On being valued by audiences

A snippet from a small discussion I had with someone recently that I thought may be valuable to share, for someone who wonders if what they're making is valuable.

I was discussing this with another YouTuber friend of mine the other day: when it comes to changing people’s lives and making valuable stuff for others, you don’t have to change the world: just helping a single person will change their world.

Another lesson I find really useful that I learnt very recently in the context of being a doctor: no matter which stage of life you’re at, you won’t be able to engage with everyone equally. “There are some patients that will really engage with you now, that in 30 years time you won’t be able to engage with”, my senior doctor I worked with said. And that’s just because we ourselves have an identity and style now that some people will instantly vibe with and some people would be instantly turned off by, and even that changes over time. Engaging with patients and audiences has  many similarities.

If “value” is just the ability to change someone’s life, the fortunate thing about creating things online is you get an infinite number of goes to do so. Because everyone has their own narrative, their own struggles, and different things they need; what you say to one person may bounce off their head, but the exact same sentence will change the life of another person.

Your audience will be this heterogenous mass of people who are variably helped by the stuff you make. So don't worry too much about your content being a binary valuable vs not valuable — each thought you find valuable, is valuable to someone else in some way at some time in some place.