What 8 Years on YouTube Taught Me About Life

Category: Personal Development and Entrepreneurship

Tags: ConsistencyEntrepreneurshipIntrinsic MotivationPersonal GrowthYouTube Journey

Entities: 1K ChallengeAli AbdaalAppleCambridge UniversityChris WilliamsonJeff BezosMel RobbinsMKBHDRobert PattinsonSteven BartTim CookWeiwork

Transcript

00:00

[Music] All righty. Today is my 8-year anniversary here on YouTube.

I have been making videos on this channel for the last 8 years. I guess I sort of made some videos on the channel before then.

I tried making some like music videos and singing videos and

00:15

they didn't go particularly well. But 8 years ago is when I made the intention that I was going to do YouTube and I was going to do it seriously.

8 years is also how much time I spent in medicine. I was at med school at Cambridge University for six years and then I worked as a doctor for two years.

So

00:32

like this month I will have been a YouTuber for longer than I was in the medical profession which is sort of weird because ever since like the age of like six when people would ask me what I wanted to be when I grow up I would have said I want to be a surgeon or a neurosurgeon or gastroenterenterologist or whatever. And now somehow I've ended up with my primary occupation being

00:48

YouTuber. And I want to try my best to share the kind of life lessons that being on YouTube for 8 years has taught me.

So that whatever stage of of the thing that you're trying to do, you're at, whether you're a creator or an entrepreneur or you're a professional wanting to build a side hustle to get to freedom or like whatever the thing might

01:05

be, hopefully, fingers crossed, there will be something in this video that that is helpful. The first reflection that comes to mind, I didn't have a plan going in.

And I don't think you need a plan going in when you're starting something out. There is a line from the poet room which I really like which is

01:20

goes to the effect of when you walk the way the way will appear. For me 8 years ago when I started making YouTube videos, there was no master plan.

There was no grand vision. There was no grand narrative around like you know I'm going to end up with like 6 million subscribers and it's going to be my full-time gig and you know all all of this stuff.

I think had I tried to come

01:36

up with a grand plan, a it would have been a complete myth because like how could I have possibly predicted where things would go 8 years later? And secondly, if I had tried to come up with a grand plan, if I felt like I needed a grand plan or a grand vision or a grand like architect narrative in order to

01:51

start the thing, I never would have started the thing because you it's sort of like when you're embarking on any new adventure. You maybe have a sense of roughly what direction you're trying to go in, but the path is very, very foggy and in a

02:08

lot of different things, you really just have to take one step in front of the other. Oh, by the way, quick thing.

If you happen to be watching this before the 1st of August 2025, then for 6 weeks from the 1st of August through to the 12th of September 2025, me and my team are hosting a live six week challenge called the 1K challenge. And the whole

02:25

idea behind the 1K challenge is that it's a 6 week live online course and boot camp to help you make your first $1,000 on the internet. It's a challenge that we've designed for complete beginners to entrepreneurship to side hustles to making money.

And you'll be doing this live with people from all around the world who are also at that same stage as you. So, if that sounds

02:41

good and you would like to make your first thousand dollars on the internet and you'd like to learn the skills and actually take action through the format of this live online boot camp, then there is a link to sign up in the video description. So, in medicine, the path is actually not very foggy.

You know that you're going to be in med school for 6 years. You know what your salary progression is going to look like.

You

02:56

can Google how much do doctors make in country X and you can like literally see the the yellow brick road that is laid out in front of you. The scariest part of doing this YouTube thing and in particular the jump to doing it full-time was that there was no longer a yellow brick road to follow.

It feels

03:12

nice to know what your life is going to look like 10 years from now. And it is very scary to no longer have that certainty when you are doing something weird like trying to be a YouTuber or trying to start a business or trying to do something in these non-leible domains

03:28

where there isn't a clear path to success. So when I speak to people who come to my events or people who are part of my YouTuber academy, they're often professionals who are in careers that are where there is a clear progression path.

