So, I had such a good time this past weekend at WordCamp Denver talking about some of the lessons I learned as a soldier that I’m starting a new video series on the topic. This will be a weekly video series and will include things I’ve been able to apply to my business, mental and physical health topics, and a whole lot more. Hopefully people check it out and find it useful. If not, oh well I’m going to have fun doing it anyway.
As a little background, I served in the Connecticut Army National Guard for about 6 years as an infantry soldier. I did a tour to Afghanistan, and picked up a lot of lessons along the way.
The first one is up above. It came out on a Thursday, so I’ll probably stick to publishing on Thursdays unless there is a compelling reason to switch.
If you’re watching that video, I recorded it with the intention of it being a “hello world” sort of video. I’m also using it as a dry run to work out some kinks on the recording process. It’s not perfect, the next one probably won’t be either, but hopefully it’ll go a little smoother.
I’m hoping this generates genuine conversation. In order to have a conversation though, we need to get in touch with each other.
There is an email signup form at the bottom of this post. Subscribers will get an email any time a new video is posted. You can reply directly to me, comment on the video on YouTube or the blog post I write for it on this site. If email isn’t your thing, you can subscribe to my channel on YouTube.
I’m also going to try to make these videos as accessible as possible. That means each video will have captions and a transcript available. This should help anyone with visual or hearing impairments. If there is something else I can do to make these videos even more accessible, please let me know in the comments or send me an email.
What I want to do is introduce a series of videos that I’m going to be doing on lessons that I’ve learned while I was in the army.
I’ve done a few talks like this at various conferences in the past.
This past February at LoopConf I did a talk on mental health issues that I learned from my military experience.
At PressNomics last year I did a short lightning talk, touched a little bit on my military experience.
And most recently, at WordCamp Denver, just last week, I did a talk on business lessons that I learned while I was in the army.
And I really enjoyed preparing for these talks, giving the talks, and I especially enjoyed the conversations that I had with people afterwards.
I got to speak with lots of people that I might not have otherwise gotten to speak to if I hadn’t given these talks.
The problem that I’ve had with these talks, though, is that there’s just not enough time to cram in everything that I want to talk about into these short, sometimes 10, 15, 20 minute, some odd talks, where I have lots of information that I want to say.
I start preparing the slides for these presentations and I end up with way more topics than I could possibly fit into the time period that I have allotted to me. And so I end up cutting out a ton of it.
This past weekend, at WordCamp Denver, I limited myself to just two topics in the 20 some odd minutes that I had to talk.
And so it just wasn’t a ton of time, to fit everything in.
And I wanted to do these talks more frequently, but waiting for the next WordCamp to come along just seemed like it was inefficient.
So what I really want to do is put out these videos of maybe concentrated versions of these talks.
So instead of a 20-minute, 45-minute talk, or whatever, maybe just some short clips of key points that I would otherwise have put into a talk and have it more geared to a specific subject.
So each video will be talking about one specific thing, as opposed to multiple topics, that a longer talk at a conference might otherwise have.
My intention right now is to do a weekly video. We’ll see how that goes.
The videos, I guess they probably won’t be too long. They might be five minutes max, or so.
And I hope people are going to be able to get a lot out of it. I feel like there’s a lot to be learned from it.
Maybe no one’s going to watch these videos, who knows?
Regardless, this is something that I’m passionate about and something that I really want to share more about.
So I’m going to do these videos whether anybody’s watching or not. Hopefully people do, and hopefully people get a bunch out of it.
Thanks.
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