Jim Makos

Living free. I walk 15 km every day, work alone from home clicking buttons on a screen, and carry a camera everywhere I go. Writing at

[Jim Makos @JimMakos]

I just realized that at least 3 of my videos don’t show up on YouTube when someone has Restricted Mode turned on.

Okay, I get why two of them are hidden, they’re about sensitive topics. But the third one? It’s literally just me comparing talking with a teleprompter vs. speaking spontaneously. Why?!

[Jim Makos @JimMakos]

My reward for batching: uploading ten short videos at once.

This is the first time I’ve actually pulled it off. And what I really mean is that I finally beat my own impatience.

Until now, I’d film four or five videos during my walk, edit them, and as soon as I finished one, I’d upload it right away. I was fast enough that I could even post five shorts in the same day.

The problem? I’d run out of content and have to start from zero again.

A perfect recipe for burnout.

This time though, I held back. I just finished editing ten videos, but instead of posting them all at once, I'll schedule them, two per day. Even though I really wanted to drop them all right now.

Now I have five days of content ready, which means I’m not under constant pressure to create. That gives me room to work on other things that might actually perform better than shorts.

[Jim Makos @JimMakos]

I heard @garyvee saying now that the best marketing is to create separate profiles on social media based on different niches.

For example, have “Jim the Filmmaker” who only talks about video and how he shoots his content, “Jim the Healthy Man” who talks about what he eats, shares his workout routines and how he maintains his weight, and “Jim the Family Man” who talks about family and relationships.

I don’t agree with that.

I think if I created separate profiles which I’ve done in the past with websites they would end up becoming completely separate entities.

They’d turn into standalone brands, without my name attached to them. And that’s fine if I wanted to build actual businesses that could exist without relying on me personally.

But if I want to build a personal brand around myself, then I should keep everything under one handle, like I’m doing now.

Because at the end of the day, I’m just one person. Like everyone else, I have multiple interests and different sides to me.

And that’s what actually makes me a real human.

[Jim Makos @JimMakos]

How many things we take for granted, right?

Sometimes people tell me, “How much time you waste walking every day!” or even I catch myself thinking, “Instead of walking, maybe I should be doing something more productive?”

And just now, during my walk, I ran into a man in a wheelchair who was with his family, watching the sunrise.

I thought to myself that this man would give anything to be in my position just standing there and walking.

I doubt he’d be wondering whether he should combine it with something more productive, or whether it’s a waste of time.

It was a good reminder to appreciate the things I have, no matter how simple or obvious they might seem.

[Jim Makos @JimMakos]

The good thing about sharing every thought you have on the internet is that you don’t have time to check the stats on how many people are actually reading them.

[Jim Makos @JimMakos]

Say I spend an entire year making the best possible post on social media.

The best Reel on Instagram.

The best long-form video on YouTube.

In a parallel universe, another Jim spends the same year posting 365 average-to-terrible videos and texts across social media.

Who has a better shot at actually succeeding?

[Jim Makos @JimMakos]

Instagram's @mosseri community is the first and only community I’ve ever joined.

What better way to learn what actually works on a platform than directly from the person who runs it? Every Friday, we can even send him our questions, and he answers them in Stories, which I never miss. Honestly, other CEOs should take notes from Adam.

So this community is kind of the cherry on top.

But that’s not even the best part.

The best part is that every now and then he debunks all the so-called “secrets” that strategists keep pushing. I genuinely enjoy reading that a lot of the things these “experts” claim don’t actually work. 😂

[Jim Makos @JimMakos]

I now spend most of my time writing and editing photos and videos, moving real-life stories into the digital world.

More and more of us are becoming active on social media. Of course, the goal is usually to get attention and then benefit from it, whether that’s by promoting ourselves and our skills, selling our services, finding collaborations, or even landing a job.

To do that, we create as much content as possible. And the easiest kind of content is simply showing what we’re already doing in real life.

So we’ve reached a point where, for almost everything we do, we first think about how we can show it online.

Does that mean we’re slowly moving our real lives onto the internet, and eventually our entire lives will become virtual?

Movies like *The Truman Show* and *Ready Player One* come to mind.

At least in the future, when we spend more time in virtual reality, I won’t have to edit anything. Εverything will be 'live'.

P.S. I chose to show my LinkedIn analytics because it’s the newest platform I’m focusing on, and it’s another place where I feel I “have to” exist.

[Jim Makos @JimMakos]

Based on my track record with Adobe software, I’d say there’s about a 50-50 chance my Lightroom catalog won’t get corrupted.

[Jim Makos @JimMakos]

I was wasting so much time and electricity boiling corn for nothing.

For years, I used to boil corn for at least twenty minutes. But recently I asked AI, and it told me it doesn’t need more than ten to twelve minutes. Plus, it said that overcooking makes it lose a lot of its nutrients.