There is a yellow brick road that you have to follow. If you want to be a

03:44

dentist, there's a yellow brick road that you follow. If you want to be an accountant, there's a yellow brick road.

If you want to be a management consultant, it's pretty obvious what you have to do. If you want to be an investment banker, pretty obvious.

If you want to be a lawyer, it's pretty obvious. And I think a big part of what holds these sorts of people back, like professionals in these sort of high-flying careers, a big part of what

04:00

holds us back, cuz I would put myself in that category, is trying to get that level of certainty in a new path, a path like building a YouTube channel or like building a personal brand or like trying to start your own business or starting a side hustle, trying to get to financial freedom or whatever. And in many ways, for me, 8 years later, it is still

04:17

scary. In fact, it's way scarier now than it was 8 years ago when I started.

Because when I started my YouTube channel, for the first three years of doing it, it was just a side hustle. It was one year in my final year of med school and then two years working full-time as a doctor.

I didn't need the money from the YouTube channel, it was a bonus that I was making money from it after a while. And it was a fun thing I

04:34

did on the side. But the instant it became my full-time occupation, then all of a sudden it added this pressure to get it right.

The pressure to get it right. And the pressure to get it right, that's scary, right?

Cuz it it like

04:49

raises the stakes. It's like if this YouTube thing doesn't go well, the mind says I'm going to end up broken homeless kind of thing.

Like that's the that's the fear. That's the fear people have.

It's like I don't want to start a business because if it doesn't work then

05:06

I will end up homeless. Um often most fears lead to I'll I'm going to end up homeless or my family will end up homeless and then that will be a bad thing kind of idea.

Usually it's I will end up homeless and or people will laugh at me. If you're thinking of like, let's say, starting a YouTube channel or starting a business and you feel like

05:21

you have to get it right, oh, that's going to stop you from actually getting started because it's so hard to get it right. Like, we get so addicted to playing the right to to knowing what the game is and being able to take the boxes and playing the game, right?

Like, it's obvious what the game is when you're trying to get into medical school.

05:37

You've got like the tick boxes that you have to tick. And we develop this addiction to the ticking of boxes.

And so then when we move into a domain where there aren't really any boxes to take and it's all like way more foggy and way more fuzzy and like you're not really sure, it's like that desire to get it right and to find the boxes to take and

05:52

find the perfect strategy is still there. Which is why when it comes to starting a YouTube channel, so many people are worried like, "Oh, what's my niche going to be?" I was I was doing a live session for one of our um for our YouTuber Academy students the other day and we had a lovely lady and she asked and she was like, "Hey, you know, I have all these interests and I've got like three or four different niches and I'm

06:08

not sure what my niche is going to be." And I was like, "Okay, how many videos have you made?" She was like, "I've made one video so far." And I was like, "Okay, this is something we often say in the course, which is that you're not allowed to use the word niche until you've made at least seven videos. You got to start making the videos before

06:23

you start worrying about the strategy." Strategy is a thing you worry about further down the line, not a thing you worry about at the start. I have met very, very, very few successful YouTubers in my life who started out with a strategy and just executed the strategy.

That's just almost never how

06:38

it works. Usually you start out the thing because you have a vague inkling of the kind of vague direction you might want to go in and you think it might be kind of fun making videos and then you keep on doing it and you keep on doing it and you keep on doing it and through taking action the strategy and the path becomes clearer.

Not through sitting there and thinking about it. We've got

06:54

to let go of some of this addiction to certainty because this addiction to certainty like if I had not let that go it like I wouldn't be here right now. I'd be still working in medicine, still in the UK and I'd have way less freedom and flexibility and autonomy over my life than I currently do.

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07:09

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I discovered it during the pandemic, and it was absolutely game-changing because working from the Weiwork co-working space in Cambridge, uh, where I was living back in 2020. That was where I really started

07:25

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07:40

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09:00

pass. So thank you WeiWork for sponsoring the video and let's get back to it.

Reflection number two, basically just get started and then you have to basically just keep going. 95% of people never take the first step.

