Preview: The thing you keep waiting to say probably doesn’t need a crisis.
I had a random thought last week.
I found myself hoping that the people I love and care about the most would never die suddenly so I’d have a chance to tell them what they meant to me.
I know that sounds obvious and I think what my mind was doing was just trying to rationalize a belief it had formed. That I’d never be able to talk to everyone I wanted to before they died.
But then I caught myself and I wondered why I thought that way.
Because it’s a pretty backwards thought, right?
Why am I waiting for a heart attack or an accident to give me the chance to say something I could say now?
I read about a Japanese practice where train conductors point at something and call it out. And then I started thinking about parents do the same thing with their kids.
Point at the red car. Say “see the red car?”
See it. Name it. Notice it more by doing so.
That idea stayed with me because I notice a lot of things.
I notice when I miss somebody. I notice when a memory hits me. I notice when somebody has helped me. I notice when I want to say, “I love you,” or “Thank you,” or “I haven’t forgotten what you did for me.”
And then too often, I leave that thought sitting in my head and assume I’ll get another chance.
Sometimes I do.
A lot of times I don’t.
It was a good reminder that I don’t need a perfect speech. I don’t need to turn it into some huge emotional production. I probably just need to say the frickin thing before I talk myself out of it.
Send the text. Make the call. Tell them.
While they’re alive.
From the Workbench
Editing has always been the big obstacle for me when it comes to making videos. I can hit Record. I can talk. The problem starts after that.
Finding dead space and mistakes and adding captions and things like that was the easy part. Where I got lost was the creative part. How do I make the final result look like I actually meant to make it instead of an amateur rough clip I got stuck with?
And so this week, I’m pumped because my video editor, FrameStak, took a pretty big step forward.
The new additions basically let me turn a raw video into a finished, more professional-looking product using only natural language. Basically, I can now talk through each of the edits I want and the editor knows how and where to make them.
It was a nice add for my faceless videos, but the really exciting part is that it now takes away any excuse I had for making my own videos.
Hell, I even built a simple teleprompter that sits up near my laptop camera so I don’t have to worry about memorizing outlines or scripts or anything.
FrameStak doesn’t make all the editing decisions for me. And It doesn’t automatically make the recording good by magic.
But editing doesn’t feel like a giant, overwhelming thing I have to solve after I hit Record anymore.
That changes things big time for me.
I’m starting to put some of the stuff I’ve been making on my Resources page. Ungated and free to download and use in your own projects.
Enjoy. And happy building.