Late to the internet
I feel like I keep falling behind
i.
I keep missing the waves.
By the time I’ve paddled out, the content sea is calm, the good waves long gone.
My first video on YouTube was in December 2021, long past the pandemic-fueled boom that launched countless nobodies into full-time creators. If I had started posting earlier, would I already be coasting on AdSense money?
I joined Substack in 2023, three years after the great writers on the internet like Heather Cox Richardson have gained significant followings on the platform. I was late to join Write of Passage, the online writing course that propelled writers like Michael Ashcroft and Ana Lorena Fabrega to internet fame. I already knew Alice Lemée was ghostwriting for a creator I admired, Matt D’Avella, but it wasn’t until much later that I realised she was a WOP alum. I remember scrolling through the alumni page, spotting her name, and thinking: Wait, she did the course? If I’d joined earlier, could that have been me? Would I have been writing his newsletter?
For three years, I have published weekly: YouTube from 2022 to 2023, Substack from 2023 onwards. Yet after all this paddling out into the content sea, I worried the waves have already rolled passed. I’m left bobbing in the waters, wondering: if I’m part an internet-native generation, why do I keep missing the swell? Or worse: am I to blame because I just suck at this writing online content creation thing?
ii.
I couldn’t have been in there earlier. I didn’t start making YouTube videos before 2022 because I had no interest. I couldn’t have written anything decent before 2023 because I wasn’t yet in a place to reflect. I hadn’t sat with my own thoughts long enough to shape them past a blinking cursor.
The timing aligned with life, not the algorithm. When I began posting on YouTube, I’d just stepped out of a season where I lived to work. For the first time, I was exploring interests for their own sake. And when I started writing personal essays on Substack, it was right around when I started therapy, a process that required confronting myself with honesty.
A few months in, I went for a run after a particularly tough day. An office health screening called me fat. My therapist once told me that anxiety and excitement often feel the same in the body: a racing heart, sweaty palms, an urge to move. That evening, I chose to move. Somewhere between the breeze off Victoria Harbour and the bounce of my shoes on the pavement, something clicked. I wasn’t thinking about how I looked. I was thinking about how I felt.
That run didn’t cure my insecurities, but it gave me something better: proof that I could meet discomfort with curiosity instead of shame. And that is what made writing this essay possible, because I’d finally learned how to be honest with myself.
The internet operates at fibre-optic speed. I move at the pace of sand in an hourglass. But my growth aligns with my own life stages, not with trends dictated by the dot-com deities.
I couldn’t have caught those YouTube and Substack waves. I just wasn’t ready.
iii.
Maybe I’m right on time for the next tech wave for the content space: AI.
ChatGPT entered the mainstream only two years ago. Most of my IRL friends don’t use it regularly. Even fewer explore Claude or cycle through more than one tool a day.
I only started using ChatGPT in January. Now, I don’t go through a single day without typing away in the black chatbox window.
The upside of tech moving at fibre-optic speed is that the waves never settle. I can always count on them to keep coming. LLM models evolve so quickly that you can always catch up. I wasn’t around for GPT-3, but I’m here for 4o and o1.
And this time, I’m not starting from zero.
Three years of weekly publishing have given me the endurance to paddle, the strength to pop up, the balance to ride unstable content waves.
Earlier this month, I hit a wall while working on Bite-Sized Creativity, my book about living a creative life on top of a 9-to-5. The draft was solid, but it was missing frameworks. Normally I’d spend days piecing those together. Instead, I fed the manuscript into ChatGPT. Within minutes, it surfaced structure, patterns, models I could shape. I still had to refine the ideas, but AI gave me a running start. It felt like the first time in a long time I wasn’t behind.
This time around, I’m ready to catch the Hawaiian roller coaster ride 🤙🏼
Thank you to friends who encouraged me to continue paddling out to sea: , , Meghna Rao, and .
Update log:
📺 April creative updates: new job, photography mentorship, slogging through book edits
🧙♂️ Figured out my Q2 life and work quests
📹 On the YouTube channel: The real point of journaling is to forget
💬 Experimented asking ChatGPT to brainstorm a high-ticket product offer
🛥️ Meeting new colleagues who are in Hong Kong this week for quarterly planning. I’m excited to get to know the teammates I’ll be working with though I think I’ll need the weekend to recover my introvert soul
🤸♂️ I lost 6cm in waist line in the past 6 months, which annoyingly means all my sports outfits / leggings are too loose now. I’m trying to figure out the most cost-effective way to get new athleisure outfits
Book a call: Have a bite-sized creative project you want to start? Let’s figure out the systems to get that going. I promise to be your earliest fan - https://calendly.com/beckyisj/
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Becky, you’re like a university rower. You show up every morning and put in the reps, always looking to improve and always there to help others get better with you. As readers, we’re the coxswain in your crew boat. You can’t always see where you’re headed or how far you’ve come, but we can see what progress your strokes are making and how beautifully you glide along the river. “Hold it steady!”
Sometimes I feel the same, then I realized it is different each time.
In late 2020, I was late to the online writing game but still earlier than most who got on because of COVID. I was lucky to capitalize on it.
But yes, when it comes to AI and stuff, I feel like I'm so behind too.
It almost feels like we have to be quick to capture attention (super advantage as an early mover), but we don't need to be quick in mastering your thing (time brings mastery). Complicated I know.