Welcome to our year in review blog – it’s been a *whole year* since we first started thinking about our project! Around this time last year, we picked the name and started planning our first shooting locations, creating our website and dipping our toes into posting on social media with what we thought, would bring value to the world.
365 days of growth – our year in review
Our lives changed a lot
Our lives have changed for the better. First of all, there are many more adventures and things we’re doing. There’s a bigger variety to how we spend our weekends as well, and this is thanks to us committing to making new videos every Monday.
Sometimes I look back at the photos we post on Instagram or our videos and there’s always something going on – we’re either doing fun DIY stuff, exploring new places, sometimes further ones like going to Denmark or spending my birthday in Snowdonia/Wales.
Ever since we started the project, we have been doing something new every weekend, maybe the only exception would be car spotting as that’s something that we thoroughly enjoy, especially Oskar. And because cars are one of his deepest passions, he’s looking to start a subsection on our website/project dedicated to them (but more on that later!).
It’s really wonderful – there’s this variety that wouldn’t be there if we hadn’t started.
It’s so easy to come home, watch another movie or TV show and wake up the next day to simply go to work.
We learnt how to work together
Ever since we met with Oskar, we have taken on little tasks together. I quite vividly remember when I was first visiting him in Denmark when we were still friends – this was about a month after he was in London for a few days. His house mates welcomed me warmly and we love cooking, so to say thanks for letting me stay at the house for free, we decided to cook something delicious.
It was a meal for six people. We bought everything at the shop and when we were in the kitchen, it simply worked. I knew what he was doing and what his responsibilities were and he knew mine, and so it magically clicked. At that moment I thought, “Woah! We don’t know each other and we can easily serve food for six people! That’s amazing!”
Obviously, things haven’t been as easy as that. Throughout our project, we learnt a lot about our skills and qualities, and how we work together. When it comes to creative work, it’s difficult to give and receive feedback as most of it is personal preference. For example, since it’s my job to write and create content, like blogs and social media posts, so I’m more geared up to receiving feedback about the things I write about and am usually fine with amending them as and if required.
But then, that’s for work and even though I’m interested and seldom even passionate about what I write and preach, it’s not the same when you’re sharing your beliefs and true being and putting yourself “on show”. At his inspirational commencement speech, Neil Geiman infamously noted that it’s only when you feel as if you’re walking naked on the street when doing your work that you may only be starting to get things right. And of course, any kind of negative feedback at that point cuts deeper than it physical wound.
I’m going to be honest – there have been some heated discussions of what should be what and how we should approach things. But through those discussions, we learnt how to work together and got to know each other on a deeper level. If we were to start a business, I’d be able to judge how well we could work with Oskar and how he would behave in that situation, more or less at least.
This project also helped us discover our strengths. For example, Oskar is better at video editing. Even though I wish I was good at it, I’m not – I’m actually quite slow and I’m still learning. And now that he has had a year of practice he is definitely ahead. As for me, I’ve really enjoyed making our website (we’re updating it very soon, read below), posting and networking on social media plus helping with the blogs.
We’re playing at each other’s strengths and I believe that every team or company should always look at the task at hand and then look at the members and say “OK, you’re the best person to do this because of your skills and experience, not because of the job title, status or relationship with the manager.”
Sometimes things don’t go according to plan
I’m a perfectionist so this was one of the bits that were hard to accept. We touched upon this in our vlog on YouTube back in December when we reviewed our progress for the past six videos. This was pretty much the end of our scripted videos at that point.
We used to work really hard on the scripts and prepare them in advance, but we found it quite difficult to “get ahead” and we found that we were getting caught in what we were supposed to be saying instead of what we feel that we should be saying as that would alter the sequence and build of the script thereafter. We still do our research prior to when we shoot (bullet points for the win!) and it has given us the freedom to create when we’re in the moment and the freedom to have some fun too. Thinking back, we learnt that recording videos with a script doesn’t work for us and that’s that, we dropped it.
You need to know when something doesn’t work, then try harder, and if still doesn’t work, drop it.
