This content originally appeared on Go Make Things and was authored by Go Make Things
This morning, I watched this short video on how Mr. Rogers would always leave his mistakes in his videos.
If he fumbled while tying his shoes or couldn’t get the zipper to catch quite right, he’d leave it in the clip. You’d get to watch him struggle a bit, work through the problem, and eventually figure it out.
Today’s shows (and more often, YouTube videos) either cut that stuff out with hard jump cuts or run at 5x speed, reducing several minutes of process into a handful of seconds.
A few years back, I stopped editing my videos.
One take. Mistakes stay in. Debugging stays in. Ums and ahs stay in. It kind of happened accidentally.
I did a live stream, and a bunch of folks told me they really liked seeing me fuck up and figure out how to fix it. One person commented that they learned more from watching me figure out what was wrong than from the stuff I got right.
Ever since then, I stopped editing my videos.
I feel like there’s this constant downward pressure—from companies, from “the algorithm,” from viewers—to be faster and pithier and louder and bigger.
Maybe it’s time we all just slowed down a bit.
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This content originally appeared on Go Make Things and was authored by Go Make Things