Everyone on YouTube sees hiring a video editor as a major milestone in their channel’s growth. It’s a symbol that you’ve “made it”. While I can say that partnering with the right editor can be a truly game changing experience, it’s worth considering this often overlooked downside:

If you’re not editing your content, you won’t feel the pain directly.

So what do I mean by that? You don’t feel the pain when something you make doesn’t land, you didn’t put in the hours of editing to get it to where it was. If you don’t feel the pain, you won’t pull your hand out of the flame as quickly as you should. You won’t make adjustments and learn from your mistakes as fast as you should.

Ultimately, being successful on social platforms is about testing and iterating to figure out what works. Pain is what makes that process go around, it’s what makes you learn the important lessons. If you don’t feel the pain directly, you won’t iterate as aggressively as you should, you might keep doing what you’re doing longer than you should.

The first 100 videos you make are often going to be bad, but the reward for that effort is intense learning. Very very few people taste success in that period. If you’re not editing your work, you’re not going to see all the little issues with the footage you shot, you’re not going to understand how bad your audio really was, you might not see that you need more b-roll and angles to keep the footage interesting, you wont realize your story lines don’t capture people.

Am I saying you need to edit videos yourself for ever? No, there’s a point where it makes sense to focus on the content creation and pass the editing to a true expert. I’m just saying don’t skip that step too fast because you’ll miss out on important learnings that will shape the rest of your content creation career.