The Struggle is Real: Overcoming Imposter Syndrome and Embracing Your Brand

I'll never forget my early days as an IT technician, where I had to sell credit cards, pre-orders, and game guarantees to customers. It was a far cry from my passion for fixing computers and helping people understand technology. I felt like I was selling them something that wasn't worth it, especially when compared to what I could offer directly at the store. The experience left a bad taste in my mouth, and I began to question my abilities.

As someone who's struggled with imposter syndrome, I can attest to the feeling of not being good enough. But, I've learned that this mindset is often rooted in our own self-doubt. When it comes to asking for money or promoting ourselves, I rarely do so because I don't feel confident in my abilities. However, when it comes to providing free access content, such as streaming and teaching, I believe there's no harm in marketing myself. In fact, it's essential to promote what we do well, especially if it brings value to others.

One area where I've struggled is with accepting a moniker that many people have affectionately bestowed upon me - "Professor." For years, I rejected this title because it seemed to reduce my expertise to a single aspect of what I do. But, as time went on, I realized that embracing this label was actually a strength, not a weakness. It's a testament to my hard work and dedication to being an educator and streamer. When I finally accepted the "Professor" moniker, my brand recognition skyrocketed.

It's interesting to note how our experiences can shape our perspectives on ourselves and others. In my job interview experience, half of it was saying "I'm sorry, I don't know." But, what that taught me is that sometimes, admitting ignorance or lack of experience is a strength, not a weakness. It shows that we're open to learning and growth. When responding to customers or colleagues, it's essential to spin our responses in a positive light, even if we don't have all the answers.

The Improv Approach: A Lesson in Confidence

When I was working at GameStop, I had an experience with a corporate call where they were trying to trick me into making a wrong answer. Instead of falling for it, I took the opportunity to showcase my skills and confidence. The interviewer asked if we carried physical PC games at the store, and I responded by saying that we didn't carry them anymore but could help customers purchase digital copies or buy them online. This approach not only showed that I was knowledgeable about our products but also demonstrated my ability to think on my feet.

The key takeaway from this experience is that sometimes, "I don't know" is never an acceptable answer. It's essential to be open to learning and growth while maintaining confidence in your abilities. When responding to questions or engaging with others, it's crucial to spin our responses in a positive light, even if we're not familiar with something. By doing so, we can show that we're proactive, willing to learn, and committed to excellence.

From Struggle to Strength: Embracing Your True Self

As I reflect on my journey, I realize that it's been the struggles that have taught me the most about myself. Embracing my flaws and imperfections has allowed me to grow into a more confident and authentic version of myself. When we accept our weaknesses and limitations, we open ourselves up to new opportunities and experiences.

In the end, it's not about being perfect; it's about being true to who we are and what we do. By embracing our strengths and weaknesses, we can build a brand that reflects our values and expertise. As I look back on my journey, I'm reminded that growth is a continuous process, and it's okay to start where you are today. So, don't be afraid to take the leap of faith and become the best version of yourself. The world needs more authenticity, confidence, and a willingness to learn and grow.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: eny'all don't want pokemon card openings you want to talk about some serious all right so eposvox killed my hopes and dreams of making money playing video games it's always possible chase your dreams but chase them intelligently the biggest piece of advice that i got about my career actually they're two that go together and this is going to seem bizarre as hell the two best pieces of advice i ever got in my career in terms of actually shaping how i worked were one was from my mother one was from totalbiscuit the late john totalbiscuit bane i miss him so dearly and that his piece was not given directly to me just to be clear it was in something he posted but that's not the point totalbiscuit's advice was to find the people that are doing things that you want to do in terms of career jobs gigs whatever or something very very similar to it and reverse engineer how they got there or what it takes to do what they do so if you see your favorite streamer you your favorite content creator your favorite instagram i mean if they're just like one of those rich kid travel instagram tick tock stars then your reverse engineering is that you need to be a trust fund kid so good luck on the respawn but you know someone who actually really really worked to get where they are you reverse engineer how they got there the steps that you think would take to get to that point and the things that they would have to do in their day-to-day life to make that job happen and i started that with totalbiscuit himself i looked at it i was like okay he runs an esports team i kind of wrote that one off because i don't care about doing that or care about esports all that much um so i wrote that one off but like he's got the esports team he's part of a big group podcast he's involved in the network stuff he made youtube videos as his core like content as well as his live streams you know i identified all the different things that he did by looking through his channels and social and things like that including social who's got to manage that how you distribute the content and work back and forth and then i also analyzed you know his content i started following tv around the uh kata days the world warcraft cataclysm a buddy introduced me to him and i just found him kind of amusing even though i didn't play a whole lot of uh world of warcraft but that was right around when he started his wtf series and started really getting into the game's journalism side of things but i went back from there as well i was like okay he started mainly doing like this wow content stuff he comes from a radio background he really got his foot in the door with the wow radio stuff and then started doing more games journalistic stuff started going to events becoming an advocate for things and followed that path and then applied that to what i wanted to do and i did the same thing with linus and lightest tech tips and reverse engineered their way and did that with as many of my favorite content creators at the time as possible to really kind of piece together the steps that i wanted to take the piece uh of advice from my mom that i picked up on was uh because she is an english teacher um and she always wanted to be a writer growing up and her piece of advice was you need to find your dream career the the core idea or the thing that you want to do which for many of you may just be playing video games for a living and identify like draw it on a piece of paper and identify the jobs around that thing that you could also do you know the whole idea of like aiming for high and settling for middle or whatever don't treat it as the middle but like the things that would enable you to do what you want to do for a living so at the time for me it really was play video games for a living i started i