Keep Learning and Keep Growing
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Today, on the last year of 2020, I want to share one positive I have decided to take away from this year. It was a year of learning.
Learning new things to me is like drinking a good wine or hearing a moving piece of music or watching the ocean early in the morning when everything feels alive. I get a rush and a sense of excitement from learning anything new. It makes me feel happy and vibrant.
This year, the most important and valuable thing I’ve learned has been how to create videos. This was not something I thought I’d dedicate hours of my life learning this year. Aside from taking videos of my kids or my dogs, downloading them on my computer and then promptly forgetting about them, I’ve never had any aspirations to expand or improve this skill.
But ready or not, I had to learn how to work with a phone camera, record lessons for my students, and edit the videos and post them on the learning platform. I’ve never needed to do this before, so I haven’t. But I had to jump in there an learn quickly because the universities didn’t give instructors a whole lot of time to prepare . . . I believe it was one week.
And sometimes, that is the best way to learn, just to jump in and do the best you can and learn by trying and making mistakes. Thankfully, Zoom (which as something else I had to learn to use) gave students the opportunity to connect with me and ask questions if the videos weren’t clear.
But here I am at the end of the year, and I’ve learned how to make videos. This isn’t to say that I’m good at it yet, but when we begin something new, we’re never good. We might be okay if we have a natural talent or the skill comes easily, but it takes time to perfect anything. I’m happy that I’m better in December than I was in March.
Of course, I haven’t finished learning, not even close. I plan to continue learning more about the features on my phone, and maybe eventually begin using my camera. I plan to learn much more about the video editing software so that my videos can have a more professional look to them.
There are aspects of creating videos that I’ve enjoyed quite a bit. I liked learning about the editing software. Then there are other parts like actually speaking to a dot on the camera that I still find weird and I don’t…
