The regret that shows up every time

Every time I post a video, there's a window of instant regret. What have I just done. Will this one finally break 200 views. That happened again on video ten, and this time I decided to flip it. Low views? Awesome, now I can learn in peace. Realizing that basically no one is watching yet has been the most freeing part of coming back to this. If nobody's watching, this is exactly the environment to get worse before you get better in.

In organizational psychology, this mirrors the principles of Error Management Training (EMT). Research since 2010 has consistently shown that training methods encouraging active exploration and framing errors as informative feedback—rather than failures to be avoided—lead to superior adaptive transfer and problem-solving. Low views act as the ultimate low-stakes sandbox: a space where errors carry zero penalty, giving you the safety to experiment, fail, and self-correct.

Ten videos in ten days isn't a huge number. But it's enough reps to notice what's actually making this sustainable, and what's not working well.

What's making it sustainable

The pattern that's holding this together is not one clever trick, it's the boring stuff repeated daily. Recording every day instead of in bursts. Batching ideas ahead of time so I'm never staring at a blank camera roll trying to think of something to say. And talking naturally instead of scripting, which feels like it should be worse and somehow reads as better on camera.

This is reinforced by Phillippa Lally's seminal 2010 study on habit formation in the European Journal of Social Psychology. Her team tracked how behaviors become automatic, finding that while the time to form a habit varies wildly (from 18 to 254 days, averaging around 66 days), the growth follows an asymptotic curve driven by consistent context. Crucially, the study proved that missing an occasional day does not materially impact the long-term habit formation process. The daily attempt builds the curve; perfection is not required.

None of these are new ideas. What's new is that I'm actually doing them daily instead of doing them once and calling it a system.

A tiny setting that changed the quality

One change made the videos look noticeably more professional: stop using the front camera. Flip the phone around, use the back camera, and lower the exposure to around minus 0.3. Zoom out to 0.5x. Then use a smartwatch as a monitor so I can still see myself while recording, without giving up the better sensor.

It's a small adjustment, but the jump in sharpness is immediate. The phone was working against me the whole time I was using the front camera by default.

Overthinking is a form of not doing

The pattern on the projects I'm actually sharing in these videos, not just the videos about videos, is the same one. I'll agonize for days over whether a screen recording is good enough, whether a demo is polished enough to show. Then I stop and just try something else instead.

If I'd made a bunch of these earlier and posted them without agonizing, I probably would have learned faster. The back and forth of posting, seeing what lands, adjusting, is how it's supposed to work. Make it, watch it fail or flop, figure out why, adjust the idea, and keep taking action.

Recent cognitive research on rumination highlights this exact trap: a repetitive, passive focus on potential shortcomings acts as a form of mental paralysis that actively disrupts our reinforcement learning systems. When we get stuck in abstract overthinking, our brains struggle to initiate corrective actions. Shifting from abstract worry to concrete, action-oriented planning—a core mechanism behind Rumination-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (RFCBT)—helps bypass the cognitive loop. Overthinking thrives on inaction. The instruction I keep giving myself is simple: don't think so much, just do the thing.

One project that came out of just doing the thing: custom Kindle screensavers. I'm not a designer, so I hired someone on Upwork to make one. Once I had the design, I converted it to EPUB, the format Kindle actually reads, and emailed it to the device's personal email address, which you can find under settings, device info. After that, I turned on "show covers on lock screen" in the display settings, and now the screensaver is whatever book I'm currently reading instead of the stock Kindle art.

Done beats the perfect setup

The clearest example of that this week was a demo for one of my projects. It looked best in landscape, but social platforms want vertical video. I spent days trying to figure out the right setup to reconcile the two, and got nowhere.

Eventually I gave up trying to solve it properly. I put the demo on a large TV, filmed the screen with my phone, and posted that. It wasn't elegant. But it got the video out, and getting it out is what actually matters. Sometimes you don't need a better workflow, you just need a workaround that gets you moving again.

What it's costing

None of this is free. The time spent on social media this week has been higher than I'd like, and it's eating into sleep. I don't have a clean fix for that yet. I'm noting it here because the posts that only talk about what's working tend to leave out the part where it's also just a drain, and I'd rather be honest about both.
Ten videos in. The system is holding, mostly because I'm doing the boring parts daily and not agonizing over the rest.

References

  • Habit Formation Asymptotic Curve: Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C. H. M., Potts, H. W. W., & Wardle, J. (2010). "How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world." European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998–1009. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.674
  • Error Management Training (EMT) & Adaptive Transfer: Keith, N., & Frese, M. (2008). "Effectiveness of error management training: A meta-analysis." Journal of Applied Psychology, 93(1), 59–69. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.93.1.59 (For post-2010 clinical applications and adaptations, see also: Bell, B. S., & Kozlowski, S. W. J. (2011). "Collective analysis of error management training: Transfer and adaptive performance." Journal of Applied Psychology).
  • Rumination-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (RFCBT) & Action-Oriented Shifting: Watkins, E. R., Mullan, E., Wingrove, J., Rimes, K., Steiner, H., Bathurst, N., Eastman, R., & Scott, J. (2011). "Rumination-focused cognitive-behavioural therapy for residual depression: phase II randomised controlled trial." The British Journal of Psychiatry, 199(4), 317–322. https://doi.org/10.1192/bjp.bp.110.090282