Ever since then, I’ve been boiling it for less and less time. I started at ten minutes, then dropped to nine, eight, seven… and today I only boiled these ones for six minutes.

The taste is still the same, and they’re actually getting a bit crunchier. I’m curious to see how low I can go before I just start eating them raw! 😅

[Jim Makos @JimMakos]

AI doesn’t eliminate jobs. It reduces them by increasing productivity.

For now.

I had a conversation yesterday with a friend who told me a story about a company that made a mistake when it fully replaced its junior employees with AI.

Originally, the company had three juniors and three seniors working on a specific task. The juniors did the actual work, and the seniors reviewed it and made the final decisions or small adjustments.

Then the company decided to fire all three juniors and told the seniors that from now on, AI would do the juniors’ part completely.

The result? According to the seniors themselves, the output from AI was worse than what the three juniors used to produce. The seniors couldn’t bring it up to the same level because they didn’t have the same hands-on skills the juniors had.

So in the end, the overall quality of the work dropped.

What the company should have done instead of firing all three juniors is keep just one.

Since AI isn’t yet at the level where it can fully replace that role, keeping one junior who understands the work would allow them to produce the output of three people with the help of AI.

Right now, what AI is really good at is helping people do more in less time and speeding up their work. In other words, increasing individual productivity.

The real question is: how long until AI can not only replace juniors, but also start replacing the seniors?

[Jim Makos @JimMakos]

I’m definitely not doing that again.

We went on a quick escape to the cool air during the heatwave. The kids wanted to go on this slide called the “funnel.” But for that slide, you need at least one adult. Guess who that was.

I’d been hearing about this funnel for years and had been trying to avoid it.

Today though, I decided to go for it.

“How bad can it be?” I thought.

All I’ll say is that when we reached the bottom, my hands and legs were shaking. Why do I need this kind of excitement at my age?

The kids were thrilled and asked if we could do it a second time. I still don’t know why I agreed.

That was definitely the last time though.

[Jim Makos @JimMakos]

I had to find a font for my videos.

Now that I’ve gotten into making short videos during my morning walks for Instagram and YouTube, one essential thing is having burned-in subtitles. Over half the viewers watch videos without sound, so they’re pretty much required.

The good news is that DaVinci Resolve’s AI generates the subtitles automatically.

I also wanted the subtitles to be in all caps. Luckily, there’s an “all caps” option that converts everything to uppercase.

That’s where the problem started.

In Greek, when you write everything in capital letters, you don’t put accents. So I needed to find fonts that don’t add accents when set to all caps.

I searched on Google Fonts and managed to find around five that worked.

In the end, I picked one I liked the most.

Of course, it’s not just about what I like. The subtitles need to be easy to read, and the armchair spelling experts don’t start complaining in the comments.

[Jim Makos @JimMakos]

I want to do what you’re doing.

I noticed a new model (at least to me) where some creators are monetizing the attention they’ve built on social media.

It’s not courses, it’s not coaching, and it’s not affiliate marketing.

It’s giving people the chance to live the same experience they have.

Let me explain.

There’s a guy in London who rides his bike through the empty streets at 4 a.m. and built a big following doing it. Now he organizes group rides where people cycle with him at the same time.

Another guy films himself hiking alone in the mountains for days. He eventually started offering paid group hikes, where followers pay a decent amount of money to travel with him and experience the same thing.

I’m guessing a lot of people would pay to be next to Casey Neistat while he’s filming his vlogs. Others would want to be on that sailboat with the couple who travels around the world full-time.

Even I would pay to stay in a small cabin alone in the mountains, like one of my favorite YouTubers who renovates cabins in the Italian Alps.

So I understand we want to live the life we’re not living.

The life other people are living.

And we’re willing to pay for it, either with money or with our time by watching their content.

That said, I definitely wouldn’t want company on my morning walks. Just putting that out there.

[Jim Makos @JimMakos]

My dad is going to do social media!

The truth is, I’m partly to blame for this, with all the conversations we’ve had. I’ve told him so many times that all the things he tells me would be good to share publicly. So other people can hear them too.

Not just me.

Besides, he’s told me himself that he regrets not writing down some of his thoughts and ideas from 15-20 years ago, so there would be proof now that they turned out to be true (or will in the future).

So every now and then I’ve been nudging him to let me create a website for him under a pseudonym, along with social media profiles, so he has somewhere to share his thoughts.

And why not, other people could even comment and tell him if he’s right or wrong. That would be pretty funny to watch. 😏

But I didn’t expect him to tell me out of the blue yesterday that he wants me to show him how to post some photos on Threads. 🫢

Whoa, I thought, you’ve reached that point? You got so annoyed with what you’re seeing that you want to speak up? It’s about time.

