The Power Of Short-Form Content

Quantity versus quality: a comparison as old as time.

It's my belief, through experience, that quality comes as a result of quantity.

On the first day of class, the photography teacher divided his class into two groups:

• “Group Quantity” would be graded on the quantity of their work—the more finished photos a student submitted, the better their grade.
• “Group Quality” would be graded on a single photo, based on the quality of the photo—the closer to “perfect” their single photo, the better their grade.

By the end of the year, the teacher noticed something strange. All the highest quality works were produced by Group Quantity.

Group Quality spent time theorizing on how to produce a perfect photo, reworking their single piece, and going through bouts of boredom and anxiety about their art.

Group Quantity spent time “failing upward” as they continually captured and edited new photos, got their reps in and learned from their mistakes.

There's a big lesson there.

I know many people who have referenced this story (David Bayles and Ted Orland in their book ‘Art & Fear', Austin Kleon in his book ‘Show Your Work', James Clear in his book ‘Atomic Habits', and many others).

Short-form content. Is it a zeitgeist of a superficial society with a shortened attention span, or a creative challenge for creators to refine their work and art?

I used to believe the former. Now I'm leaning toward the latter.

Long-form is for creating depth in your ideas and connections with your audience (this letter is long form).

Short-form is for testing ideas, acquiring skills, getting your reps in, gaining momentum, capturing attention, and refining your communication/presentation.

Regardless of what you or I believe, short-form content isn't going anywhere. I've learned to embrace it, and in this letter, I'll share my perspective on its power.

I'm by no means an expert, I'm only sharing my experience along the way. I hope you find inspiration in this letter to do your own thing. 

“I have made this [letter] longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.” — Blaise Pascal

Skill Acquisition

Creation of any type requires some amount of skill. Here are the skills I'm acquiring through short-form content. I'll emphasize video content, though I'm also doing some short-form writing).

Even if I don't gain anything from an audience or financial perspective, acquiring these skills will make this project worth it.

Here's a list of hard and soft skills I'm developing:

• Writing (including copywriting)
• Researching
• Communication (writing short scripts and delivering concisely)
• Storytelling
• Video recording
• Video editing
• Graphic design
• Motion graphics
• Music production
• Music theory
• Productivity
• Organization
• Discipline

Writing

To me, everything is made better with writing.

Short-form text posts are obviously made better with great writing. Video content is also made better with great scriptwriting.

I'm learning copywriting to catch attention while also learning to write more concisely to fit my ideas into the character/time constraints of short-form content.

Writing is a lifelong habit of mine, and I'm more than happy to continue improving.

“You can't hide behind bad writing. Bad writing will show bad thinking.” — Shaan Puri

Researching

This is another lifelong skill. Getting better at research, to me, means finding and understanding more perspectives on a given subject in order to craft our own unique perspectives.

It's about following genuine curiosities and improving our processes.

For me, that means researching the technical aspects of content creation as well as the ideas of the content itself.

I'll touch on this more with the upcoming sections on the Protégé Effect and project-based learning.

Communication

Communication is key for connecting with people. People make up the audience for online content. Therefore, clear communication is of utmost importance in content creation.

For short form, we need our communication to be super clear and concise.

This continues to be a creative challenge for me. I have so much to write and say. The constraints of short form make me focus on the important, high-impact parts and cut the “fluff”.

Storytelling

Humans love stories. It's in our nature.

Storytelling in short-form content forces us to focus on the essentials: intention and obstacle.

“I worship at the alter of intention and obstacle.” — Aaron Sorkin

With education-first content, my “story” is often implied through learning a concept and then applying it in the real world.

Video Recording

For the longest time, YouTube was the only “social media” (if you want to call it that) that I was on.

I’ve always wanted to get into video production (and have now worked professionally as a cameraman and editor).

But I never really got my reps in. There’d be a sports broadcast to shoot here, and a promo video to edit there, but never a consistent stream of stuff to work on.

So I created that for myself with my short-form video content.

Short-form gives me consistent start-to-finish recording projects.

• I record “talking head” style, speaking into the camera and playing guitar and piano.
• I screen-record my DAW and demonstrate other software.
• I record the audio to go along with it.

And I organize it all effectively to be able to publish one short video every day.

Video Editing

I’ve been working on audio for video professionally, to some degree, since 2015.

In 2024, I’m starting to get into the actual editing of the video (rather than mixing, sound design, ADR, or scoring).

It's the shortness of each of my videos that allows me to constantly learn and experiment with the new techniques I’m learning. It’s also not an overwhelming run time, so I can focus my efforts to make the entire video as good as I can.

It’s been such a fun challenge, and I get to, again, take an idea from raw footage to a full edit every day.

Graphic Design

A picture’s worth a thousand words. Graphic design is another skill I’ve been interested in for a while but never took to plunge into learning.

Being able to whip up graphics, whether they’re artistic or infographics, is a great way to add value to video and written content.

It’s been a blast messing about with Adobe Illustrator and, in many cases, turning those vectors into motion graphics, which brings us to…

Motion Graphics

This one is intimidating, which makes it even more interesting to learn.

