views on Scribd. A handful of sales. By a metric, that matters far less than the video that gave me Internet fame. On the other hand, my CA borrowed my copy of the book, read it through in a weekend, and, handing it back, told me that I'd described the ways she felt about things and had never told people. And tonight, my girlfriend told me that her mother, while reading, kept nudging her on the plan and saying, "I know how this feels! This is exactly what it's like!" So, I managed to use words and reach out to people, which isn't easy to do. (I'd argue it's harder than almost anything else in the world.) That's the achievement, for me. It's knowing that I did something well.
markessien 18y ago
The point of the video is the page views. One of my philosophies is this - I don't care about pleasing smart people. How are they better than people who are less smart? If my goal is to create an intellectually stimulating video, then I would work on that. While that is a worthy goal, it's different from trying to create a video that has a lot of hits. I'd actually say that for the average user on this site, considering that most of us have university degrees, it would be much harder to create something that appeals to a person who only has a very basic education than it would be to create something that would be appreciated by people that went through the same educational system that we did. It's great to be smart, but that does not mean you should insulate yourself from the human condition. It does not mean that simple pleasures are somehow lesser pleasures. If you can make a video 500.000 or more, it means you understand the how a lot of people think, and this is more important than understand how people very similar to you think.
- unalone 18y ago
  I don't care about pleasing smart people. How are they better than people who are less smart? They're better because they're lucky enough to be born with greater faculty for comprehension. I understand you not wanting to appeal exclusively to bright people, but don't make the mistake of putting down bright people because they've got something going for them. And you missed my point. You can't go out and easily devise something that will get lots of page views. To quote Roger Ebert, a person in a funny hat is not funny unless they don't know it's a funny hat. Look at the big YouTube "indie" successes and you'll see the the biggest ones are usually entirely unintentionally up there. The laughing baby. The kid playing Canon in D on his guitar. Yeah, they're great videos. But you can't put up a video expecting it to reach a certain threshold. And if you make videos specifically to meet said threshold, you're fighting against greater odds than if you just go out trying to better yourself as a filmmaker. The point I was trying to make, more succinctly, is this. You can't rely on quantity. If and when you get that many views, it will be entirely by accident on your part. The only thing you can control in your videos is quality. And, incidentally, quality means a better chance at getting quantitative views. Quality isn't about "pleasing smart people." It's about bettering yourself through mastering the skills required to make a film. You can go out and make shoddy film after shoddy film and eventually hit a lucky break, or you can go out and try to make your movies as good as possible, and when you get your break it'll be more deserved and, for that matter, attract a better crowd. (When I made my big Harry Potter redub, I got IMs from "fans" for a long, long time. I still do, on occasion. It's incredibly annoying because none of them have anything more to say than "make another one just like that last one," and I've given up on the scene entirely. Later works I've done have attracted much brighter, interesting people, and that's a reward unto itself.) It does not mean that simple pleasures are somehow lesser pleasures. There is intelligence in simplicity. And not all simplicity is good simplicity, either. Don't let that let you think that there's no such thing as quality. There's eating a piece of fruit as opposed to eating a gourmet meal, and there's replacing the gourmet meal with a Big Mac. Both simpler, but with one there's something significantly lost. If you can make a video 500.000 or more, it means you understand the how a lot of people think, and this is more important than understand how people very similar to you think. You're only ever going to understand your own mind to any significant degree. If you become popular, you most likely won't know exactly how you do. If you do understand it, then you'll derive from the experience either a knowledge of a gimmick - "These people love me acting stupid, let's do it again" - or you'll understand it because you're creating a quality experience. It's why the best way of making a good movie is to adhere to your own standards and to focus on making, plain and simple, good movies. Any other way is riskier and will eventually demean you. Quality, on the other hand, always has an audience.