They never actually get started with the thing they want to do. they never get started with whatever with with whatever the dream

09:15

is. And of the 1 to 5% that do, almost no one just keeps going.

Um, I don't know what the stats are for YouTube channels, but the stats are for podcasts that like I think more than 80% of podcasts have less than three episodes

09:31

recorded and less than like 1% of podcasts have more than 20 episodes recorded. So, some amount of people start a podcast.

Maybe you've had the idea at some point, hey, it would be cool to start a podcast. Maybe you see people like I know Steven Bart and Chris Williamson and like Mel Robbins and you're like, "Man, this is really cool.

These guys are making all this money and

09:46

have all these followers and all they're doing is just sitting there and having conversations with people like that would be fun. I want to start a podcast." A lot of people will have that thought.

Almost no one in the grand scheme of things will actually record the first episode. And of the people that do record the first episode, very few of them will make it past episode 3.

10:01

Almost no one would make it past episode 20. And then almost no one continues making three podcast episodes a week for seven years, which is where my friend Chris Williamson from the Modern Wisdom Podcast has been has been doing the thing.

And that's really the game. The game is just get started and just keep going.

So the game of just getting started involves lowering the bar and

10:18

just taking imperfect action like minimum viable learning, not like, you know, trying to learn more and think you need more strategy and all of that kind of stuff. All of that just stops you from getting started.

and we've just got to get over ourselves and get over all of these emotional hurdles, all of these addictions to certainty to just get

10:34

started with a thing. But then once you've gotten started, the game is to just keep going.

The YouTuber MKBHD did an interview with the Y Com on the Y Combinator podcast and they asked him, you know, what's the secret to your success? And he said, well, you know, if you just pick something and do it for a decade, it's hard not to be successful.

And I found that incredibly inspiring. I

10:50

saw that like like maybe one or two years into my YouTube journey. I can't remember exactly when, but I remember thinking at the time that like, oh, if you just do something for a decade, you are unlikely to go wrong.

It's probably going to work if you just do it for a decade. But no one does it for that long.

No one keeps going. There are so

11:06

many YouTubers who there are so many people who started YouTube channels during the pandemic. And how many of them are still going 5 years later, 4 years later?

Basically, no one. It's so hard to get started and it's so hard to just keep going.

I've talked a lot about the getting started thing, but I want to talk about the keep going thing cuz like

11:22

how do you keep going with something for a long time? And I've quote only been doing YouTube for 8 years.

I'm looking at the people who've been doing it for 13 years, 15 years at this point. And I'm I'm super inspired by them because they've been doing it for like twice as long as I have.

And I'm like, okay, what are they doing to just keep going with the thing in order to just keep going?

11:38

External motivation is not enough. External motivation is something like money.

People think that like, well, if I was making all this money on YouTube, I'd be able to be consistent with it or whatever, like whatever the thing is. is like you would think so.

Um but it's actually not about money. The money

11:54

serves as a useful motivating tool in the very early stages of the journey. But then the desire to make more money stops stops actually being a reliable source of motivation.

Um after a while there is the negative. So the the fear of losing money becomes like a negative

12:10

motivator. But that sort of operating based on fear and scarcity often makes people burn out.

And that's another big reason as to why they quit. And this is something that I've been struggling with for years at this point.

The thing that I have found is actually helpful is more helpful than money for staying

12:25

consistent and staying motivated and sort of being able to sustain the journey is trying to shift it more towards internal motivation, trying to make the reasons for doing the thing feel aligned with my deeper self, deeper values, all of all of this sort of

12:41

stuff. For me, about once every 3 months for the last like 5 years, I've had a mini mini existential crisis with my YouTube channel, thinking uh it's all crumbling down.

You know, the views aren't the same as they were during the pandemic. And then I speak to my YouTuber friends and they're all like, yeah, you know, everyone had massive

12:57

views during the pandemic and then mass massive drop offs after that. It's like h you know, there's comments on the video saying it's it's like repeating content.