Getting into After Effects has been a great learning experience. I like to think of it as graphic design animated along a timeline.

Connecting the dots of timeline-based digital audio workstations and video editors has made this a bit easier.

I’ve been digging into the rotoscope effect and using layers, along with motion blur and 3d spacing.

It’s been great being a beginner and having a beginner's mindset with motion graphics.

I love having known unknowns (how do I get that effect?) and unknown unknowns (wow, I can do that?). The study of motion graphics is the biggest source of that learning in my life right now.

Music Production

I’ve been producing music for a long time. But to explain different processes on camera takes a deeper level of understanding.

This is the content of my content (the major subject of what I'm creating content about).

Music Theory

The same goes for music theory, which is one of my all-time favourite topics to nerd out about.

Admittedly, a lot of my content is more advanced. I'm learning to simplify for short form and to go deeper in long form. Sometimes I just can't help myself!

Productivity

Productivity, simply put, is the efficiency of production (in this case, content production).

I used to scoff at the consistent “churn” of short-form content production.

Perhaps I was thinking lazily when I thought I was thinking efficiently.

Either way. It’s taken an investment in developing a productivity system (I use Notion for this) to get this work done effectively.

Now that I've built this system, I can modify it to help me with achieving other goals in life.

Organization

Short form means more pieces of content. More pieces of content means more organization.

Unless you plan on uploading simple writing or footage as you feel like it, staying organized is key.

I work primarily with video content and I need to stay organized (writing helps tremendously with this).

I get to organize:

• My thoughts into concise content timeframes/character counts.
• My room for presentation (this keeps it from getting too cluttered with other projects).
• My hard drives—for capturing, editing and storing content.
• My backlog and publishing schedule.

That means building in-depth databases and pages inside Notion (my preferred “second brain” software).

It also means creating folder hierarchies on my hard drives.

And it means sticking to a system to reverse entropy, both internal (my thoughts) and external (my hard drives, databases, and physical space).

None of this comes naturally to me. I was the kid who had a messy room because it was inspiring to have my projects out in the open (I stepped on a lot of Legos in the dark).

It's been (and will continue to be) a great skill to learn.

Discipline

Content production on a daily schedule requires discipline and focus.

I've stopped consuming nearly any content that doesn't apply directly to my goals, and have put in work every day to create my own daily short-form content.

Discipline is key, especially in the early days with few followers and few views. It takes discipline to keep going even when you're not “motivated” and feel as though you aren't making progress.

“Successful people do what they have to, whether they feel like it or not.” — Brian Tracy

Fortunately, I have the experience of building (and losing) a 6-figure online business, so I have faith that the work sowed now will reap rewards in the future. Nothing happens, and then everything happens.

More Pieces Of Content = More Opportunities

My current short-form publishing schedule is one YouTube Short a day and one X post (tweet) a day. My focus is on YouTube, though we'll see what happens on X, too.

That means I get one proverbial “kick at the can” every day. I get to try:

• A new idea.
• A new way of presenting.
• A new way of recording.
• A new way of editing.

Every video is an opportunity to learn more, build more, experiment more and teach more of every skill I mentioned above.

By the way, I'm fleshing out my Learn Build Experiment Teach (LBET) framework (and will share it in a future letter). I'm excited about putting that into words.

Every piece of short-form content is a data point. Because of the relatively low amount of effort required (much less than this letter, for example), short-form is a great way to test ideas.

Poor performance is a data point. Great performance is a data point. Double down on the ideas that work and find new creative ways to share the worst ideas (if you really want to).

Furthermore, each piece of short-form “top-of-funnel” content is an opportunity to catch the attention of a new potential audience member.

If we can capture and deliver on attention, we can gain interest. And if we have a bank of content for them to check out (from posting every day), then we can deliver further value on that interest.

Before we know it, we can gain a new fan.

That's the way I see it.

Audience Building

On the topic of building an audience, I'm by no means writing this from a point of “authority”. I'm still a relative “nobody” in the world of online content (at the time of writing, I'm just over 1900 YouTube subscribers).

The fact is that I've made 6-figures online for multiple years without building a true audience. I write about how one of my websites once brought in a regular 350,000 page views every month and still no one knew who I was. You can check out that letter here.

I answered questions people asked Google without putting in the effort to connect with them.

What happened when my SEO (search engine optimization) traffic fell off? The business failed!

Side note: I'm actually a fan of failure. If we can change our perception and use the pain of failure as a learning mechanism, we can move forward with real-world knowledge to do better. And the faster we execute, the faster we can fail, learn, and move on from a place of greater experience.

“Invest in your portfolio of failures until you can afford success.” — Dan Koe

There were no personal anecdotes or reasons to connect with me as a content creator. My newsletter then was all about promoting products and not about sharing depth in any meaningful way.

Yes, short-form content is shallow by the nature of time and character constraints.

However, if you write impactfully or even just show your face and personality on camera, you can make connections with people.

Nerd out about what interests you the most, share stories, and do so in an inspirational, educational and entertaining way.

I'm still learning all of this, but that's how I'm going to continue creating a real audience.

