The Editor is Hayden Hillier Smith. I copied/distilled his teachings into 15 points below. 1/ Rhythm Think about the Rhythm or speed of your cuts - you can't maintain a 10/10 energy the whole time. Vary the pace of cuts depending on what's been happening and where you are in the sequence. Arbitrary fast cutting doesn't necessarily translate into intensity - it can easily descend into incoherent visual noise. The rhythm of your cuts will help the audience anticipate when the next cut happens - you can play with this. Breaking with the rhythm of what's come before helps highlight certain key moments in the video. Example: The average length of the previous 4 cuts was 1-2 seconds but there's a funny moment you want to emphasize so you hold for 4 - 6 seconds. 2/ Contrast/Emphasis Going from total silence to sound at certain moments is a powerful way to add emphasis. You can also do the reverse with a volume swell that then cuts to something much lower in volume to emphasize a specific moment or give the viewer a break. @Ross Sinclair uses volume swells really well. I'd watch his 'Don't Overcomplicate Body-Building Video'. 3/ Using B-roll B-Roll is literal. Just find footage that literally show what you're talking about in the video. 4/ The 'Zenith Cut' The Zenith Cut is your most exciting cut. It's the money cut. It's what the whole movie or sequence is building towards. Think about the end of Fight Club when the buildings come down or Casey Neistat's 'Make It Count' video when he splices all the separate running shots together in different locations near the end of the video. It's a big pay-off. 5/ Murder your darlings Just because you worked on it for 6 hours doesn't mean it's good. The things you most want to include (or think are cool) may not necessarily serve the overarching story. Does it undermine the value of the rest of the edit? Respect the audience's emotional investment and get rid of anything that doesn't serve that goal.

(Update, the video is getting about 20k views a day now so while the over 10k statement is accurate it's still growing rapidly) Here’s the video btw: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bq-CYdjX5_A There are a couple things that have led up to this moment and as much as I would like to tell you it was an overnight thing it's unfortunately an accumulation of years worth of work. I’m still at the very beginning of my journey and there is still a long way to go which is super exciting to think about. But here’s what’s led to this. I have been making videos for around 10 years, not consistently and only a couple a year, but I have tried a lot, from gaming videos, to finance and comedy and a bunch of other stuff. None of it worked. I just tried to emulate (often poorly) the creators I watched. This is an embarrassing but important first step because I learnt how to edit and tell a story with these very bad videos. I went to film school and studied screenwriting, and became a competent writer and learnt the fundamentals of storytelling, these apply not only to feature length movies but also to Youtube videos and educational content. People resonate with stories, not just straight information. I then got a job as a journalist and video producer and really got to put in the hours writing multiple articles a day and producing, filming and editing a few videos a week for a year. This was miserable and I didn’t like what I was doing but it was great practice to get better and better at these skills. I also had the opportunity to work with and learn from some very experienced and brilliant people which was great and helped with figuring out my vision. I also had the pleasure of working with @Andrew Kirby and his team, and spent a lot of time chatting with @Wiktor Romanowicz which taught me a lot about the content game and contextualised a lot in my mind. I also followed the journey of people like @Hamza Ahmed and analysed the way he and others created content which was the most effective and (very importantly) the most helpful to people so they would stay and absorb the content. And this leads to another important point.

I'm trying to boost my productivity output by as much as possible. Though I notice that whenever I come back from a heavy session at the gym, the rest of the day usually falls apart. This is partially the reason why I gym later at the day. I've heard people take these Athletic green smoothies but I'm skeptical. Right now I'm fasting 18/6, go to the gym 5 days a week & take 5 minute breaks when I need to but I'm still not as energized as I want though my nutritional intake & sleep is pretty great. What do you do?

Any South Africans in here? If so, I would love to meet up. I’m in Johannesburg and run a Skool course and mastermind in the financial planning and finance space.

I have been making YouTube videos for over 10 years, not entirely consistently, maybe averaging 3-4 videos a year. I recently looked back at my old videos and was just appalled at how badly they were made. I was clearly trying the emulate a number of other creators with very little of my own creative input in the videos and they all did really badly which is understandable, they were rubbish. But it was important that I made these first videos even though they were bad so that I learnt how to conceptually make videos and more quality content would eventually come out, which it did. I slowly got better and better. And in 2021 I first started making videos that I was proud of and could look back on and happily share with other people because they were true to me and contained content which helped me deal with things in my own life. Though none of these videos even broke the 10-view mark. Because I didn't understand thumbnails and titles and tags and all that. Fortunately last year I got a job as a video producer for pretty big online news publications in my country and I was managing the YouTube channel. This meant I had the opportunity to upload 3-4 videos to YouTube every single day, making the thumbnails, doing the titles and the tags and everything. I was even producing a lot of the content myself as the host of a cryptocurrency show. This gave me massive exposure and I was able to really experiment with what made a video get a higher CTR and see what content would get the most exposure. At this time however, I wasn't able to apply what I learned to my own content because it was deemed as a "conflict of interest" for me to produce my own content but I did keep the lessons I learnt. and I got a lot better at making thumbnails. and figuring out what got people to engage with content even when it was incredibly boring. I left that job to work with the @Andrew Kirby and the synthesizer team briefly at the end of last year where I learnt a lot of valuable lessons which I am incredibly grateful for. In my interview with Andrew, he asked me why I wasn't making my own content. I didn't really have a good answer for him. And I had been thinking about this question ever since. So in February this year, I decided to start making my own content again. So I started making videos which were relevant to me, my life, and the lessons I had learnt along the way. These got a little bit of traction, but nothing spectacular. I then took a look back in my channel at one video that I was particularly proud of but had got something like 8 views. So I literally just reuploaded this video and put more time and attention into the title, thumbnail, description and tags. it started quite slow but the algorithm showed me its grace for the first time in my life and within a day I had a couple of hundred views. So I wrote another video in a similar style, edited and uploaded it and again, a few hundred views in a day. These videos also had tons of positive comments with people saying they were shocked at how few subscribers I had. I've also increased my subs by 4X in the last 2 days.