I’d like very much to talk about something fairly basic today that is a little more inspiring than I would hope it to be.

I’ve had many jobs, and through those journeys, have picked up many random skills. Before I continue to fascinate you with the rest of this- I hope- I shall preface that professionally, I am an actor. In other words, I am consistently unemployed, and finding a job that accommodates this, is less than appealing. So as I choose to defy the cliché arrangement of waiter by day and actor by night, I found a way to use some skills. I am now a luthier by day and actor by night, or maybe that’s the wrong way around… The point is I learned to build guitars and am now making a business of it.

Yet, even with much work experience and much time spent pretending to be other people (possibly luthiers) in front of cameras, I had no clue where to start with building guitars. So I turned to the encyclopedia of the world: YouTube. Not only did I learn how to build guitars, but I learned about the value of the great expanse that is the online video world. The vast amount of material that exists out there is accessible and free. Having that access to all this information is humbling to say the least, and when I figured out that I could learn an entire skill or craft, solely from this lexicon of recorded experience, I was gratified by what I could accomplish. I guess I’m writing this, not so much to make people realize that YouTube is a resource, but more to define what you can do with that resource. If you think of college classes, for example, you have a 1-hour class, 1 day a week for approximately 36 weeks if it follows through an entire school year. That’s 36 hours of knowledge being passed on, yet it is absorbed over that 36-week stretch of time.

I found that with the immediate access of YouTube and a little willingness to pick up something new, even with a bad teacher online, you could accomplish as much in a few weeks as a class can teach you in a school year. That’s the beauty of it. It’s such a treasure trove of life’s “have been, could be, or to be” futures. One day, if you like, that future could be yours.