wanted to be a games journalist i wanted to write for game mags back in the day and then i wanted to be a gaming youtuber and blah blah because i i got into youtube with the first wave of youtubers doing gaming stuff blowing up and i was just like this is the thing i want to do man and so i identified that i was like what careers could i pursue around that and i got into journalism i dropped my computer science program that i wasn't at all really sticking with and moved colleges into a journalism program so i identified the jobs around that so for example instead of just being a gamer for a living of course you got games journalists you've got support staff for game studios i could do writing i could do photography i was actually designing my own game they weren't anything worthwhile that was not a career i could pursue but i was designing my own game stuff i could do hosting esports event i could do the live streaming aspects that was slowly slowly slowly slowly slowly starting to become a thing you know all these different things so i could find the right path and that is what actually led me to tech in that suddenly making the gaming content especially for the lack of success i was finding it at the time which i still i think with the right like marketing and meta gaming experience that i have now uh my wife and i could have actually been very successful youtubers other than the fact that our lifestyle just we would have dropped it anyway but we were doing co-op gaming stuff right before that became the thing like our show channel name at the time was let's play together we were doing co-op let's plays like you know boyfriend girlfriend co-op let's plays right before that became the hot thing to do we could have been on that trend uh but it just wasn't working out but what you know i was getting stressed out it really damaged my relationship with gaming but i still wanted to be that kind of i still wanted that kind of career and so in order to find that direction without hating it so much and still learning it was to go into the tech side i started making software tutorials i started you know getting into gaming gear i was doing gaming headset reviews and suddenly those were the more popular things uh we were all using fraps and dxtory at the same time and and then from there you know as we were all using dx story a little program called obs came along and with the original obs back in 2012 2013 obs classic i started making some tutorials it was a free to use to stream and record your games you didn't have to pay for it you didn't have to pirate it it had some really compelling features and no one was making videos on it and i did because i made videos on everything i made videos on how to do the harlem shake on youtube when they added that easter egg in i made videos on all sorts of stuff like that as time went on those became the most viewed videos i ever made and so i went from chasing a career where i play video games for living too i'm a tech youtuber now and a tech educator after that but ultimately like it was the path that i should have been been on and i found that by trying to find the you know by reverse engineering and finding the right steps towards the career that i wanted and so you may find yourself in a career that's either adjacent to or completely out of left field from what you expected to start with but by taking the steps to achieve that career you are then going to get into the one that you want and with streaming the same thing find your favorite streamer really break down don't just think about it on a casual level like oh they just stream and they log off and what go to sleep every day no they they do a lot and so you break down what they're you know what collaborative work they do you really got to hunt for it sometimes because not everybody promotes it very well what collaborative work do they do what other work they do for other people you can even ask them in fact back in 2014 for a college project i interviewed austin evans this was like right after his whole apartment fire thing uh and i interviewed him about how he got to where he is what he did what a day in a life of austin evans looks like it wasn't for a video that i published it was for a school project but i did that and i just reached out to him and he agreed to it you know you can most most creators well that's not necessarily true but a lot of creators will be friendly to that kind of thing if you approach it in the right way where it's not serving your own self-interest and i i i don't know i really think that's the way to go so that's my advice to someone starting new on twitch or for streaming in 2021 rest in peace total biscuit you beautiful bastard miss you so much still have this poster on my wall still have a shirt i actually put it in a keepsake box because it's starting to fade but you know okay yes interviewing him was in my own self-interest but like it wasn't self-promotional or anything like that i he asked at some point what i was doing but it wasn't like check out my channel collab with me even though you have no idea what you who i am and i have no collab ideas let me make a video where i said i got to talk to austin none of that it was just i want to figure out how you do what you do please inform me mr austin not duncan it's interesting to hear your side of the story have you ever had a real moment where you thought damn i made the wrong turn i don't think this is going to answer your question but i i technically have an answer so i firmly believe i firmly believe that i have multiple what would be major milestones in my career where i could have spun something into something really really successful like more so than i have now and i didn't make the right move to capitalize on it on it but that's hindsight is 2020 and that's also coming at it with the experience and the knowledge that i have now which i did not have at the time and thus did not have the capacity or the wisdom or the maturity to act on it at the time and these go back really far so for example one of my first big breaks on youtube i had just made a new channel which is now my secondary voxbytes channel i just made a new channel and was trying to be serious about this whole game streaming thing because my previous channel had some copyright issues whatever the i was getting serious not game streaming but game youtubing streaming wasn't really a thing yet getting serious about this game youtubing thing i was in high i was no i had just finished high school it was the summer between high school and college i was getting super serious about doing this game streaming thing i wanted to do you know call of duty halo videos things like that let's plays even though i've only ever finished like two let's plays in my life i started a million of them this was my serious thing and i was working really hard and i had a big break and i've told this story a couple times i'm gonna just tell it really quickly here as an experiment with justin.tv just kind of rolling out i had terrible internet at home but i wanted to experiment with streaming my university's wi-fi so this wasn't the summer between high school and college because i was already in college time get this was literally 10 years ago to this day uh actually within a couple months it'll be two years ago ten years ago so my brain gets scrambled i've been doing this a long time so i was in first semester college which was all new and scary but i wanted to try out my university and their library had 100 up hundred down wi-fi which was the fastest internet i had ever seen because i had i think we had just switched off a dsl to like some basic broadband at the time but the upscale the upload was like two to five megs maybe this was a hundred hundred