August musings 1: learning new skills
Rushing to remain relevant in a fast-changing age
Photo source: part of the screen of the Descript video editing software.
To keep the algorithms happy I prepared some very short posts during July that I scheduled to post during August. Here is the first one.
At the beginning of 2025 I decided that I was going to commit to a post each week on Substack. I did this because everyone says that consistency is the path to higher free subscriber numbers. And they say that higher free subscriber numbers are ultimately the path to higher paid subscriber numbers.
Well, as regards free subscribers, it worked. For this newsletter, Sapienta Cyprus Snippets, it took me just over two years of inconsistent posting to reach 206 subscribers at the end of December 2024. It took seven months of weekly posting to add another 151. So I now have 367 subscribers, of which three are paying.
For the pay-only, once-per-month Cyprus Pocket Brief, paid subscribers ‘trebled’! (They went from two subscribers to six subscribers.)
I also told myself that to stay relevant in this age of artificial intelligence (ai), which I wrote about in more detail the other week, I needed new skills.
So from February I started to produce videos. They remain pretty low-tech. But I decided it was better to dive in and learn by doing than sit and wait until I was perfect. Here is my list of modest achievements.
In January I learned how to film myself and my screen at the same time. I was a total novice so did not know how to do that until this year.
Around February I learned how to blur my background.
Around February or March I learned how to make one scene style apply to all scenes (tip: do it at the beginning before chopping it into scenes).
In April or May I learned how to edit the ai-generated transcript as a single document, instead of clicking each and every time I needed to edit a word.
In June I worked out how to reduce the gaps between words without spending hours clicking and how to apply “smart transitions”
In early July I finally worked out how to mute part of the audio in the video without turning the accompanying video black. (It is not so easy in Descript, the software that I am using and how to do it is hidden inside YouTube videos about other things.)
One of my next goals is to learn how to put a different background in altogether. And then how to slot in additional footage or additional audio. For example, if I mess up and say the wrong word, Descript offers the option to “drop in” your own ai-generated voice. But the results are not such good quality, so I need to be able to create my own audio and slot it in at the right place.
Once I can do that, I suppose I can also start adding more flashy footage, like James-Ker-Lindsay on his far more ‘sophis’ YouTube channel. But that costs money.
This is all immensely time-consuming and earns next to nothing. But I have convinced myself that, in the year 2025, when ai threatens to be able to do all of our jobs before too long, “content-creators” need to reach audiences in multiple ways. Whether we like it or not, video is one of those ways.
Why am I branching out into Substack when I produce a much more expensive monthly product called Sapienta Country Analysis Cyprus? I shall talk about that more in the next post.
If you want my premium monthly in-depth product, check out Sapienta Country Analysis Cyprus and other deep-dive reports here or single copies here. And if you can’t afford those but want the executive summary only for just €100/year*, you can find that here on Substack, at Cyprus Pocket Brief.
Or support this publication, Sapienta Cyprus Snippets, for just €49 per year.*
*Monthly payments are a massive administrative headache, so since I can’t switch them off I have effectively banned them by setting the monthly price the same as the annual.