We attract like-minded people through the short form (making use of social media as a gathering spot). We develop deeper connections through the long form (like this letter).

And if you're reading this long from content, I'd like to thank you for being part of my audience!

Project-Based Learning

I've been “teaching” online since 2018 and have since taken an interest in pedagogy (the theory and practice of learning, itself).

Side note: I'm a big fan of meta (no, not the company), but rather the self-reference of creative work. For example, learning and about learning, thinking about thinking, writing about writing, producing videos about video production, etc.

I, myself, love learning new things—getting away from only writing about music gear online (my full-time gig from 2020-2024) has been spiritually freeing.

So all of this is as much about me as it is about you—isn't all the best advice just advice we'd give ourselves?

I'm a big proponent of project-based learning. As the name suggests, it's a system to learn the material and apply that material to achieve a specific goal (the “project”).

Any goal will present problems. Problems require solutions. Solutions require learning.

Short-form content production (specifically YouTube Shorts, in my case) has been a fantastic project.

At the time of sending out this newsletter, I've published 54 YouTube Shorts. Again, I'm not writing from super-high authority here, I'm still in the proverbial trenches.

I've learned a tremendous amount through this project already. Moving forward, I will continue learning by building, experimenting, and teaching.

I've made massive improvements in my video production, organization, motion graphics, communication, and everything else I mentioned in the Skill Acquisition section of this letter.

By the way, I go deeper into project-based learning in this letter.

Protégé Effect

The Protégé Effect is the concept that we learn more effectively when we teach or explain what we’re learning to others.

This is true whether we actually teach others or simply prepare to teach or even act as if we're going to teach.

A shift happens in our minds when we think about teaching information rather than just learning information. In an effort to make sense of the material for others, we make better sense of it for ourselves.

We'll naturally consider different ways of explaining the information:

• What anecdotes can we link to the subject to give it a story (humans learn best through stories)?
• How can we make analogies and comparisons to simpler topics to help make sense of the subject?
• How can we make the subject as interesting as possible for the student?

“If you can’t explain it simply you don’t understand it well enough.” — Albert Einstein

That's one of my all-time favourite quotes.

I love nerding out about music production and music theory, and fall into the trap of going too deep in my short-form content (that's a data point).

The concepts I'm interested in are rather advanced and inaccessible to beginners, who make up the vast majority of any potential audience.

And so I have to get better at explaining complex ideas with simple language and examples. I should also cover more beginner-friendly material in the short form and save the depth for the long form.

On the flip side, I'm only starting to take video production seriously, and love nerding out about that too, albeit from an amateur's mindset.

In this case, I'm learning new material, putting it into practice (by producing short-form videos), and starting to teach about it. This is where I'm really taking advantage of the Protégé Effect.

It's not enough to go through the motions of easing my keyframes in and out, as an example. I need to understand what's happening in that process to teach it effectively. In turn, I'm learning more for myself.

This might sound self-serving, and it is. It's through your own self-improvement that you can best serve others.

There's a reason you put your own oxygen mask on first before helping those around you in the case of an airplane emergency.

I write more on the concept of the Protégé Effect in this letter.

Condensed Presentation

I have the tendency to drag on. If I'm curious or excited about something, I'll go deep in my learning, building, experimenting and teaching.

That naturally spills over into my content, which is why I love doing long-form.

When I started on YouTube, I would record these hour-long videos either talking directly to the camera or working within Logic Pro.

Being new to video and presenting information, I would stumble through explanations, go off on tangents, and have to edit out a ton of false starts.

An hour of content with minimal editing and poor communication skills is an excruciating amount of time for a viewer.

As with any creative endeavour, I can look back on those early days with a cringe and a smile. I'm happy to have gone through it and am glad I learned what I had to learn.

But long-windedness has no place in short-form content. We need to “stop the scroll” by capturing attention and immediately delivering our value on that attention.

All without being gimmicky, over-promising or overtly sexualized. I don't believe the world needs any more of those things. My goal is always to deliver real value to people who want to better themselves.

That means great copywriting and concise presentation.

These skills take time to learn and do well. Fortunately, as mentioned earlier, we have lots of opportunities to practice with low-stakes short-form content.

Getting Comfortable Publishing

This one's important. It's not really something I struggle with now, but in the beginning, things needed to be “perfect” before hitting publish.

Don't let perfection be the enemy of good.

And by the way, our first attempts at anything are going to suck. That's the way it's supposed to be. Learn to embrace that.

It's short-form content. It's the Internet. It doesn't have to be perfect.

But it does have to be good.

Focus on good ideas, execute them as well as you can, learn from doing, and move on.

This is a reminder to myself as much as it is a call to action if you're interested in publishing content, yourself!

Recap

Alright, this one's long enough, and I've shared most of what I wanted to write about on this topic. Undoubtedly it will come up again from a different point of view (maybe once I break the 10,000 subscriber count).

I'll also eventually start producing videos based around this type of content, but if you're interested in tips on music production, music theory, and other creative work, check out my YouTube channel.

That's it for this week. I'll write to you soon!

Cheers,

-Art