It’s amazing where you will learn stuff if you take the time to observe closely. Let me explain.
There’s a man on YouTube with his own YouTube channel.
Even though the views he espouses are, to my mind, pathetic, odious, chauvinistic, right wing, misogynistic, and repulsive I have learned something from him.
Before I share what I have learnt it is noteworthy that he has over 100,000 subscribers, the vast majority of whom are men. He is a mature man. Not only is he mature, he looks mature, too, for he has grey hair and a well-trimmed grey beard and lives on his own.
I have not paid much heed to his back story or what he has said about his living arrangements, but I gather from the titles of his videos that he lives alone and has been through a great deal of relationships and a divorce or two.
He gives advice to men about love, women, relationships, what it means to be a man, why feminism is to be attacked, and spreads a lot of nonsense bordering on misogyny. But his subscribers love him and see him as the father or grandfather many of them never had.
So he gives this purportedly home spun, worldly advice about all types of things to do with life, especially from a man’s perspective. He even has a video on how to smoke a pipe and he has guys asking him questions about smoking pipes, tobacco, and so forth.
In 2019, for young men to be getting advice on YouTube about the benefits of, and techniques for, smoking a pipe is mind boggling.
But what I have learnt is if you are making a YouTube video, and I make many of them, they don’t have to be all action or edited and cut to ensure there is no dead space or movement.
Because this guy, from time to time, just sits there thinking about choosing the right words to speak and puffing on his pipe. Not in any hurry.
He waits until he is ready, until he has the right words, and he doesn’t edit or cut out the natural contemplation or thinking or ‘dead space’ or choosing of the right words to articulate what he wants to say.
His self confidence in this regard is stunning because the most natural thing in the world for most of us is to either fill the space with some words, somehow, or edit it out before uploading the video to YouTube.
And his YouTube subscriber count continues to grow and grow inexorably with his subscribers and viewers giving him the most positive feedback.
So, it’s amazing what you learn when you are watching closely with an open mind, even if you find the individual or his views anti-diluvian and odious.