even over crappy wi-fi on a laptop in 2011 which was just mind-boggling justin.tv was the hot new thing and i wanted to try streaming so from my laptop at the university library with no camera or microphone i streamed me typing a video or me typing an essay in word for a college class and a couple people showed up said they were friends with small beans which was a call of duty youtuber at time apparently they weren't actually friends with him but they were friends with another call of duty youtuber named vickstar123 and one thing led to another and i ended up getting to do a collab with him or what they called dual com at the time back in my elden times and he had like 100k subs at the time maybe maybe it was like 50 or 70 or 80. it was one of those numbers that seems not super big now but was like the big deal at the time um for a growing but still big channel he had like 50 to 100k subs at the time which was just like he was full-time making a living even though he was like 16. doing a great we did a dual com it was mainly about how deep my voice was because it was much deeper at the time it's actually lightened up with age uh and it was a dual call of duty commentary went up on his channel got me my first like 1500 subscribers on this new channel i got into the partner program i made enough money to buy the parts to build my first computer for youtube things were going great but immediately i had this freak out in my head i did not want to be niched out to just playing call of duty every call of duty video i posted got like 200 views which was just insane i was loving it but i just did not i i've always had it in my head i didn't want to be tied down to a specific gamer niche and just be known as the x guy of whatever and you know call of duty was also a game where i got easily tilted and especially i didn't like modern warfare 2 so i was playing cod 4 in world of war i i didn't want to be beholden to call of duty or my youtube career and so i effectively just made a rule where for a couple a few months i just stopped posting call of duty so i could affect and effectively burned off all of those subscribers the thing is at the time like i even knew this at the time the barrier of entry the threshold of what is considered good content for call of duty at the time was nothing it was hey guys today i'm playing on rust i've got i've got the the whatever the quick snow scoping sniper was not the intersect i don't remember now i've got the sniper and we're gonna go to town and uh yeah uh man ah look at that oh my dog came in sorry about that no one knew how to edit audio cut out stupid parts of the clips no one knew how to make a concise video or a high produced video and i was starting to learn that stuff and realistically if i had the maturity in my head and the experience to know that that is what i should do i could have locked down and made some kick-ass call of duty content and i could have potential i'm not going to say i was i have no way of guaranteeing it but i could have been freaking huge i could have been amazing i could have sucked it could it could have gone nowhere my videos weren't exactly great at the time but i i knew that it was easy and i could see myself like climbing that ladder fairly easily and that's kind of what scared me about it because i already saw people who started out just playing call of duty getting burned out on it and quitting youtube and i didn't want to be one of those people so i just cut it off i firmly believe to this day if i could like split off a branching timeline and go make a variant of myself with today's experience and understanding i could go make a full-time call of duty youtube channel bank in and you know live the rest of my days with a ferrari in a mansion and making apology videos with my dog for promoting csgo lotto and things like that i didn't go down that path i believe it's for the better but for a while at times when i have struggled with my youtube career and on things like that i wondered if i made the wrong call honestly i i dislike half of the call of duty's that come out so that wouldn't have lasted very long but you know there's that and then secondly it's just a matter of i wish i had acted sooner or realized the writing on the wall sooner with the tech stuff because the obs stuff was blowing up even the headset reviews and things like that which weren't great at the time they were doing significantly better than my gaming videos but i had this passion i had this idea that i'm going to be a gaming youtuber this tech stuff was just for fun for me to get stuff to play with on the side because i've always been a techie and wanted to play with tech i didn't treat it seriously as my main content when as when i should have as soon as i saw those videos doing better i could have locked down on that sooner and gotten more professional about it sooner and probably accelerated my growth a little bit whereas once again i was afraid of being tied to just tech i wanted to be gaming and tech i wanted to be you know whatever i wanted to be a variety streamer which is a terrible way to identify yourself and i think i threw away a couple years of accelerated success there again i wasn't making as good videos as i make now i didn't have the expertise the wisdom blah blah so there's no guarantees in life it's like i i spent what is now 8 000 worth of bitcoin on a humble bundle in 2013 because it was worth like 50 cents had i saved that that would be good money right now i had no way of knowing i could have just gone back in time and told myself so it doesn't matter but that's the second point in time where i was like i should have done different but i don't think i made the right call i think we're all on a journey that we're all on our own journey that we are discovering as we go and it's that journey itself that you have to come to appreciate it's not about the end result if you're not somewhere that you want to be right now then first and foremost make sure you identify what you do like about your life right now and really hone in on that and focus on that and appreciate that because when you start changing things you will lose some of that and that's never fun i mean it is once you're making positive change but it still hurts um but then start making steps towards changing that because we're never until you die or you end up in like a lifetime sentence in prison or something you're you're never at a static place where you stop growing changing or progressing in life and so it's the journey itself because in the end wherever we end up at the end of the day we're going to die and regardless of what you believe happens after that things at least reset in some capacity and so you have to really appreciate what you're doing right now so i i i don't i don't think there is any making the wrong choice it may not be the best choice it may not be the choice that you 100 love and want to stick with but then you still have the freedom to make different choices and to evolve that or to tweak it a little bit and so like if i were to make you know if i were to run those parallel timelines and look at the timeline where i did the call of duty videos i could be like white boy 7th street where i ended up in jail a bunch of times and just in a miserable position or i could have hated my life or i could have ended up in darker places or i could have ended up just quitting youtube all together and go do the office cubicle job that i always hated or something like that alternatively i could have acted quicker or done a better job and went and actually worked for g4 and machinima and be doing the cool stuff i went to college wanting to do there's infinite timelines and possibilities and none of that matters other than the here and now