Tutorial: How To Find 10x More Viral Video Clips
Reminder: Next Monday, September 4, is a holiday in the US. Therefore, next week’s posting schedule will be Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday.
Kudos #1: Congrats to reader Nnamdi Ibekwe (creator of the New Society, New Risks Substack) for learning how to curate video clips in the paid version of this newsletter, taking action, and having his curated clip retweeted by the luminary he featured:
Further kudos for then starting a back-and-forth dialogue:
This is one of the powers of video clip curation. You’re celebrating the impact of someone else’s work, and as a result, they promote the clip, and the door is open to build a relationship. It’s a win for everyone.
Kudos #2: Hat tip to reader Alina Okun (author, angel investor, entrepreneur) for asking some great questions in a comment thread. This back-and-forth along with a conversation with three other readers was the inspiration for today’s post.
Now on to the post..
The #1 Challenge To Finding Viral Video Clips Is Not What You Think It Is
One of my top five quotes continues to be this:
A problem well stated is a problem half solved.
—Charles Kettering (former head of research at GM)
Understanding the problem we’re solving is so important, because it fundamentally changes how we solve it. If we do not understand the problem, then our solution will either be inefficient or ineffective.
With that said, the #1 problem I hear from students who curate video clips is difficulty finding lots of great clips in their niche (side note: you can read how to search, produce , and distill clips in past posts).
After thinking deeply on this after hearing it from multiple people, I realized that I was trying to answer the wrong question.
The challenge is not a search problem. It’s a learning problem.
In other words, the larger problem is…
Our learning process
Which determines the knowledge in our head and how it’s structured
Which determines the keywords we enter into search engines like Google, Amazon, and YouTube.
By first going to the root (our learning process) rather than the symptom (ie - keyword search), we can more easily find the right keywords.
With that said, in today’s post we’re going to talk about…
How To 10x Your Video Search Process By Improving Your Learning System
My goal in this post is to help you quickly and easily find video clips in order to help you:
Become the recognized expert in your niche
Rise above the noise on the Internet
Build a library of video lessons you can monetize through a course or paid newsletter
To accomplish these goals, this post will provide you with missing mental models and step-by-step advice on how to apply them…
Tutorial: The Five Key Learning Strategies
SECTION SUMMARY
1. Extract experts, terms, and resources as you learn
2. Build an instant knowledge map of a field
3. Research what others in your field don’t or won’t
4. Research across fields to find hidden nuggets
5. Break things down to the micro-level to find hidden connectionsLearning Strategy #1:
Extract experts, terms, and resources as you learn (free preview)
When most people learn a topic, they focus on applying it to their life. Therefore, they focus on extracting hacks, habits, strategies, and mental models they can use in order to accomplish a result.
When I do research, I do this too. But, I also go a level deeper.
As a thought leader, my goals are different than the average reader in a few ways. My goals are a few fold…
To find nuggets of wisdom I can curate and publish immediately
Construct my own ideas that I can publish into longform articles articles in the future
Capture everything I learn in my notes system so I can create content in the future that I couldn’t even fathom right now
My fundamentally, my goal is to learn about the author’s sources so I can curate and learn from those too.
Put differently, when someone writes a book, they spend years doing research to construct their idea. Therefore, they know who the key people are. They know the best books to read. They know the terminology.
As a thought leader, that research is just as valuable to me as their application of ideas.
Therefore, I look for and keep track of the following three goldmines as I consume other people’s work:
Experts (researchers, practitioners, journalists, thought leaders, case studies)
Terminology (jargon, ideas, fields)
Resources (books, videos, articles)
As a result of keeping track of these, one book can lead to dozens of new rabbit holes and easily provide me with 10+ video clips.
Knowing this, every time I come across an expert, term, or resource that seems important, I immediately:
Stop consuming the content
Highlight the term so I can easily come back to it later
If I’m in Kindle, I highlight it.
If I’m reading a physical book, I add it to my research list in the blank pages at the end of the book so I can easily find them later
If I’m watching a video, I will note the time stamp in the physical notebook on my desk
Search for the expert, term, or resources on a relevant search engine (Google Scholar, Google, YouTube)
Determine whether the expert, term, or resource is relevant and important
If what I find seems promising, then I either:
Add it to my notes system so I can come back to it later
Add relevant videos to my Watch Later queue on YouTube
Keep going down the rabbit hole and put my initial book/video on pause, because the new research path seems more promising.
Case Study
While re-reading The Evolving Self, in order to write Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Helps You Find Hours A Day To Write, I came across a 1950s researcher named Johann Huizanga that I had never heard of:
As soon as I saw this passage, I thought to myself, “Wow! That’s very interesting! That parallels investor Chris Dixon’s thesis: The next big thing will start out looking like a toy. It is also relates to an article I’m writing on the importance of intrinsic motivation and play.”
So, I bought Huizanga’s book, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. I also searched for YouTube videos of Huizanga. Unfortunately, there weren’t any, but that search brought me to other related researchers with YouTube videos that built on his work. And, I’m currently in the process of distilling two video clips by those researchers.
Shortcut: Find a book’s top experts, terms, and resources in 15 minutes
You don’t have to spend 7 hours reading a book to extract the relevant experts, terms, and resources.
Rather, to start, you can:
Go right to the end of the book
Explore the bibliography and index
Look for experts and resources that are mentioned more than once
Go to the part of the book where they’re mentioned to get more context
Search them on Google and Youtube to quickly explore them further
This works particularly well with academic books, since they have a boatload of sources and are really good at citing them.
While this hack doesn’t replace reading a book, it’s a great place to start getting value immediately.
Bottom line
As I consume content, I extract experts, terms, and people in real-time.
This provides me with a map of a topic that I connect to my larger map of knowledge in my head and in my notes system.
This map also provides me with terms I can input into search engines to find new video clips or research for my longform articles.
So far we’ve talked about the importance of building a map of knowledge in our head in order to know what keywords to search in order to find video clips and great content.
First, I showed you how to rapidly map a book’s experts, terms, and resources. In the following sections, I’ll show you how to do the same thing:
Within a field
Between fields
At a meta level