I spent ~15 hours pouring my soul into the scripting, title, thumbnail, recording, and editing of a video and it paid off. I give all the credit to Hamza. Hamza recommended the book Storyworthy, so I read it in its entirety and found this quote: "The longer you speak, the more perfect and precise you must be. The longer you stand in front of an audience - whether it be a theater or a boardroom - the more entertaining and engaging your words must be." I journaled about the quote and realized how I could finally grow my YouTube channel, after 2 months of failure: If I'm not entertaining, why am I posting long unedited videos? What if I cram as much value into the least time possible? My average watch time is ~2 minutes on an unedited video. If I cut out all the fluff in my video, and bombard the viewer with extreme value and entertainment, why couldn't I triple my watch time? I did this and it worked. To all the self-improvement YouTubers posting 30-minute unedited rants, if you just add music, throw in some graphics, and most importantly, cut the moments that aren't valuable to the viewer you'll start getting views. I hope this was a good use of your time.