and so the end goal success doesn't really matter so much as figuring out what you're doing now and what you want to do differently so i don't think at some point like i ever went wrong i just know that at some point everything could change and so you know even in my peak which i deal with a lot like stress and anxiety and worry about youtube and content creation and my job i don't ever think i did the wrong thing it's just a question of at what point do i make a change that was a really long-winded answer but yes troy's pointing out so many streamers get burned out and frustrated when they only get views for one game that's why i didn't want to stick with one game and that's also why you should also this is a complete side tangent and then i need to i need to take a break to get a drink here just as a tangent if you're looking at your stream performance keep in mind that any viewers you get when you're only streaming a specific piece of content is not your true viewer count and you'll never find this out until you go to stream something else but effectively like there used to be like a pie chart that went around about viewers subscribers and commenters on youtube and that kind of applies in different ways to streamers but you have your core viewers that will watch you for just about whatever you stream and those are your actual like consistent viewers those are your long-term paid excuse me subscriber customers that are always going to come back to your brand if you were a product or something like that but then you have viewers that are only hanging around based on the interest that you're streaming so a trendy product idea they're only here to see your newest movie you know those kinds of analogies and those are good to capitalize on and if you can chase trends and do so in a healthy sustainable way chase those a little bit but you still need to be building the smaller more tightly knit community that is going to watch other stuff and if you tie yourself to one thing that no one else wants to watch you doing anything else then you're a one-trick pony that will inevitably like not be able to continue doing what you're doing because you sold yourself sold yourself as doing one thing at the same time if you don't identify a greater concept of what you do you're also screwing yourself so i cannot stand it when someone says they're a variety streamer that doesn't mean anything other than you'd stream more than one thing if you tell me you're a variety streamer i'm going to look you dead in the eye and be like what the do you actually stream variety is not a piece of content it's not a show it's not a game it's not like if your channel name is variety content and that's all your title and thumbnail says for a video i have no clue what that means i'm not clicking on that what do you actually stream and so i think you need to kind of there's a whole lot of books out there like primal branding and things like that you really gotta write it come down to one sentence effectively of i make x product product is video service content social post whatever for why people who believe z which is effectively the primal branding code which is you make a certain type of content for a specific audience who enjoy who appreciate who support some concept some ideas some belief some whatever it doesn't have to be super deep i make tech education videos for people who want to master their tech or more specifically i make tech education videos for people who want to master their streams and make better content you know content creators and who believe that that's important i guess i don't just make random videos about variety tech topics that doesn't tell you anything it's like a resume like if you show up at a at a job interview and they're like so what are you good at and you're just like you know some things here and there a variety of things you're not going to get hired but you're like i'm really good at leading a team to do x or i'm really good at getting why result or i'm good at project management or something like that you're gonna be more likely to get your job and i think everyone who identifies themselves as variety streamers are just their streamers their streams aren't necessarily bad they're not necessarily bad streamers they're bad marketers for their stream they're bad at marketing their streams and that's a huge part of it so i guess you could argue by nature of sucking at telling people what you do and getting people to watch you you're bad at your job but that doesn't that doesn't necessarily represent the quality of their stream just to be clear there i'll be honest i hate marketing or trying to sell things including myself i used to be the same way well that's not true i am still the same way i ended up having like i ended up leaving retail jobs whenever i got to go full time on youtube which has been a very long time now i ended up having days where i just did not go to work because i was basically having panic attacks about not wanting to go because i hated sales so much the normal part of retail jobs of just stocking shelves and helping people check out and all of that was 100 fine but when they started pushing like you got to sell credit cards or you got to sell pre-orders or game guarantees or you gotta you gotta sell cell phones when i did easy tech i'm like i'm here to fix people's computers and help them understand technology not sell them a cell phone for twice as expensive with a super expensive credit down payment than they could get across the street at at t directly that's bull i can't stand it and when it comes to actually asking for money for things that i do i rarely do it because i i just don't like it i i don't feel like you know i get imposter syndrome or don't think it's worth it or gotta you know i gotta deliver the like most perfect thing ever for someone but when it comes to the thing that you do well especially when it's free access content like there's no harm in marketing something you provide for free that isn't hurting anyone you are doing this thing and once you get to a certain point of believing in yourself for doing the thing that's when it happens and actually i think if we're going back to things i think i did wrong i rejected the the the the moniker stream professor for years ever since i made my original obs multi-platform which was the original name for obs studio kind of mini class and then my obs master class i had comment after comment after comment and even people on twitter calling me professor or you know obs professor stream professor that came up so many times and for years i rejected that name because that shoehorned me into one thing eventually i got over myself and i realized that i was really freaking good branding and that that was a solid representation of what i did i am a teacher i am an educator a professor that's fine that's another word for that i am the stream professor and i'm damn good at what i do but it took me years of doing that thing and building up that confidence in believing in what i did in order to really sell myself with that so it does take experience but at the same time brand recognition like if we're talking like i'm on a curve even halfway through last year actually i think it was 2019 the end of 2019 sometime after ltx i finally accepted that that's what i should be called so probably the start of 2020 is when i really went into it if we're talking completely irrelevant to my actual channel growth like those curves are not at all related brand recognition for myself skyrocketed just because i embraced basically a marketing term for who i am it's that simple sometimes i got clown in my job interview today half of it was me saying i'm sorry i don't know if you're at a job and it's either