Oh, it's like uh what's even the point? Like I will have that kind of crisis around the YouTube channel about once every 3 months.

And usually it

13:14

takes many hours worth of journaling and thinking about it and speaking to friends about it and speaking to my wife about it and sometimes talking to Chad Gyt about it and all of the conclusions just end up in the same place which is to realign to the why. Realign to the

13:29

reason why I'm doing the thing. And that reason needs to be deeper than just money in order for the thing to stay sustainable.

For me personally, your mileage may vary on this, but there are two things I think about as it relates to alignment, which is two C's, connection and a contribution. I have

13:45

those two C's in my mind and I have for a long time around helping me sustain the motivation to continue with this YouTube thing. connection in the sense of this YouTube channel is a very nice way to connect with people all around the world and seeing the comments and seeing the DMs and the emails and people coming up to me in the street uh and

14:01

saying you know how helpful they found the content and asking questions and attending workshops that we do that's amazing I love that sense of connection that feels very meaningful and it feels more way more meaningful than money and also contribution like the feeling of imagining a real life person and imagining the video or the content or

14:18

whatever helping them in any kind of way I often find myself doing therapy sessions for fellow YouTubers. Um, even like very big YouTubers.

Uh, because I've now been doing this for a very long time. I was having a chat yesterday with a friend of mine.

She is a very big YouTuber. And she was also saying that

14:33

when she thinks about the money, it sucks the motivation out of the process. But when she thinks about the connection and contribution and the fact that her videos are actually seem to have an impact on some people, that is what makes it feel worth it.

And I've had similar conversations with my entrepreneur friends who have startups and whatever and even people with jobs.

14:50

Generally, a job is much more manageable and a lot more sustainable when it feels like you are doing it for more than just the money. There are so many investment bankers and management consultants I know who are very very burnt out.

They're making really good money. Corporate lawyers as well, they're making amazing money but they are very

15:06

burnt out because they don't feel that sense of contribution that their work is actually contributing to. Similarly though on the on the other side of the coin my friends who are working in medicine in the UK and also in the US there is a feeling of contribution which is that you're actually helping people and you can see the help on a daily basis but there isn't a feeling of

15:24

autonomy or flexibility. Flexibility mostly it's like if they just had a little bit more flexibility in their careers that would be a massive like source of joy and would make it way feel way more sustainable and you know not burning out and stuff.

And there are so many people I know who are sort of way

15:40

further into medicine than I was who are thinking of quitting medicine. Not because it doesn't have contribution but but because it just doesn't have it that that just extra sprinkle of flexibility.

And this goes to something that Dan Daniel Pink wrote about in his book drive. So his book drive talks about the three sources of intrinsic motivation.

15:55

Autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Autonomy i.e.

you have control over like potentially what you do, how you do it, like why you do it, all that kind of stuff. You have mastery, i.e.

you're working towards something and you're actively learning and improving your skills at the thing. and purpose.

You can feel the impact that your work is having. And so when I find myself doing

16:11

therapy sessions with other YouTubers and other entrepreneurs who are struggling with the keep going thing, like they've gotten started and they're successful, but they're feeling burnt out, they're feeling demotivated and stuff, I can fully relate to those things because like I said, I have that period of like demotivation about once every 3 months, sometimes more frequently, sometimes a little bit less

16:26

frequently. And basically what it comes down to, what it what it always circles back to is intrinsic motivation.

having your own internal reasons for doing the thing. Autonomy, very useful, mastery, very useful.

Purpose, arguably the most important one. Back in the day when YouTube started, no one was doing it for

16:42

the money cuz the YouTube partner program didn't exist. There was no sponsorships.

There was no AdSense, any of this sort of stuff. Around 2012, I think, is when YouTube started to become a bit of a money-making scheme.

But really in the last 5 years, especially since the pandemic, when people like me started doing videos about how much

16:57

money you can make on YouTube, and this whole like, oh, you can just make money on the internet started to get big. Suddenly, there's all of these people starting YouTube channels and starting businesses where the only motivation is to just make money.

