Hello nobody!

I’m going to start vlogging here on the Temzee 2 channel –kind of just to check in with myself, and keep myself accountable for the goals that I’ve set for myself, and for the things that I’m working on with Temzee.

You may have heard the story about a pottery teacher who tells one half of their class that they'll be graded on the best piece of pottery that they make during the semester, and the other half of the class that their grade will be based on the number of pieces of pottery that they make, the higher the quantity, the better the grade –for the second half of the class.

Well as the story goes, the first half of the class naturally tends towards being perfectionists and spends a lot of time on just a few pieces of pottery and tries to make them as good as possible, but they kind of still end up a little bit mediocre (the pottery they make) by the end of the semester.

While the half of the class that tries to maximize the number of pieces of pottery that they make ends up getting much more practice and learning the intricacies of a lot of different techniques. Through trial and error, they end up making consistently higher quality pottery than the other group.

So, even though this story is probably mostly apocryphal, I think it resonates with a lot of people because we know that it takes a lot of practice and repetition to get truly good at something.

I have a really bad habit of being a perfectionist and I’m really slow to make new content. That’s part of why I’m starting this vlog is because I want to try and break myself of that habit.

So, just doing this in one take, crappy lighting, crappy whatever, we're just going to do it. -ya know? In the spirit of making as much "pottery" as possible I want to start tracking how much content I produce for Temzee.com –a website where I teach Data Science. I make Data Science lessons, tutorials, videos, etc. -code challenges. So, because of that I make a lot of different posts and videos that are all of different lengths and different levels of complexity. So, when I track the number of "pieces of pottery" that I make, I don’t want that necessarily to be lessons, or code challenges, or anything of that nature. I just want to track the number of words that I’ve written and published on Temzee.com and to try and maximize that. Now, some days I'll probably cheat a little bit with a little help from ChatGPT as kind of a writing assistant, other days I'll want everything to be –you know– just from me and so it may differ from day to day, but I just want to be consistent. And I just want to be consistently teaching, and putting stuff out there, and helping people learn. It's kind of like if you were to keep track of the number of steps you've taken as a measure of your physical activity, right? Kind of like that.  

I haven’t decided how exactly I want to count up all the words that I write, I’m sure I’ll come up with some overly technical, complicated system for doing it, but I do think that this is going to be really motivating for me, and it's really going to help me consistently create things that help people.

Once I have a system for tracking the number of words that I've written, I want to try experimenting with a bunch of different writing techniques. Is it better for me to type everything out, or like dictate a recording to my phone, and then edit the transcription afterwards? –something like that. Is it more efficient for me to just open a notebook and record some live-coding and then go back through and polish up my instruction? Maybe with some heavy editing? Do things in one take –kind of like this?

I want to try out a bunch of things and I’m sure as the quantity of content I make goes up, I’m naturally going to discover what works for me, and what works for the people consuming my content –what they like best. And think I'll naturally become better at making things and get less scared of publishing –which is one of my biggest fears right now, honestly.

It's really different making static videos for the whole world vs teaching a class of 20, or 40 students, and doing that live. I could do that all day, but it's really scary for me to make a final version of something and put it out there, because I always just want it to be as good as it possibly can be. So, I'm trying to get over that, I'm trying to make content that's good and helpful, even if it's not perfect –and to do that much more consistently. At least, that's the hope, so...

This is me trying to put the best foot forward. With these vlogs I'll give updates on the content I'm writing, the changes I'm making to the site, whatever I really want to talk about, and I don't really care if nobody ever sees this, it's just for me. To help me be accountable, so... See you next time I make one of these (hopefully tomorrow).

I don't know if I'll be able to start writing, a lot, a lot, a lot, immediately. There are some big changes that I want to make to the site before I get to this. I just want to simplify, and be able to track the number of words. So, don't know when I'll start reporting the number of words that I've written, but it'll be in the next few days so... BYE!