Choose the right kind of hard
As a kid, I made stop-motion videos with toy cars on Windows 98 and a low-resolution webcam. In my teens, I animated stick figures battling each other. In my early 20s, my animation obsession escalated, and I began the gruelling process of growing a YouTube following.
My ambition for quality was limitless. I hand-drew animations frame by frame, enduring back-breaking work, a knotted shoulder, and frequent hand cramps. I spent hundreds of hours labouring, waking up at 5 am to work early and animate until 9:30 am or when the office filled up.
As a less-than-fluent animator, scenes that took a professional a day might have taken me a week. It usually required six to twelve months to complete a couple of minutes of animation. But when I finished, the feeling was magical. Seeing a vision become reality made the difficult journey seem worthwhile.
Publishing on YouTube was exciting, but the response was often underwhelming. Hundreds of hours of labour yielded just a handful of views and a few chuckles from friends. And I began questioning why I was doing it. In reality, I hated the process, and the satisfaction of completion was fleeting. It took time to be honest with myself about it, but all I sought was validation and view counts.
Then I began to wonder what might happen if I applied this effort to something with a bigger impact, like a business. Perhaps the numbers would be more meaningful? And the validation would come from genuinely helping others rather than just making them laugh?
So, I made the switch. I quit animating and chose a different challenge: one where I'd enjoy the journey rather than the destination and make a useful difference in the world.
And I still get to see a vision become reality, but now on a grander scale. And one that feeds my family.
The moral of my story is cliché but important: we all have the same hours in a day, and how we spend them is our choice.
The level of difficulty is often similar, whether you're scrubbing blood from a butcher's freezer for six hours or untangling the complexities of global e-commerce logistics. But the potential rewards can vary significantly.
Choose the right hard for you.
Maybe this was useful. Maybe not.
Cheerio,
Charles Burdett.