And I get it. I get the motivation of just making money

17:13

because like in many ways, that's what a job is. A job is a thing that you do.

You trade your time for money. And the problem with that is that then it be you get into this difficulty with the motivation side of things because when you're doing it for the money you only go so far.

If you think of your favorite authors again, they probably didn't do

17:29

it for the money because in order to be an author like at least, you know, you often have to have have to publish lots of books and like they don't make any money and then maybe you know Brandon Sanderson his I think sixth book was the first time he actually got published and then his 11th book was the first one that actually became successful and so the people that are doing it for reasons

17:45

other than money have a sustainability advantage compared to people who are just doing it for the money. And so the kind of note to myself and what I find myself kind of discussing with fellow YouTubers and entrepreneurs in these therapy sessions is it's about reconnecting with why you're doing the thing.

Reflection number three is

18:02

finding ways to enjoy the process. This is the whole thesis of my book Field of Productivity.

If you haven't read it, if you find a way to enjoy what you're doing, then it just becomes way more sustainable. And there are two ways to enjoy what you're doing.

Number one is do things that are enjoyable. And number two is enjoy the things that you're doing.

Most people can't just do the things that are enjoyable, right? Like

18:18

if you have a job, there's going to be aspects of that job that you don't inherently find enjoyable. In that case, you need to find a way to enjoy them.

You need to change your approach to the work so that it becomes actively more enjoyable because enjoyment is efficiency. The enjoyment becomes a source of energy.

It improves your productivity, your creativity, it reduces risk of burnout. This is all the

18:34

that I talk about in the book. But even the most enjoyable things start to feel like work after a while.

If you ask kids these days what they want to be when they grow up, like this, the most popular answer is like YouTuber or influencer. you whatever that says about the state of the world.

Back in the day,

18:49

it used to be astronaut or footballer, but being a YouTuber, being an influencer, being an astronaut, being a footballer, these are things that seem fun on the surface, but if you really drill down to what they actually involve, what they involve is a lot of work. In the case of being a YouTuber/influencer, it's a lot of sitting on a computer and trying to figure out what to make content about

19:04

and dealing with sponsors and sending emails back and forth, etc., etc. And I think the key to the sustainability of anything is to continue to find ways to inject enjoyment into the process.

A lot of YouTubers I know quit after a few months to a few years because it stops being fun. But the thing with fun is

19:20

that it's not just a property of the activity that you can't do anything about, right? Like this mouse is made of like plastic and it makes this kind of sound.

That is a intrinsic property of the material and there's not much I can do about the fact that the mouse is made of plastic other than like burn it

19:36

pieces or whatever. But the amount of fun that something is is not one of those sort of properties that you can't do anything about.

Like I'm sure there's a word for this. There is a lot of impact you can have on how enjoyable a thing might be if you were to just ask yourself, you know, one of the things I talk about in the book is what would

19:51

what would this look like if it were fun? What would the most enjoyable version of this look like?

Instead of trying to get it right, what would it look like if you just optimized for enjoyment? Those are the sorts of questions that again sound a bit like trite on the surface, but that is genuinely the stuff that helps people

20:08

keep going. That's genuinely what has helped me stay consistent with this YouTube channel for the last eight years because I've kept on finding ways to make it fun.

And the problem with those ways is that the same method of making it fun eventually runs its course and stops being fun anymore. Back in the day, for the first 2 years when I was

20:24

doing my own video editing, I really enjoyed video editing for the first like 2 months. And then I stopped enjoying it.

And then I found ways to inject enjoyment into the art of video editing so that I could try it with new animations and this and that. And if you look at my, if anyone feels like looking at my channel back in the day, pretty much every video I was doing from like

20:39

2017 to 2018 had some kind of new editing effect because I was injecting this sense of progress of like, hey, I'm going to learn something new each time was part of what made it fun. But again, there comes a point where there's only so much fancy new stuff you can add to

20:54

your edit before like you tap out of that source of enjoyment. And so then I had to find other ways to make it enjoyable and it eventually ended up outsourcing my editing.

