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
show me a chicken laying an egg or
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