Broken Laptops & Cancelled Lectures

Screenshot of a message I sent after editing a YouTube video for the first time.

The butterfly effect is the idea that the world is deeply interconnected in a way that one small occurrence can influence a larger complex system. In other words, something small can have much larger effects.

Today’s blog is going to focus on how a broken laptop and a cancelled lecture has impacted my present and foreseeable future.

It’s April 2019. Avengers: End Game has just been released in theatres and the Notre Dame Cathedral has caught on fire. I’m in the first (freshman) year of university and I’ve recently started a YouTube channel with a group of friends. We’re making things work in empty lecture halls and an iPhone XS Max. For so long I said that I wanted to learn how to edit to take the workload off of Tobias, a great friend of mine who was the channel’s main editor. I continued to procrastinate with wanting to learn until one day his laptop broke and needed a repair.

Without much of a choice, I stepped up to the plate and edited not one but two videos. Looking back now, it was scrappy and had some bad cuts but at the time for what it was, I thought it was perfect. I was feeling like a young Martin Scorsese after seeing the end product of a video that I created. From there I edited a few times for the channel before becoming the channel’s social media video editor until we took a hiatus.

It’s early 2020 and I started a podcast and that made me fall in love with not just video but audio editing too. In July of that year, I shot and edited a promotion video for a makeup brand founded by my close friend Ola. From there I started shooting and editing promotion videos for actual money. Being paid in exchange for my services, outside of a job, made me feel like I had finally understood those Gary Vee videos from back in the day. During this time, I also started building websites on a volunteer basis.

Towards the end of 2020, after reflecting on my skills, I wanted to start my own solo digital media agency and do everything from videos, photography and websites. I’ll touch on this in a future post, but one of the reasons I’m happy that I have done a few different things is that I’ve discovered my likes and dislikes. After doing more promotional videos, I realised that I didn’t like shooting and editing as much as when I was doing it for personal endeavours like youtube and podcasting. I decided to focus on building websites, got good at it and had the opportunity to work with interesting clients.

It’s now April 2022 and it’s the final push to submit my final year project. I agreed to meet my project supervisor in person at 9:30 on one Friday morning. She was unable to make it that morning and to make matters worse, the lecture that I had later that day was cancelled. Instead of going home, I decided to stay and study in a computer lab. Fiona, a girl in my course, was also in the lab and in conversation she mentioned that she received an email about a global student accelerator program taking place in Portugal and encouraged me to apply. So I did

As mentioned in my first ever blog post, university finished on a random Wednesday afternoon. But a few days after that, I got an email that said my application was successful and I was through to the final stages of the application, where I would have to pitch an idea. I pitched the idea and was successful in winning a scholarship to the program.

I’ve already touched on the impact of this program and how it led me to meeting my eventual friend and co-founder Ronan. But one of the other huge benefits was meeting people from different parts of the world. Seeing my peers doing great things in their respective countries has shown me what’s possible and increased my self belief.

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if Tobias’ laptop never broke or if my supervisor was able to make it that day. I also ask myself what if that lecture wasn’t cancelled and I never got to have that conversation with Fiona. It’s not to say that things wouldn’t be currently working out for me if these events don’t take place but I think the things that appear small and insignificant make telling stories like this more beautiful.