And so the reflection here is that you've got to keep looking out for more wells of enjoyment. And once the well runs dry, you have to find another one.

And ideally, you dig multiple wells of

21:10

enjoyment at the same time or like you know in a in sequence so that you you never let the enjoyment run dry. Other examples of wells of enjoyment that I found useful is uh for example having an in-person team.

Initially everyone was remote but then in like 2020 I started working with Angus in person. He

21:26

happened to be in Cambridge and I realized like holy like working with people in person is really really fun and I've tried doing remote and stuff. I was doing some digital nomad stuff and then when I moved to Hong Kong the team was fully remote but I realized that actually having a remote team sucks some

21:42

of the enjoyment out of the process of doing this and so we kept the remote team but we hired a handful of people in person as well and it's expensive hiring people in person. Some some entrepreneurs I speak to who love the remote life say that like oh you could save money by just hiring people in the Philippines or whatever and then they're remote and this that the other.

It's

21:57

like yeah probably could in in my case I would be sacrificing enjoyment for the sake of money. And given that enjoyment is what makes the thing sustainable rather than money.

I will probably make more money by virtue of the thing being sustainable through the process of enjoying the thing than I will through trying to optimize for like short-term

22:14

profits or whatever. So it is okay to spend money and to spend time in ways that are not sensible for the sake of your own enjoyment of the craft.

Sometimes another well of enjoyment is doing stuff in an underoptimized fashion. So again what you should do as a YouTuber is you should optimize your

22:30

titles and thumbnails and you should only make content that the audience really wants to watch and that the most number of people want to watch. And what that ends up is that in my kind of educational personal development stuff, you end up only making videos about how beginners can make money on the internet without any work cuz that those are the videos that get the most that get the

22:46

most views. But if you follow the incentives of the algorithm and the incentives of the views, that also sucks some of the enjoyment out of the process.

And I don't know anyone who has just kept on following the sort of the incentives of the algorithm and the incentives of like making numbers go up

23:02

through audience who have who's enjoyed that process and has not burned out along the way. So sometimes in order to enjoy the process, you have to do things in an underoptimized fashion.

This video for example, this video is never going to go viral. It's not going to get as many views as if the title was how to make $10,000 a month

23:20

the easiest, laziest possible way without any skills and without doing any work, right? Like that's the sort of video that would get a million views.

This video probably won't get a million views. I think it's very unlikely that this video will get a million views.

This is a very underoptimized video. I have a vague sense of what I want to say.

I had a vague sense of what the title was going to be. My team had

23:35

actually prepared like eight different videos with titles and thumbnails that I could have filmed today, but I wasn't feeling it. I was like, uh, yeah, I I I don't really feel like any of these titles are currently in this moment of time that resonant.

But wait a minute, it's 8 years since I started doing YouTube. That would be a fun thing to make a video about.

And even though it's

23:54

going to get less views, the reason I'm making this video is because I think it might be helpful to some people if you're if you're still at this point, then I hope you're enjoying it so far and maybe finding it helpful. I know that this is the sort of video that I would have wanted to see 5 years ago if I'd seen someone else who'd been on YouTube for 8 years to be like, "Okay,

24:10

cool." like what what are they thinking? And I know it's not going to get the views and that is okay because this is a video that I'm making for the fun and the fulfillment of making this video.

Sometimes you got to take a hit on the numbers in order to do it the fun way. And this is hard to do.

This is hard to

24:26

do in industries where the numbers are visible and even when they're not to be honest. Let's say you're running a business and no one and no one knows your revenue numbers or anything like that.

you know your revenue numbers and you know your profit numbers and you know that if you're making a product because it lights you up that might not be the most

24:42

optimized product you could make and you will see that you will see the impact of that on your balance sheet on your P&L every single day. You're probably not looking at it every day, but like every month when you look at your management accounts, you're going to see the impact of doing something that felt fun rather than something that maximized the amount of money you could make.