experience you don't have you can reword that this is actually a piece of advice i got when i was working at gamestop and they had those like secret calls where the corporate would call in and try to like trick you into fail well that's not the goal they're trying to make sure you're responding to customers properly they called the store i answered and i was a senior game advisor or supervisor kind of thingy and i was the only one in the store anyway and i answered and they were like do you have lego batman available for pc at the store and my answer was no we don't carry physical pc games anymore but online i can help you or but we sell the digital copy and i can help you purchase a steam key or you can buy it online or whatever and they were like that's freaking great that's better than most people who are just like no sorry and then hang up but you still start out with the negative so if it's experience you don't have take the like improv approach well okay the improv approach is yes but but don't say yes if you don't have experience or don't know how to do a thing but the the objective is not to word it with a negative but to spin it to a positive because i don't know is never an acceptable answer it's either asking questions to get clarification on what you're actually answering if you truly don't know what they're asking or making it clear that you are open to doing it or that you are open to learning about it like oh i ha i did not have to do that at my last job but i am completely open to train you know will training be provided for me to learn that i am quick on you know i'm quick to learn i will happily pick it up if you want to train me uh is there someone i can shadow to see the process those kinds of things because i'm sorry i don't know is ending the conversation there's no way there's no direction for the conversation to go from there whereas when you actually provide an end to continue the conversation even if the answer is effectively the same everything changesy'all don't want pokemon card openings you want to talk about some serious all right so eposvox killed my hopes and dreams of making money playing video games it's always possible chase your dreams but chase them intelligently the biggest piece of advice that i got about my career actually they're two that go together and this is going to seem bizarre as hell the two best pieces of advice i ever got in my career in terms of actually shaping how i worked were one was from my mother one was from totalbiscuit the late john totalbiscuit bane i miss him so dearly and that his piece was not given directly to me just to be clear it was in something he posted but that's not the point totalbiscuit's advice was to find the people that are doing things that you want to do in terms of career jobs gigs whatever or something very very similar to it and reverse engineer how they got there or what it takes to do what they do so if you see your favorite streamer you your favorite content creator your favorite instagram i mean if they're just like one of those rich kid travel instagram tick tock stars then your reverse engineering is that you need to be a trust fund kid so good luck on the respawn but you know someone who actually really really worked to get where they are you reverse engineer how they got there the steps that you think would take to get to that point and the things that they would have to do in their day-to-day life to make that job happen and i started that with totalbiscuit himself i looked at it i was like okay he runs an esports team i kind of wrote that one off because i don't care about doing that or care about esports all that much um so i wrote that one off but like he's got the esports team he's part of a big group podcast he's involved in the network stuff he made youtube videos as his core like content as well as his live streams you know i identified all the different things that he did by looking through his channels and social and things like that including social who's got to manage that how you distribute the content and work back and forth and then i also analyzed you know his content i started following tv around the uh kata days the world warcraft cataclysm a buddy introduced me to him and i just found him kind of amusing even though i didn't play a whole lot of uh world of warcraft but that was right around when he started his wtf series and started really getting into the game's journalism side of things but i went back from there as well i was like okay he started mainly doing like this wow content stuff he comes from a radio background he really got his foot in the door with the wow radio stuff and then started doing more games journalistic stuff started going to events becoming an advocate for things and followed that path and then applied that to what i wanted to do and i did the same thing with linus and lightest tech tips and reverse engineered their way and did that with as many of my favorite content creators at the time as possible to really kind of piece together the steps that i wanted to take the piece uh of advice from my mom that i picked up on was uh because she is an english teacher um and she always wanted to be a writer growing up and her piece of advice was you need to find your dream career the the core idea or the thing that you want to do which for many of you may just be playing video games for a living and identify like draw it on a piece of paper and identify the jobs around that thing that you could also do you know the whole idea of like aiming for high and settling for middle or whatever don't treat it as the middle but like the things that would enable you to do what you want to do for a living so at the time for me it really was play video games for a living i started i wanted to be a games journalist i wanted to write for game mags back in the day and then i wanted to be a gaming youtuber and blah blah because i i got into youtube with the first wave of youtubers doing gaming stuff blowing up and i was just like this is the thing i want to do man and so i identified that i was like what careers could i pursue around that and i got into journalism i dropped my computer science program that i wasn't at all really sticking with and moved colleges into a journalism program so i identified the jobs around that so for example instead of just being a gamer for a living of course you got games journalists you've got support staff for game studios i could do writing i could do photography i was actually designing my own game they weren't anything worthwhile that was not a career i could pursue but i was designing my own game stuff i could do hosting esports event i could do the live streaming aspects that was slowly slowly slowly slowly slowly starting to become a thing you know all these different things so i could find the right path and that is what actually led me to tech in that suddenly making the gaming content especially for the lack of success i was finding it at the time which i still i think with the right like marketing and meta gaming experience that i have now uh my wife and i could have actually been very successful youtubers other than the fact that our lifestyle just we would have dropped it anyway but we were doing co-op gaming stuff right before that became the thing like our show channel name at the time was let's play together we were doing co-op let's plays like you know boyfriend girlfriend co-op let's plays right before that became the hot thing to do we could have been on that trend uh but it just wasn't working out but what you know i was getting stressed out it really damaged my relationship with gaming but i still wanted to be that kind of i still wanted that kind of career and so in order to find that direction without hating