THIS is one of the reasons I decided it was time to retire, I am now a grumpy old man. To be a good teacher you have to remember the mantra “there is no such thing as a stupid question, just stupid answers”. You have to turn every idiotic question into a great teaching moment. I did this for 15 years and I was good at it but I simply no longer have the patience to deal with lazy, entitled people who can’t critically think and want to be spoon fed every little bit of information. Take the following question from this video:
“Am I missing something here. Why Scooby are looking like shit, compared when he started at YT.”
Here is my reply:
“Yes, you ARE missing a lot here. Let us start with the fact that you do not understand why I looked better in videos filmed in 2004 when I was 43 than in 2020 when I am 60. Your lack of critical thinking is frightening. Have you never compared the physique of your father and compared it to your grandfather? Then we have you illustrating your complete laziness and complete lack of resourcefulness because the answer to your question can be found in three places: in the video, in the video description, and in the pinned comment. Clearly you were simply too lazy to bother reading and wanted to be spoon fed the answer. Then we have you illustrating your complete lack of manners in the question itself. Your inability to think critically, lack of manners, laziness, and your lack of resourcefulness means that you are not going to make it in this competitive economy. Best of luck to you, you are going to need it.”
Everything I do is google searchable
I believe I am accurate in saying this. I am the only fitness trainer on YouTube who has made sure that all the content presented in videos is also available in text form on my website. Probably more than 80% of my fitness and health videos have a link in the video description that explains the subject in a lot more detail than is presented in the video. The reason I did this was twofold. First because a lot of people were watching my videos who had trouble understanding english and second, I wanted people to be able to find the info quickly and google searchable text is the only way to do this. If you do an hour long video, in a year, nobody will remember which video had that one gem they want to re-watch. By putting it on a webpage, google can find that same gem in 5 seconds. 95% of the questions I was getting from people could have been answered with a quick google query. For years, I just swallowed the pillow scream and would cut and paste the answer from my webpage to their question box or give them the link but I simply have lost the patience to deal with these lazy, un-resourceful people – see my video on how to get fitness questions answered.
“I did not spend thousands of hours over 20 years writing over 1,700 pages of information about bodybuilding, nutrition, and fitness so that so that I could spoon feed it to people too lazy to do a google search or click on a link in a video description.” – Scooby Werkstatt
Davi has horrible grammar
By the way, you will note that I did not comment on Davi’s poor English. A lot of people on YouTube have English as a second language and they get a LOT of leeway. As long as their question/comment is clear, I dont comment on their spelling or grammar because I know how hard languages are. After years studying German and two years living there, my German was still horrible and full of mistakes. Any person who speaks more than one language is to be commended, even if their second language is not totally mastered.
Scooby is a grumpy old man
An ex-fan from the Netherlands got it right, he recently called me a “Grumpy old man”. To be a good teacher you need infinite patience and the ability to make lazy students who ask stupid questions think that they have asked the most brilliant question in the universe. THAT ability to turn absolutely everything into a teaching moment is what it takes and I have lost the patience to do that. The constant low level pain that goes along with the aging process has tended to make me less patient with people who dont make an effort to help themselves. Rather than inflict my grumpiness onto a bright eyed and bushy tailed new generation, I decided to bow out and stop doing fitness videos.
I thought you said you were going to retire
What I said was I was going to retire from doing fitness videos so that I could start doing travel videos – quote from my retirement notice page:
Although I will no longer be doing new fitness videos, I will be doing adventure travel videos when I travel. It will not be one video a week like I did for fitness but just when I am traveling so that I have time to work on my airplane.
For the observant people out there, you will have noticed that international travel has been completely shut down for coronavirus containment. Every country I have looked into has new laws saying non-essential personnel (aka tourists) are not allowed in and essential personnel need a 14 day quarantine. As soon as the travel bans are lifted, I am SO outta here! :) Yes, I might do workouts while traveling because FITNESS is a big part of what makes travel fun for me but it will not be the primary focus of my YouTube channel any more.
Video where “Scooby are looking like shit”?
Scooby looks like shit!
If this is ringing a bell, yes I have done another video with a similar title shown below.