“Yeah,” he said, “I want you to show me how to do it.”

“And what,” I said, “with the account you already have? The same username you use to log into every service and platform on the internet?”

this is gonna go great.

[Jim Makos @JimMakos]

I was so excited that I was heading straight for burnout.

This week I started bringing my camera on my morning walks and turning the thoughts I had written down into videos.

I got so hyped about the ideas coming to me that I couldn’t even sleep at night.

But when I actually did it the next morning for the first time, I ended up filming 14 videos.

Yeah, fourteen.

I was super excited. I had created so much content in just an hour and a half of walking.

However, when I got back home and started editing and posting them with all that excitement, it quickly turned into exhaustion, doubt, and second thoughts.

Now who even cares about what I’m saying? Am I making a fool of myself?

Am I seriously sitting here talking to a camera, doing the thing I’m worst at? Am I digging my own grave? And honestly, can I even keep up this pace for more than two days?

By the time I had prepared the fourth short or reel for YouTube and Instagram, I was already thinking about quitting.

On the very first day.

I’m supposed to be doing something I enjoy.

If I’m already reaching this point, then clearly what I enjoy isn’t what I’m doing right now.

So I decided to only film one video during my morning walk.

Maybe two at most and the second one I’ll film on the way back, not all at once.

I know that batching is the smart strategy when you want to create a lot of content, but what’s the point of making a ton of content if you’re going to burn out on the first day?

I’d rather do one video a day for 30 days than film 14 in one day and then go silent.

[Jim Makos @JimMakos]

I can’t think and perform at the same time.

Lately, I started turning these thoughts of mine from text into video.

And when I started filming the video during my walk today, I was thinking maybe I should say something to the camera that I haven’t already written down as text first.

Something completely original, in other words.

So I had to think about the first sentence I would say, what I would say in the middle, and what I would refer to.

And most importantly, where my thought would land so I could close the video.

And while I was thinking about all that, I also had in my mind that:

- I only had five to ten minutes to film it in my favorite spot,
- from which side I should hold the camera,
- remember to turn on the microphone, and
- try not to lose my words.

And all of that after doing it in my native language, Greek, I would then have to say it again in English.

In other words, too many things going on in my head at once.

But my job at that moment was to film the video, not to figure out what to say.

Besides, I had already done half the work in the previous days when I recorded my thoughts as text (like this one).

So in the end, I decided to turn the thoughts I had already written down into video, and not try to come up with something new on the spot.

This way, I focus on one specific thing at a time and try to improve it.

I think this is a better approach.

[Jim Makos @JimMakos]

Friends and family are not your audience.

But what happens when the majority of the people following you right now are exactly that, friends and family?

There are two main solutions.

The first is to create a new profile. One that I won’t tell any of my friends or family about. A completely fresh persona on the internet that no one around me knows exists.

The downside, especially when you’ve already spent over a decade building a brand, is that you’re basically throwing all those years of work in the trash.

So the second solution is to keep using the persona I’ve already built and grow such a big audience that friends and family eventually become a tiny minority.

Easy to say, hard to do.

Until that happens, what’s a smaller step I can take in that direction?

Post as much content as possible, so that they can’t keep up with everything. Ideally, they’ll reach a point where they say, “I’m tired, I can’t watch all this stuff you’re posting anymore,” and then...

“Unfollowing you.” 😱

And that’s actually already happened to me many years ago. A very close friend once told me exactly that:

“Jim, you keep posting things I don’t care about. You’re a really good friend, but unfortunately I have to unfollow you on Facebook.”

Perfect. That’s actually my goal: to attract and keep only the people who have similar interests and the same mindset as me.

After all, how many friends and relatives do we have that we can truly say that about?

[Jim Makos @JimMakos]

I have an idea I want to share on the internet. Should I turn it into text or a video?

For me, the decision is easy.

I always start with text.

I write it by dictating during my morning walk, when I have the most inspiration while walking for about an hour and a half.

So, which ideas do I turn into videos?

Definitely the ones that got the most reach and engagement the day before as text. 📈

Beyond that, I’ll also make a video out of a story or idea that involves something I can show visually. In those cases, it makes much more sense to do it as video rather than just dictating it on my phone to turn into text.

[Jim Makos @JimMakos]

The AI in YouTube Studio hates me.

Every time I ask it how my latest video performed, it always finds something for me to fix.

“Yeah, it’s good, but improve the hook.”

Next video:
“The hook was solid. Now fix the mid section.”

Next video:
“You fixed that too? Guess what, now improve the ending.”

You did that as well? Alright, now…

It seriously never stops.

Even MrBeast’s Shorts I'm sure the AI Studio would still tell him how to make them better.