it so much and still learning it was to go into the tech side i started making software tutorials i started you know getting into gaming gear i was doing gaming headset reviews and suddenly those were the more popular things uh we were all using fraps and dxtory at the same time and and then from there you know as we were all using dx story a little program called obs came along and with the original obs back in 2012 2013 obs classic i started making some tutorials it was a free to use to stream and record your games you didn't have to pay for it you didn't have to pirate it it had some really compelling features and no one was making videos on it and i did because i made videos on everything i made videos on how to do the harlem shake on youtube when they added that easter egg in i made videos on all sorts of stuff like that as time went on those became the most viewed videos i ever made and so i went from chasing a career where i play video games for living too i'm a tech youtuber now and a tech educator after that but ultimately like it was the path that i should have been been on and i found that by trying to find the you know by reverse engineering and finding the right steps towards the career that i wanted and so you may find yourself in a career that's either adjacent to or completely out of left field from what you expected to start with but by taking the steps to achieve that career you are then going to get into the one that you want and with streaming the same thing find your favorite streamer really break down don't just think about it on a casual level like oh they just stream and they log off and what go to sleep every day no they they do a lot and so you break down what they're you know what collaborative work they do you really got to hunt for it sometimes because not everybody promotes it very well what collaborative work do they do what other work they do for other people you can even ask them in fact back in 2014 for a college project i interviewed austin evans this was like right after his whole apartment fire thing uh and i interviewed him about how he got to where he is what he did what a day in a life of austin evans looks like it wasn't for a video that i published it was for a school project but i did that and i just reached out to him and he agreed to it you know you can most most creators well that's not necessarily true but a lot of creators will be friendly to that kind of thing if you approach it in the right way where it's not serving your own self-interest and i i i don't know i really think that's the way to go so that's my advice to someone starting new on twitch or for streaming in 2021 rest in peace total biscuit you beautiful bastard miss you so much still have this poster on my wall still have a shirt i actually put it in a keepsake box because it's starting to fade but you know okay yes interviewing him was in my own self-interest but like it wasn't self-promotional or anything like that i he asked at some point what i was doing but it wasn't like check out my channel collab with me even though you have no idea what you who i am and i have no collab ideas let me make a video where i said i got to talk to austin none of that it was just i want to figure out how you do what you do please inform me mr austin not duncan it's interesting to hear your side of the story have you ever had a real moment where you thought damn i made the wrong turn i don't think this is going to answer your question but i i technically have an answer so i firmly believe i firmly believe that i have multiple what would be major milestones in my career where i could have spun something into something really really successful like more so than i have now and i didn't make the right move to capitalize on it on it but that's hindsight is 2020 and that's also coming at it with the experience and the knowledge that i have now which i did not have at the time and thus did not have the capacity or the wisdom or the maturity to act on it at the time and these go back really far so for example one of my first big breaks on youtube i had just made a new channel which is now my secondary voxbytes channel i just made a new channel and was trying to be serious about this whole game streaming thing because my previous channel had some copyright issues whatever the i was getting serious not game streaming but game youtubing streaming wasn't really a thing yet getting serious about this game youtubing thing i was in high i was no i had just finished high school it was the summer between high school and college i was getting super serious about doing this game streaming thing i wanted to do you know call of duty halo videos things like that let's plays even though i've only ever finished like two let's plays in my life i started a million of them this was my serious thing and i was working really hard and i had a big break and i've told this story a couple times i'm gonna just tell it really quickly here as an experiment with justin.tv just kind of rolling out i had terrible internet at home but i wanted to experiment with streaming my university's wi-fi so this wasn't the summer between high school and college because i was already in college time get this was literally 10 years ago to this day uh actually within a couple months it'll be two years ago ten years ago so my brain gets scrambled i've been doing this a long time so i was in first semester college which was all new and scary but i wanted to try out my university and their library had 100 up hundred down wi-fi which was the fastest internet i had ever seen because i had i think we had just switched off a dsl to like some basic broadband at the time but the upscale the upload was like two to five megs maybe this was a hundred hundred even over crappy wi-fi on a laptop in 2011 which was just mind-boggling justin.tv was the hot new thing and i wanted to try streaming so from my laptop at the university library with no camera or microphone i streamed me typing a video or me typing an essay in word for a college class and a couple people showed up said they were friends with small beans which was a call of duty youtuber at time apparently they weren't actually friends with him but they were friends with another call of duty youtuber named vickstar123 and one thing led to another and i ended up getting to do a collab with him or what they called dual com at the time back in my elden times and he had like 100k subs at the time maybe maybe it was like 50 or 70 or 80. it was one of those numbers that seems not super big now but was like the big deal at the time um for a growing but still big channel he had like 50 to 100k subs at the time which was just like he was full-time making a living even though he was like 16. doing a great we did a dual com it was mainly about how deep my voice was because it was much deeper at the time it's actually lightened up with age uh and it was a dual call of duty commentary went up on his channel got me my first like 1500 subscribers on this new channel i got into the partner program i made enough money to buy the parts to build my first computer for youtube things were going great but immediately i had this freak out in my head i did not want to be niched out to just playing call of duty every call of duty video i posted got like 200 views which was just insane i was loving it but i just did not i i've always had it in my head i didn't want to be tied down to a specific gamer niche and just be known as the x guy of whatever and you know call of duty was also a game where i got easily tilted and especially i didn't like modern warfare 2 so i was playing cod 4 in world of war i i didn't want to be beholden to call of duty or my youtube career and so i effectively just made a rule