No excuses, Just Stream

 No excuses, Just Stream

What do you do when it’s time to go live, but you just can’t find the motivation? You’ve even come up with a convincing excuse to tell your audience to get yourself off the hook. As you think about it more, the excuse starts to make sense, and you convince yourself there’s no way you can do your show. These snowballing thoughts often stop us from creating content and can be dangerous. The more we entertain the idea of skipping a livestream, the more it feels normal. If we give in to this temptation too often, it becomes a habit to miss scheduled broadcasts. It's crucial to stay vigilant and trust your long-term goals over short-term desires. When thoughts of skipping arise, it’s usually best to go live anyway.

Earn Success

A common misconception that stops many people from achieving their life goals is the belief that following your dreams shouldn’t feel like work. This likely comes from the “grass is always greener” mentality, where we imagine that doing what we love will be the opposite of the monotonous 9-5 grind. While it’s true that pursuing a passion like streaming can be more rewarding, entertaining, and personal, it’s not without the trappings of work. Building something from the ground up comes with its own set of worries, and you still need to show up every day, just like with any job.

The lack of immediate consequences for missing a day may seem like a benefit, but it can hurt you in the long run. The structure and consistency of a traditional job can be a great asset to your streaming career. Successful channels don’t appear overnight; they’re built on consistent effort and reliability. This means streaming every scheduled day, whether you feel like it or not.

In the entry "Staying Motivated," we emphasized the importance of using your work schedule as a guide. It’s okay to take a day off if you genuinely need it, but these should be rare. Don’t let the number of days you take off streaming exceed the number of days you’d be allowed to take off from a regular job. By maintaining this discipline, you’ll keep progressing. To put it simply, hoping and dreaming won’t get you the results you want, you have to put in the work for what you care about.

Keep Believing in Your Dream

How do you push through and go live on days when you feel short on time or energy? The answer most people don’t want to hear: you cut corners. Just like on some workdays, you might not feel great and only put in 70% effort, but you still show up. The same applies to streaming. Don’t worry about making a perfect show every time. It’s more important to be consistent than perfect.

If you’re not feeling up to it, make adjustments: cut the show shorter, change the time, switch to a less intensive activity, or do anything else to avoid canceling the broadcast. As we mentioned in previous entries, there’s no stream length too short, no time too late or early, and no scheduling excuse that should prevent you from streaming. What matters is maintaining your habit. Anyone can stream when it's easy; it’s how you handle the challenges that define you.

Embrace Imperfection

There's an excellent story in James Clear’s book Atomic Habits, where a university photography professor decides to grade his class using two different criteria. The first half of the class would be graded solely on the quantity of their photos. They'd get an A if they took over 100 photos, a B for 90, and so on. The other half would be graded on the quality of their photos, needing to submit just one perfect picture graded on composition, lighting, and other factors.

Now, you might expect the quality group to produce more artistic and striking photos. However, by the end of the semester, the professor found that the quantity group took the best photos. This makes perfect sense when you think about it. The quantity group was constantly taking pictures, making mistakes, experimenting, and improving their skills every day. Meanwhile, the quality group spent their time theorizing about the perfect photo, but did little practical work. They had many ideas, but only one mediocre photo to show it.

Ideas and plans are meaningless if you don’t put them into practice, and practice is meaningless if it’s not done regularly. If you're struggling to decide what game to play, just pick whatever comes to mind. If your channel redesign isn’t perfect, use it anyway, you can always improve later. Making the wrong choice is never as bad as making no choice. As we mentioned in "Overcoming Streamer’s Block," the only reason we spend time making decisions is that a decision is there to be made. Remove the burden of choice, go with the first thing that comes to mind, and go live.

Final Thoughts

The more content you create, the better you’ll become at making it. Like the photography students, only the content you produce matters. No amount of thinking or behind-the-scenes work can replace real experience. So don’t let obstacles get in the way, don’t reschedule your show, and don’t wait for perfection. When in doubt, stream.