My love letter and thank you note to Youtube

This post is one part a love letter to Youtube and another part a thank you note. A love letter for being a place that provides a ton of entertainment for myself. A thank you note for realizing that my life would probably be a lot different without it.

I spend a lot of time on Youtube just mindlessly watching comedy or sports highlights. I have also spent a lot of my time learning new things that I find interesting. In the past few months I have fallen into one of my rabbit holes where I get obsessed with something on the internet. Right now that happens to be cooking videos on Youtube. The amount of amazing recipes, tips, and tricks that are out there is essentially unlimited. You can find a video for nearly any dish you would want to make, typically from a world class chef.

Being able to consume all this cooking content has really leveled up my skill in the kitchen fast. I consider myself a decent to good cook but after the last few months of watching Youtube I can really feel myself leveling up. It's awesome to be able to learn this valuable skill for free all from the convenience of my own home.

A veggie sushi bowl I recently made. I learned how to cut the cucumbers properly, make my own light pickle, and more all from skills I picked up while watching cooking videos.

I really think the power of Youtube is underrated for learning things. Looking back on my own life I have leveled up and learned things in areas like:

• coding
• fixing my car
• startups
• cooking
• gaming
• biking
• home improvement
• making music
• languages

And there are a ton of other one off skills I learned that I'm missing. It's hard to measure the number of skills I've learned and how much explainer and tutorial videos have had a huge impact on my life.

While I have learned a ton from other sources like Stack Overflow or tutorials, Youtube has been my single biggest source of learning material to level up my life. I wouldn't have the career or startup opportunities without Youtube. Without fuzzy tutorial videos with shit audio I probably don't learn to code, which means I have a different job, don't meet the cool people I've met through tech, etc. etc. The changes are endless, a real butterfly effect when I get to thinking about it.

I want to give a special shout out to the creators making Youtube what it is. Without them taking the time to create the content, I don't know if I would still know how to properly slice an onion. The quality of both the content and video itself has gotten off the charts and hats off to the people making content that we love day in and day out. It might be hard to fathom, but the Youtube video you post might be the catalyst to someone leveling up their life. I know that because I'm one of those people.