You are not your content

The reason behind changing the name of my channel

Soon, I’ll publish a video covering Composition over Inheritance. It’s almost finished, but it has taken me about 4 months to get to this stage. As much as I do believe it’s the best video I would have created so far, I already see things I could do better.

And I do not want to fall into that trap.

Spending 3 months on a video is 2 months longer than I want to spend. I have only just started and I can only dream of a time I’m teaching software concepts full-time using fun metaphors and analogies.

But I fear if I don’t publish the best work I can create - it won’t do well. The “YouTube Algorithm” won’t push the video or no one will like the video and my audience wont grow. Investing 4 months on a video for it to be published with a whimper can only be measured as a failure.

I found myself trapped between publishing the video or working on it until it’s higher quality.

I could do better visuals. I can improve the script. There is so many things I could do to improve the packaging (title, thumbnail, etc.). Or, I could accept the video is “good enough for now” and publish it.

I’ve yet to make a decision on this, but I have decided to do one thing: rebrand.

You see, my channel used to be named “Andrew Cairns”. It was my channel and it was my content. And I think that’s fine, but I know, from past experience, that it will be difficult for me to separate my YouTube channel from my personal identity.

If a video did well - great!

However, if a video didn’t to well, that can easily leak into my personal life and it will make me miserable.

I am not good at separating work and life.

And this is why I changed the channel to: Metaphorically Speaking.

You may have heard this before because it is the name of my Substack. There is history behind this name, but it perfectly describes the content I want to create. From now on, the channel will not be directly tied to my name.

This may be a small subtle change, but I believe making it can help be endure the swings that apparently come from publishing content regularly online and publishing to a YouTube channel in particular.

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