Background

During December, I released a series of videos to promote the upcoming World Tai Chi and Qigong day. I used some psychology and lean thinking to get past imposter syndrome. I ran it as an experiment, with one goal to be learning how to edit videos. This goal comes from wanting to help Rick Krause promote his Tai Chi practice, as well as the larger Tai Chi and Qigong practitioners in the Oklahoma City area.

What follows are a few things I learned along the way.

How did I get over imposter syndrome (at least so far)?

A lucky confluence of events lead to even starting, and it also was the basis of not stopping.

I’ve recently been working with a local group to promote Tai Chi and Qigong. Rick wanted to record a video for this event. And this all happened around a week of vacation in November, so I decided to do some on my own, along with Rick.

Imposter syndrome set it. There’s a million videos, I’m relatively new to the practice, etc. If I were doing this for myself, that’s game over. Several times I reminded myself that I was helping promote an event that I’m certainly interested in.

So I kept thinking to myself, that’s what I’m doing. I’m going to do this as a way to raise awareness for WTaQD. I point that out in the videos. If I didn’t remind myself that most of the last two weeks of November, I would have stopped.

Do it for someone / something else to help trick your imposter (lovingly).

How did I apply lean thinking?

At the start, I had hardly edited videos beyond trimming the ends. I needed a tools and techniques that would give me a way to both create videos, and learn how to do it along the way. I had also had a recent miss with trying to help a friend, so I want to do a bit more than I had in the past.

Single Piece Flow

I recorded the first video. Ugly green shirt (so says my wife). While I considered what, how, etc., I made the decision that I wanted to add closed captioning.

I did a bit of research, had several false starts, but I managed to find a tool that seemed adequate.

Before finally deciding, I completed 1 video. That done, I set out repeat the process.

It took hours for me to figure out how to edit the subtitles the second time. I was missing some mental model. Also, the mechanism is so “obvious” that you can’t google it. I wasn’t yet able to take in all the visual information. That hiccup lead me to seeing the timeline differently. That turned out to be a crack in a damn in terms of mental model changes.

In any case, the process is repeatable, but after the first deployment, I started batching based on light constraints.

Light Constraints & Devops

After the first video, I did a batch of 5 recordings. This was due natural lighting, near the Winter Solstice, when plenty of cloudy weather, and how it impacts photography. I lucked upon this. I recorded 5 more videos back to back, then the weather turned, making it was a bit dark to record for a few days. Since I started in November, I had enough buffer of deployed videos, but I realized that I should record more than 1 video when the opportunity was available.

After that batching of 5, I then did single piece flow to deployed (it was on this second video I spent hours to realize I need to double-click on a bar in the timeline).

However, rather than doing continuous deployment, I choose to do a phased rollout. One per day. So continuous deployment, scheduled released, but I did release a few early to a few people, so thy really were in production.

Even with this constraint, I worked enough in advance that I did not start a new batch of video recordings until I had finished processing the current bash. I wanted to avoid huge backlogs.

Context matters. Batching based on physical constraints was an acknowledgement of “what is.” Use single piece flow where you can

Even more Devops

I practice immutable infrastructure with the videos. From the beginning to the end of this experiment, I’ve learned quite a few things, one of my goals for doing this, and have started to get a bit of a sense of how to express content-relevant ideas.

None of the first 19 videos have any of that learning. I considered going back and redoing them, but that fails on several points:

it’s a large backlog
yes the newer ones have more special effects, but the essential content is there
I like the historical record of the growth of the style

The lines

Collection of the tweets minus the common content:

As this holiday season thickens, giving your parasympathetic nervous system some attention can really keep you going. Do you believe you are worth some self car?
Be a ninja. Fix your posture while you sit at work. And nobody will know you’re doing it.
Control your body, control your mind, earn meditation points if you’re into spiritual materialism.
Find new ways to pop your joints learn to twist your body like you’re DNA.
In this time of winter blues, raise your qi with some sweet, slow moves.
Losing height? Want to slowly stretch your spine and get some of it back (maybe a bonus articulation)?
Make use of those 700 new neurons created by your Hippocampus every day.
Manipulate your Multiverse.
Re-train your brain by focusing on your feet. Find an event near you and join a world wide community of feet focused folk.
Reclaim your attention from all the VUCA in your life through #TaiChi or #Qigong.
Resist the monolith: Melted sand and corporate greed are hijacking your nervous system. Give your Vagus nerve a nice hug by practicing #TaiChi or #gigong.
Stop trying to kill your ego, de-anthropomorphize it through moving meditation.
The Winter Solstice approaches. Be prepared to raise you Yang side with the Swimming Dragon Diving for the Pearl of Wisdom.
This #qigong exercise will help you remain supple for the next time you break into The Time Warp Again.
This meat-suite we each occupy lacks user manuals. Learn to better control yours.
Want to learn how to better control this meat suit you occupy?
Warning, practicing moving meditation might loosen your connection with consensus reality.
We’re getting close to the Winter Solstice. Bring up some yang energy to revitalized your mid dantian.
What are you doing reading this?! Get control of your parasympathetic nervous system.
Whatever your chaos baseline, raise above it a touch with some intentional body jirations.
Would you like a way to down-regulate your sympathetic nervous system? In just a few minutes. The only equipment required is practice and presence.
You can learn new things up until you die, but you need to participate in your life physically to do so.
You shorten you hips when you sit. You might be doing it when you stand. Avoid the walker!
Your intention informs your attention. Your attention informs your reality. One path into reality bending is through #TaiChi or #Qigong

Video Experiment