Creative Woodworking and Building a Worldwide Tribe

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i

have a superpower i know what you’re

thinking

you’re thinking who the heck is this cat

in a cut-off sleeve shirt

doing a ted talk well uh

the world is changing i mean obviously

we’re in my shop recording at tedx talk

and that kind of seems like a little bit

of a silly thing to say because the

world is always changing

in fact uh i have a toilet now

which you would think i that’s an

obvious thing everybody has a toilet

well i didn’t always when i was growing

up i didn’t have a toilet

we had an outhouse which we use in the

summertime in the winter time it was a

five gallon bucket in a closet and yes

that is as gross as it sounds

but it’s what we did we also didn’t have

electricity

or running water we didn’t have

televisions

and for a very long time we didn’t even

have a phone we ended up with like a

three-party line some of you remember

what that is

but growing up that way was great for

being a kid you had to be creative for

your entertainment

now i did present some challenges there

was always work to be done

in fact there was a lot of work to be

done but when it came to really big jobs

like

raising barns or billing hay or maybe

cutting firewood for a family whose

father was hurt

our community came together to to make

those things happen

what i learned then was something very

interesting that everybody

had something to share something to

teach some knowledge to pass down

and that there was this feeling in the

air when a community when our community

came together that is undescribable

there’s like

it was just an energy that i can’t

really describe very well and i loved

that energy that aspect and the

community and the sharing of knowledge

so yes things have changed probably one

of the biggest effects

in change that we’ve seen in our world

in the last 40 50 years is the internet

which is what i do for a living by the

way

but i really wish i would have had the

internet as a child my dad

my dad taught me or he had me convinced

that uh

boats being pulled down the road by a

truck and when their motors are left in

neutral

their propellers will spin he had me

convinced when i was a young man that

that propeller was pushing the trailer

and the truck down the road it was the

way they saved gas

having the internet would have been

handy back then for a little fact

checking

so now fast forward 40 years and i have

a five-year-old son

who is proficient at the internet he

can’t read or write that well yet

but he knows how to hit the little

speaker button and you can hit watch him

walking around the living room going

google

show me a chicken laying an egg or

google

what do dinosaurs eat or my favorite one

is google

do boats really push trucks down the

road

so times have changed and

now we have this tool where we can share

not only with just the people in our

community but with the entire world

and that’s what i do for a living i’m a

youtuber

i’ve had some success on youtube and

it’s been an interesting journey

i still remember the very first video i

posted on youtube it was 2013 march

19th and it was quite frankly probably

the worst video

ever posted to youtube it was a single

single frame shot pointed really low

talking in monotone about this

sharpening jig i’d made for a table saw

blade

but something interesting happened

people asked questions

and people commented on the video and

quite frankly i was hooked

i was sharing information things that i

learned things that i’ve

designed with everybody everybody had

access to this it wasn’t just

my neighbor or a kid down the street

that happens to be interested in

woodworking

so i’m involved in this community that’s

called a maker community

and that means i make stuff for those of

you who don’t know what maker

what the maker community is about and

i focus on woodworking and to tell you

what i

do might be a little bit difficult so

rather than doing that

i’m gonna show you because i make videos

so here

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so all those things you just saw were

made completely out of wood

of course there were some drills and a

few mechanical devices but for the most

part that was woodworking

now i do other stuff too i i build some

jigs i show folks how to get more out of

their tools than they might otherwise be

able to

and i have a lot of fun doing it but i

build those kind of things because i

want to inspire people

that then show them that they can do so

much

with woodworking or making and

i really want to inspire that next

generation and i love building cabinets

and chairs but we’re not going to do

that

we’re not going to get a five-year-old

or a teenager

in interested in building a chair well

there’s a few but for the most part

builds like that are what are going to

get people excited

and that makes me excited so i’ve been

on youtube now for

about eight years just shy of eight

years i have um three quarter of a

million followers on youtube

uh 125 000 on instagram

a few on facebook and i have my own

social media app that i share

information on as well

100 million views i just passed that

which is a pretty exciting

number on youtube and across the board

almost a half a billion

views and that’s not a brag it’s

i just want to show you that it’s

possible to affect a change in a lot of

people and inspire a lot of people

there are some youtubers that do that

before breakfast

whenever i tell people that i’m a

youtuber and i’ve had some success

on youtube i always get that question uh

how how do i make it on youtube

and while i don’t think that’s the right

question i do have an answer for it it’s

an acronym the acronym is you

can so you see a n and u stands for

unique b have your content be unique be

unique

and all that means is like if you’re a

rhinoceros and a cache of rhinos

wear a pink tutu you’re going to stand

out

watch where the crowd’s going and then

go the other way

that’s the best way to stand out from a

crowd the second one is content

content is important in fact i had

someone from google

once tell me that the most important

thing you can do is content

it doesn’t have to be original content

it doesn’t have to be

earth shattering content it has to be

good content

everybody has a unique view of something

even if somebody else has done something

before

your view is going to be unique to your

experiences

so good content

a think or speak with authority

so know the content that you’re showing

if you’re sharing something really

understand it and know it speak with

authority when you speak with authority

it draws people in

they believe you they want to they want

to see more

so speak with authority and the last one

n

is now do it now it’s that simple

you can talk about it all you want to

but until you take action

nothing’s going to happen

so so there’s a lot of online

communities

that kind of evolved around the maker

community

it’s not just one guy on youtube there’s

a lot of us that do

builds whether it’s woodworking or 3d

printing or

crazy wild builds there’s quite a few of

us that do it and there’s communities

that have

developed around there now in those

communities there’s people like my

friend andy berkey or my friend joe

crawford or my buddy mike

who constantly post things who are

constantly inspiring

other people who have affected positive

change and lots of lives but

you know you won’t see their names up on

youtube and you’re not gonna

they don’t have 750 000 followers or a

million and a half followers

but they’ve taken the time to share what

they do they share their experiences and

share their knowledge

and they’ve become pillars in these

communities these offshoots

and they’ve affected positive change in

a lot of

a lot of lives i’m a lot of things

i’m not just a woodworker i’m not a

youtuber i’m

i’m a amateur engineer um i’m a designer

i i’m a i’m an artist

i’m an okay grill master not the best

but okay

and i’m all these things not because i

learned them traditionally

through people around me locally or

schools

i learned all these things because

people just like yourselves took the

time to share that information and

knowledge

and i was interested and i connected

with someone

and that’s really what it’s about we’re

not going to connect with everybody but

you will connect with somebody

and i search people out that i connect

with and they were sharing information

and i was

interested and that interest turned into

a passion and that happened because

someone like yourself took the time

to record and share their their

knowledge and information

so today my big idea we’re sharing

is that your ideas are worth sharing

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you