where for a couple a few months i just stopped posting call of duty so i could affect and effectively burned off all of those subscribers the thing is at the time like i even knew this at the time the barrier of entry the threshold of what is considered good content for call of duty at the time was nothing it was hey guys today i'm playing on rust i've got i've got the the whatever the quick snow scoping sniper was not the intersect i don't remember now i've got the sniper and we're gonna go to town and uh yeah uh man ah look at that oh my dog came in sorry about that no one knew how to edit audio cut out stupid parts of the clips no one knew how to make a concise video or a high produced video and i was starting to learn that stuff and realistically if i had the maturity in my head and the experience to know that that is what i should do i could have locked down and made some kick-ass call of duty content and i could have potential i'm not going to say i was i have no way of guaranteeing it but i could have been freaking huge i could have been amazing i could have sucked it could it could have gone nowhere my videos weren't exactly great at the time but i i knew that it was easy and i could see myself like climbing that ladder fairly easily and that's kind of what scared me about it because i already saw people who started out just playing call of duty getting burned out on it and quitting youtube and i didn't want to be one of those people so i just cut it off i firmly believe to this day if i could like split off a branching timeline and go make a variant of myself with today's experience and understanding i could go make a full-time call of duty youtube channel bank in and you know live the rest of my days with a ferrari in a mansion and making apology videos with my dog for promoting csgo lotto and things like that i didn't go down that path i believe it's for the better but for a while at times when i have struggled with my youtube career and on things like that i wondered if i made the wrong call honestly i i dislike half of the call of duty's that come out so that wouldn't have lasted very long but you know there's that and then secondly it's just a matter of i wish i had acted sooner or realized the writing on the wall sooner with the tech stuff because the obs stuff was blowing up even the headset reviews and things like that which weren't great at the time they were doing significantly better than my gaming videos but i had this passion i had this idea that i'm going to be a gaming youtuber this tech stuff was just for fun for me to get stuff to play with on the side because i've always been a techie and wanted to play with tech i didn't treat it seriously as my main content when as when i should have as soon as i saw those videos doing better i could have locked down on that sooner and gotten more professional about it sooner and probably accelerated my growth a little bit whereas once again i was afraid of being tied to just tech i wanted to be gaming and tech i wanted to be you know whatever i wanted to be a variety streamer which is a terrible way to identify yourself and i think i threw away a couple years of accelerated success there again i wasn't making as good videos as i make now i didn't have the expertise the wisdom blah blah so there's no guarantees in life it's like i i spent what is now 8 000 worth of bitcoin on a humble bundle in 2013 because it was worth like 50 cents had i saved that that would be good money right now i had no way of knowing i could have just gone back in time and told myself so it doesn't matter but that's the second point in time where i was like i should have done different but i don't think i made the right call i think we're all on a journey that we're all on our own journey that we are discovering as we go and it's that journey itself that you have to come to appreciate it's not about the end result if you're not somewhere that you want to be right now then first and foremost make sure you identify what you do like about your life right now and really hone in on that and focus on that and appreciate that because when you start changing things you will lose some of that and that's never fun i mean it is once you're making positive change but it still hurts um but then start making steps towards changing that because we're never until you die or you end up in like a lifetime sentence in prison or something you're you're never at a static place where you stop growing changing or progressing in life and so it's the journey itself because in the end wherever we end up at the end of the day we're going to die and regardless of what you believe happens after that things at least reset in some capacity and so you have to really appreciate what you're doing right now so i i i don't i don't think there is any making the wrong choice it may not be the best choice it may not be the choice that you 100 love and want to stick with but then you still have the freedom to make different choices and to evolve that or to tweak it a little bit and so like if i were to make you know if i were to run those parallel timelines and look at the timeline where i did the call of duty videos i could be like white boy 7th street where i ended up in jail a bunch of times and just in a miserable position or i could have hated my life or i could have ended up in darker places or i could have ended up just quitting youtube all together and go do the office cubicle job that i always hated or something like that alternatively i could have acted quicker or done a better job and went and actually worked for g4 and machinima and be doing the cool stuff i went to college wanting to do there's infinite timelines and possibilities and none of that matters other than the here and now and so the end goal success doesn't really matter so much as figuring out what you're doing now and what you want to do differently so i don't think at some point like i ever went wrong i just know that at some point everything could change and so you know even in my peak which i deal with a lot like stress and anxiety and worry about youtube and content creation and my job i don't ever think i did the wrong thing it's just a question of at what point do i make a change that was a really long-winded answer but yes troy's pointing out so many streamers get burned out and frustrated when they only get views for one game that's why i didn't want to stick with one game and that's also why you should also this is a complete side tangent and then i need to i need to take a break to get a drink here just as a tangent if you're looking at your stream performance keep in mind that any viewers you get when you're only streaming a specific piece of content is not your true viewer count and you'll never find this out until you go to stream something else but effectively like there used to be like a pie chart that went around about viewers subscribers and commenters on youtube and that kind of applies in different ways to streamers but you have your core viewers that will watch you for just about whatever you stream and those are your actual like consistent viewers those are your long-term paid excuse me subscriber customers that are always going to come back to your brand if you were a product or something like that but then you have viewers that are only hanging around based on the interest that you're streaming so a trendy product idea they're only here to see your newest movie you know those kinds of analogies and those are good to capitalize on and if you can chase trends and do so in a healthy sustainable way chase those a little bit but you still need to be building the smaller more tightly knit community that is going to watch other stuff and if you tie yourself to one thing that