Good Insight.

I was watching a conversation between Scott the Woz and James Rolfe of the Angry Video Game Nerd show, and these two people, despite having chipper and angry presentations, respectively, in their own shows, are just about the calmest, most almost milquetoast couple of people in the world, and here they were, talking for an hour about making videos for the Internet, and other things.

Anyway, Scott asks James a strange question, midway through the episode (nearer to the end, actually), which was something along the lines of “What do you think you would have done if you didn’t do/end up doing” (an important distinction, as you’ll see later) “the Angry Video Game Nerd channel?” And James asks him a few questions, or sort of hits at it multiple times, I think, to clarify what he was asking (sort of a weird question: “If things were different, where would they be?”), but one of the things he says in the way of clarification is “Okay, if I worked on someone else’s P roject? Or, uh, uh,” which was a very enlightening response, to get his view on the subject. He is a very successful guy, unassuming though he is, in the Internet video arena, and what he says here is basically making the distinction between what he does and maybe what most people do: Oh, what would I do if I were doing something for somebody else? Basically, “What would I do if I were following someone else’s lead, rather than my own? Working on their project, and not Mine?”

That is the thing. It hit me like a ton of bricks, or, in the AVGN vernacular, a pile of shit: If you’re working and you’re not making the calls and directing the traffic, then you’re doing someone else’s Project, not your own.