Shorter newsletter today. I’ve been building PARAZETTEL V3 for launch next Friday (relevant in a minute) and haven’t had much time to do any other writing.

But I wanted to quickly discuss building skills and setting goals…

A while back I wrote a piece called The real reason why you set number-based goals​- it was all about the real motive behind setting arbitrary numbers as goals and targets.

In short, the point I was making was that when you reach said number you’re going to get a quick spike of satisfaction only.

What’s more important and lasting are the skills that you’ve had to build up to become someone capable of reaching your number-based goal.

I’ve got a very current example to share with you…

Around three months ago I set the goal of doing a video accompaniment issue for Fundamentalised every single week for a year.

Do I care about having 52 videos on my YouTube channel? Not really. However, I do care about how good I’ll be at speaking in front of a camera, with precision and character, when a year is up.

I’m even seeing the benefits now - I wasn’t doing YouTube whilst building the first two versions of PARAZETTEL and I’ll admit that making each release’s video content felt uncomfortable.

Filming the V3 videos recently I felt a lot more relaxed and able to express myself, going off-piste to share useful details.

PARAZETTEL V3’s videos will be more engaging to watch even if still stand by the quality of the content in other versions’ videos.

I don’t really value the momentary high that I’ll get in nine more months when I reach a year of recording YouTube videos. It’s better to have the skills that I used to get there to implement for the rest of my life.

Think about the goals that you set in the same way.

– Theo


Last week’s video issue…

Read the issue - 064 • What would you do even if you knew you’d fail?

Was recording PARAZETTEL videos the day I did this, so I used the main camera, light and microphone again. Felt a little bit fried after recording though - perhaps one to watch on 1.5x speed again.