The Kids Just Launch

Watch this (it’s less than two minutes). Then you can file it away under “What All the Kids Are Into These Days,” and then, you can make a copy of that file and file it in your secret “God, I Feel Old” file.

Mitchell Davis is a self-made YouTube celeb from Ohio who, segue, kind of reminds me of a young Jim Carrey if Jim Carrey’d had iMovie at 18. What I’d like you to note about this video is how genuinely “2010 teenager” it is. It’s a vlog, first off, so the format is new-ish, and there’s a sort of MySpace-y casual narcissism, but there’s also the obvious comfort with technology, the use of comedic editing techniques culled from the media he’s grown up with, and the way the whole thing looks and feels like a video chat.

Next, I’d like to direct your attention to my favorite fashion blogger. Tavi Gevinson is 13 and has honed a common childhood penchant for playing dress-up into a prodigious sense of (and interest in) fashion that, in turn, has become a widely read and highly regarded fashion column. Style Rookie reads like a teenage diary because that’s how it started out and, as Tavi maintains, what it still is. Most importantly, it’s that natural lack of pretension that makes her blog great.

What these kids give us is a triple lesson in real artists shipping, good enough being great, and authenticity. The nice thing about that last one is if you’re doing the other two right, “realness” comes along for free.

So ship that thing you’re sitting on. Make it good, but don’t wait for perfect—improve it as you go. Is the editing in that student-produced video not quite right? Are the styles in your faculty blog still a little off? Are you worried about selecting the right photos for an event recap? Do/make/publish the thing. Get it in front of people and let them beat it up. Then do it again and again. Your project will either die from the constant pummeling and you can move on, or it (and you) will be stronger than ever. Then you can learn from your mistakes and get better and faster at producing content.

Bonus takeaway: make sure you’re not afraid to try things. That’s how to get millennial-level familiarity with new tools: just have at it. You’re not going to break Photoshop or the Internet. Go ahead and mess with the weird settings on your camera. Try GarageBand. Vlog. Then keep at it until you decide you hate it or something good comes out. I mean, come on…all the cool kids are doin’ it.

#hadto #sorry

Posted by Laurel Hechanova
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