2023 Recap: Most popular posts and lessons learned
It’s New Year’s Eve where I live, and I’m just wrapping up an extended winter holiday at my in-laws’. I feel refreshed and very grateful for the year that’s wrapping up tonight! Before the year is up, however, I wanted to take a moment to recap what 2023 has looked like and meant to me, by outlining my most popular content and sharing a bit about the lessons I learned this year. Let’s get into it!
My first year fully self-employed!
The year 2023 will go down in the books as a very special year for me because it’s the first year I was fully self-employed and didn’t have to take a part time job in order to support my creative entrepreneurial endeavours. I can’t tell you how long I’ve dreamed of being self-employed, and let me tell you, it’s better than I even imagined! 🤩 If you made my acquaintance this year, either connecting through social media or in lessons, I just want to say thank you from the bottom of my heart for connecting with me and sticking around my YouTube channel while I figure out what I’m doing. I’m so incredibly grateful for this community of music lovers, and I’m really looking forward to the ways we can grow together next year!
My most popular posts
I thought it could be fun and maybe even educational to check out what has been my most popular content this year. Here it is!
By far my most popular YouTube videos this year have been my Let It Be tutorial series. This honestly astounds me because it was my very first tutorial that I recorded before I had any idea what I was doing. I just had an idea that I wanted to try, went for it, and figured out the details as I went. Was it the best idea to record the series in portrait mode again? Perhaps not 😂 But my heart was focused on creating something that might help people, and you received my efforts so kindly. Portrait mode or not, the response to this tutorial showed me that we can still learn together if we try, so I appreciate your kindness and I look forward to creating more tutorials in the new year! In landscape mode this time!
My second most popular video was on how to create chord progressions that follow your emotions. I only just published this in the last month but it skyrocketed to the top of my views, so this seems to be a topic that resonates with a lot of people! I was so amazed and delighted to know that people want to learn how to write their own music. I believe there’s a lot of value in creating your own music, not just for performing in front of others but just for expressing yourself. I will be very happy to talk more about these things in the new year.
Here on my blog, my most popular article asked, how do I know if a song is too hard for me? The amount of readership on this post really moved me because it showed me that people were doing their best to learn piano, but also wondered when their all was enough. It’s a brave thing to ask if it’s okay to give up, so if you read that blog post, I’d like to thank you for trusting me enough to give you my perspective on that. I hope it was helpful to you.
Lessons learned
For me, the biggest lesson of the year was to try and see. This has been a year of learning how to let go of my own expectations and trying to figure out the narrative that my life might take before it actually happens. This was probably the first year of my life that I really just let go and pursued opportunities without putting too much stock into where they might lead. I feel like I have been truly rewarded with new friendships, new opportunities, new knowledge, and I’m so grateful for everything that came to be in 2023.
The lesson to try and see also extended to my social media output. I never knew in advance if any of my ideas would land. More often than not, my expectations for how my content would be received were wrong! Videos that I thought people would like got few shares, and videos that I thought were probably too boring to post got tons of views! I never got better at predicting the popularity of my ideas. And really, I don’t mind, because it means I get to keep being surprised and just keep focusing on the part that I can do — which is to keep creating. ☺️
Thank you!
Thank you so much for joining me this year! I hope that you had a good holiday and that you were blessed in some way in 2023. I hope that you look forward to the new year with joy and anticipation. Next time, let’s talk about our goals for the new year and how we can build and grow in 2024. Take care!