So to all the vloggers, bloggers, creators, people in companies – go for it! Always analyse what’s not working and what isn’t working as well as it should. This is the way you increase your productivity without taking on extra work!
In the second half a year we learnt even more than we did in the first. We started travelling more and recording vlogs. The reason why we felt that vlogs were appealing was because they give a very honest overview of how we felt at that moment and that’s what we want to give our readers and watchers.
If you want to have that same experience or are thinking of going for it, we want to give you a full overview that’s honest and a glimpse into how it was for us. Then, you can decide whether you want to go for it or not. Doing vlogs is fun – and we don’t always know how they will end which adds to the mystery, even for ourselves!
Plans for the future
We’re going to be writing lots of blogs and we hope you’ll love them
Our tagline has changed slightly to “life worth living for” and that’s our driver every day – to live the life we’ve dreamed up and achieve all that we want while we’re on this planet.
Part of this is to go on adventures and show how amazing (or not) the world is and we want to give you an even more thorough overview of the experiences we’re having. So, we’re going to be slowly shifting our attention to blogging actively. We will still be recording at least one video a week, but we’ll look to write more about travel, review the places we’ve stayed in and potentially even write about food or lifestyle. We shall see!
As fun as vlogs are we found that the detail we wanted to achieve translated in very long video lengths, so we want to condense all of that into articles and high-quality images (sometimes video) to really bring the story of a place or city to life. One of our latest blogs that we are very proud of is our car spotting guide for luxury cars in London! We spent many days and hours walking throughout London and writing this guide to bring the very best car spotting places to you.
Our #carspotting guide for #luxurycars in London ?? is finally here ? https://t.co/s9yy9hgh4R
— Oskar & Veronika (@lifeviewers) July 1, 2017
We’re redesigning our website
You’ll see a completely new website very soon and we’re super excited about this! It will look much more like a blog and we will make the announcement as soon as we pencil in the date. You may ask, why the change in focus? Well, instead of focusing LifeViewers just on ourselves, we will be reaching out to other companies and people to help them with our expertise and knowledge in business consulting and social media marketing. If you need any help with either of these or you fancy a chat about any kind of projects, please feel free to contact us.
It’s possible that our site will be offline for a few days or a weekend, but we’ll keep updating you on our social networks, so definitely follows us there if you’d like to know what’s the latest with us and our project. We’re currently active on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and of course, YouTube.
We’re going to northern Italy with our car
Can’t hold my excitement about this one! It will be our very first long car road trip. We’re going away for 12 nights altogether and we just recently booked our tickets to cross the channel. We’re taking a Eurostar train from Folkestone to Calais and from there we’re driving south to Lyon where we will stop briefly. From there we will go straight to northern Italy – to look at beautiful Swiss mountains and Lake Como. Then we’ll begin visiting cities like Milan, Modena, Parma, Florence, and the coast…. Honestly, can’t wait for this!
This will be the first time we’ll be spending so many days on the road, so it’s definitely interesting how we’ll cope with all of that and find time to film! We’ve been following quite a few van lifers recently (people who live in vans and travel extensively), and their lifestyle inspired us so much that we just may one day get a van and travel the whole of Europe….. Of course, we have a very long way to do this as we have way too much stuff to take with us and we will be staying in hotels for this trip, but still. Going by car is the first step towards the lifestyle of living on the road!
And that’s it for now….
I’m incredibly grateful for having a partner who saw that a common project is what we needed and persisted even though I showed resistance in the beginning and I just want to thank him for that. Because it really was what we needed, something we could work together on.
And yes, the downside may be that we spend almost all of our free time on this, but it has pushed us into thinking how we can become more efficient in every other part of our lives so we could spend more time on our little project. It’s funny but we’ve entered an entrepreneurial state of mind where we are constantly on the lookout for growth opportunities.
And on that note, our throwback blog comes to an end. It’s a year in review for LifeViewers! Hope you enjoyed the blog. Please let me know if you like these as we’ll be more than happy to do this every half a year or year. In the meantime, feel free to subscribe to our YouTube channel and follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.
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