no one else wants to watch you doing anything else then you're a one-trick pony that will inevitably like not be able to continue doing what you're doing because you sold yourself sold yourself as doing one thing at the same time if you don't identify a greater concept of what you do you're also screwing yourself so i cannot stand it when someone says they're a variety streamer that doesn't mean anything other than you'd stream more than one thing if you tell me you're a variety streamer i'm going to look you dead in the eye and be like what the do you actually stream variety is not a piece of content it's not a show it's not a game it's not like if your channel name is variety content and that's all your title and thumbnail says for a video i have no clue what that means i'm not clicking on that what do you actually stream and so i think you need to kind of there's a whole lot of books out there like primal branding and things like that you really gotta write it come down to one sentence effectively of i make x product product is video service content social post whatever for why people who believe z which is effectively the primal branding code which is you make a certain type of content for a specific audience who enjoy who appreciate who support some concept some ideas some belief some whatever it doesn't have to be super deep i make tech education videos for people who want to master their tech or more specifically i make tech education videos for people who want to master their streams and make better content you know content creators and who believe that that's important i guess i don't just make random videos about variety tech topics that doesn't tell you anything it's like a resume like if you show up at a at a job interview and they're like so what are you good at and you're just like you know some things here and there a variety of things you're not going to get hired but you're like i'm really good at leading a team to do x or i'm really good at getting why result or i'm good at project management or something like that you're gonna be more likely to get your job and i think everyone who identifies themselves as variety streamers are just their streamers their streams aren't necessarily bad they're not necessarily bad streamers they're bad marketers for their stream they're bad at marketing their streams and that's a huge part of it so i guess you could argue by nature of sucking at telling people what you do and getting people to watch you you're bad at your job but that doesn't that doesn't necessarily represent the quality of their stream just to be clear there i'll be honest i hate marketing or trying to sell things including myself i used to be the same way well that's not true i am still the same way i ended up having like i ended up leaving retail jobs whenever i got to go full time on youtube which has been a very long time now i ended up having days where i just did not go to work because i was basically having panic attacks about not wanting to go because i hated sales so much the normal part of retail jobs of just stocking shelves and helping people check out and all of that was 100 fine but when they started pushing like you got to sell credit cards or you got to sell pre-orders or game guarantees or you gotta you gotta sell cell phones when i did easy tech i'm like i'm here to fix people's computers and help them understand technology not sell them a cell phone for twice as expensive with a super expensive credit down payment than they could get across the street at at t directly that's bull i can't stand it and when it comes to actually asking for money for things that i do i rarely do it because i i just don't like it i i don't feel like you know i get imposter syndrome or don't think it's worth it or gotta you know i gotta deliver the like most perfect thing ever for someone but when it comes to the thing that you do well especially when it's free access content like there's no harm in marketing something you provide for free that isn't hurting anyone you are doing this thing and once you get to a certain point of believing in yourself for doing the thing that's when it happens and actually i think if we're going back to things i think i did wrong i rejected the the the the moniker stream professor for years ever since i made my original obs multi-platform which was the original name for obs studio kind of mini class and then my obs master class i had comment after comment after comment and even people on twitter calling me professor or you know obs professor stream professor that came up so many times and for years i rejected that name because that shoehorned me into one thing eventually i got over myself and i realized that i was really freaking good branding and that that was a solid representation of what i did i am a teacher i am an educator a professor that's fine that's another word for that i am the stream professor and i'm damn good at what i do but it took me years of doing that thing and building up that confidence in believing in what i did in order to really sell myself with that so it does take experience but at the same time brand recognition like if we're talking like i'm on a curve even halfway through last year actually i think it was 2019 the end of 2019 sometime after ltx i finally accepted that that's what i should be called so probably the start of 2020 is when i really went into it if we're talking completely irrelevant to my actual channel growth like those curves are not at all related brand recognition for myself skyrocketed just because i embraced basically a marketing term for who i am it's that simple sometimes i got clown in my job interview today half of it was me saying i'm sorry i don't know if you're at a job and it's either experience you don't have you can reword that this is actually a piece of advice i got when i was working at gamestop and they had those like secret calls where the corporate would call in and try to like trick you into fail well that's not the goal they're trying to make sure you're responding to customers properly they called the store i answered and i was a senior game advisor or supervisor kind of thingy and i was the only one in the store anyway and i answered and they were like do you have lego batman available for pc at the store and my answer was no we don't carry physical pc games anymore but online i can help you or but we sell the digital copy and i can help you purchase a steam key or you can buy it online or whatever and they were like that's freaking great that's better than most people who are just like no sorry and then hang up but you still start out with the negative so if it's experience you don't have take the like improv approach well okay the improv approach is yes but but don't say yes if you don't have experience or don't know how to do a thing but the the objective is not to word it with a negative but to spin it to a positive because i don't know is never an acceptable answer it's either asking questions to get clarification on what you're actually answering if you truly don't know what they're asking or making it clear that you are open to doing it or that you are open to learning about it like oh i ha i did not have to do that at my last job but i am completely open to train you know will training be provided for me to learn that i am quick on you know i'm quick to learn i will happily pick it up if you want to train me uh is there someone i can shadow to see the process those kinds of things because i'm sorry i don't know is ending the conversation there's no way there's no direction for the conversation to go from there whereas when you actually provide an end to continue the conversation even if the answer is effectively the same everything changes\n"