Blockbuster Booster: Easily Create Short Form Video Clips To Rise Above The Noise Of The Internet

Blockbuster Booster: Easily Create Short Form Video Clips To Rise Above The Noise Of The Internet

Short form video clipping can bring new opportunities into the creator/curator economy. I’m now convinced that curating short form video presents one of the best opportunities for thought leaders that has existed in the last 10 years.

Editing video is way easier than you think. Social media algorithms love short form videos. Short form video is a limited-time opportunity. Short form video is engaging to consume.

Editing video with Streamlabs’s tool is like editing text in a word processor. For example, to edit the video below, I just edit the text on the left and then the video on the right automatically updates. More specifically, if I delete a word from the transcript, it automatically clips that part of the video. If edit the spelling of a word in the transcript, it updates the subtitle in the video.

In 2020, the two other big social media platforms (YouTube and Instagram) copied TikTok and made short form videos a key part of their algorithm. In other words, they gave a boost in newsfeed reach to short form video and decreased the reach of other formats accordingly. I now understand that once something unique works, the advantage you get from it disappears in 2-3 years. The reason is that once everyone knows that something works, there is a mad dash to do it. As a result, it gets crowded.

Short form video is powerful because it cuts out all of the fluff and gets right to the most interesting and important part. Clipping short form videos is something like highlighting/clipping text on the web. It allows you to curate the best ideas in text format and convert them into engaging videos.

As a thought leader, you can think of each video that someone else has posted as an experiment. And you can think of YouTube as a platform that reveals the results of all of these experiments publicly. If you want to gain traction, a proven way is to borrow other people’s celebrity. This is why blockbuster films have many celebrities, and it’s why companies have celebrity spokespeople.

Clipping the best ideas of the best experts helps you skip years of trial-and-error. Clipping videos is easier than producing your own. Clipping helps you take advantage of the Celebrity Effect. You can use clips to support your ideas.

Selling Your Sawdust. With this approach, you take the byproduct of your idea creation workflow that you’d normally throw away, and you turn it into its own product. By clipping the best ideas of the best experts, you can create valuable content that resonates with your audience.

Imitate, then Innovate - David Perell. The more we imitate others, the faster we can discover our unique style. Originality Disease — a pervasive plague that makes creators feel scared to imitate other people’s styles. Imitation and innovation are not opposed, but operate in tandem. Creators consume art differently than consumers. They’re far more intentional in what they consume. Consuming art is productive work for them. Directors watch movies not just to be entertained, but also to see how they’re made. Consciously or not, they’re developing their own mental Pinterest board of ideas to borrow and build upon in their own work.

Some of the juiciest inspiration comes from admiring (and maybe even reverse-engineering) other people’s work. But many people think inspiration needs to strike out of thin air, like a bolt of lightning. By tracing what admiring people had done, we think the significance of the work. I worry that academics are so focused on checking the “nobody’s ever written about this before” box that they sometimes forget to make useful contributions to human knowledge. Throughout human history, most imitative learning happened through apprenticeships.

In true “Imitate, then Innovate” fashion, there were obvious similarities between what da Vinci observed as an apprentice and what he’d later produce on his own. What humanity gained in its ability to scale the transmission of facts it lost in its disproportionate focus on ideas that could travel in textbooks. The transmission of technique and tacit knowledge was lost in translation. The harder it is to put the core knowledge into words, the more a skill should be developed through imitative learning.

Reading a lot of good writing is among the best ways to become a good writer. Even if the principles of effective writing are hard to communicate, reading a lot hones your intuition for what quality writing feels like. The more you’re drawn to learning the skill on YouTube, the more it’ll benefit from imitative learning. “YouTube skills” tend to be more bodily than intellectual. They’re hard to describe in words. Nobody learns to dance by reading a textbook. Improving creative education begins with retrieving the benefits of apprenticeships.

When you imitate somebody’s work, you’re forced to think about why they made the decisions they made. Through consumption and creation, you weave the threads of other people’s work into a tapestry of your own. Imitation helps us discover our creative personalities because it reveals our taste and which parts of the creative process come most naturally to us.

Learning to see as a painter is among the best things you can do to become a more articulate writer. Both skills require a keen sense of observation. Where painters aim to illuminate the world with color and shadow, writers aim to illuminate it with words and metaphors. Both activities are acts of composition and sometimes, the selective withholding of information.

Much of the future originates in art before it becomes our reality. This is why the world of technology holds a close ear to the world of science fiction. Steve Jobs famously pulled from Star Trek to design the iPad, and early concepts for FaceTime appeared in 2001: A Space Odyssey. If we want to be innovative, we should be less imitative in who we choose to imitate. An easy way to improve who you imitate is to escape the Never-Ending Now by diversifying your inputs, escaping your industry, and reading more about history and less about the present.

Observing successful companies like Stripe has reminded me that originality is only useful insofar as it serves a higher end. In business, a lack of originality hints that you don’t understand the problem you’re trying to solve well enough. Once you understand a problem deeply enough, the solution becomes fairly obvious. Those who hold originality as their highest virtue are bound to either get stuck or create nothing of substance. Learn from the past and imitate the successful strategies that have proven to work.

In conclusion, short form video clipping and imitating others can be powerful tools for thought leaders and creators. By curating the best ideas and leveraging the Celebrity Effect, you can gain traction and engage your audience. Incorporating imitative learning and studying the work of others can help you discover your unique style and improve your own creative output. To take action, consider the following advice:

1. Use video editing tools like Streamlabs to easily clip short form videos and create engaging content.
2. Study the work of successful thought leaders and creators, imitate their strategies, and build upon them to innovate.
3. Diversify your inputs, escape the Never-Ending Now, and learn from the past to gain new perspectives and insights.

By implementing these actionable advice, you can rise above the noise of the internet and create impactful content that resonates with your audience.