And you're

24:58

going to feel bad about that because you you're going to always think that like ah but if we'd made product Y instead of product X, we could have made more money. And I've had that decision.

I've I've had that thought process many many many times and what I've realized over the years is yeah yeah we could have done but the reason we chose to make product X rather than product Y is because product X is just a bit more

25:14

interesting just a bit more fun even if it's less optimized this gets harder when you are in in industries where the numbers are visible so part of why being a YouTuber is like emotionally taxing is because the numbers are visible to everyone so anyone can look at my YouTube channel

25:31

and can glance through the view counts of the videos can glance at my subscribe account and some people will come to the conclusion that bro has fallen off. They'll scroll back 5 years.

They'll see that like, oh, 5 years ago he made a video that got like 5 million views and he's not made a video that's got 5 million views in a long time. And

25:46

actually, if you look at the average view count of the last video, and the reason that stuff hurts is because I think it myself every single day. I think it myself whenever I make decisions that are doing anything other than optimizing for views.

Whenever I

26:01

make a decision to post an underoptimized video or even when we make the decision to post an optimized video because you can't really control the view count on a video, right? It's not like a it's kind of like a lottery each time.

Every single day the thought that I have is is my YouTube channel dying? And I've spoken to so many other

26:17

massive YouTubers, YouTubers bigger than me. Every single day they are worried is my YouTube channel dying.

And then when you see a comment to that effect or like I don't know video with dislikes or what like that when it that when it feeds into the narrative of my YouTube

26:32

channel is dying makes it even harder to continue doing the thing because it feeds into your own worry that like ah am I going to end up broke and homeless as a result of pursuing what I enjoy. And every single creative in the world has this problem like the balance between the craft and the commerce.

the

26:49

balance between the creativity and the commercial incentives. Um, I was watching a couple of documentaries about Robert Patatterinson, the actor, and you know, he was in Harry Potter, then he was in Twilight, and these are films that make a lot of money.

And then he was like, "Okay, I don't want to be the Twilight hotthrub anymore. So, I'm going

27:06

to do this random artsy film that's going to make basically no money, but it's going to light me up. It's going to fulfill me.

It's going to creatively fulfill me. And then I'll do something big blockbuster like on Batman or something.

And then I'm going to do another random film that no one's going to have heard of." and basically no one will watch outside of a film festival

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because that will creatively fulfill me. And I get really inspired by stories like that because it is someone who could make the decision to make more money and what they are doing is making a decision instead to optimize for fun and fulfillment rather than finances.

And you got to be okay with leaving money on the table. You just got to be

27:36

okay with making less money. And being okay with making less money actually is what makes the thing more enjoyable and more sustainable because it is very unlikely that the thing that is most fun and enjoyable and interesting and aligned for you is also the thing that makes the most money.

It's just vanishingly unlikely that that's actually the case. If that is the case,

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it will only be the case for a certain period of time and then the incentives will diverge again. And therefore, you you've always got a choice.

There's always a choice between am I doing this for money or am I doing it for fun. The way that I found it helpful over the years to think about this is to really get clear on what am I doing for fun and fulfillment and what am I doing for

28:09

money? And the way that I do this is I ask myself the question of if I had $100 million in the bank, what would I continue doing?

What would I start doing and what would I stop doing? It's like a stop, start, continue kind of mini table.

If I had $100 million in the bank, I would not do sponsorships on

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videos and I would not do paid online courses, but I would continue to do YouTube videos for free. I'll just chuck everything on YouTube for free.

I would still continue to write books. Check out my book if you haven't already cuz writing books is fun.

And I would still continue to make software. We we're making various apps as part of Sparkle Studios, which is my new business that

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I'm doing with my wife. Uh some links down below if you want to check out our apps.

We've got Voice Pal, Super Focus, and a few other things that are coming up. Making YouTube videos, making writing books, and making apps is fun, and I'm doing that for fun and fulfillment, not primarily for money.

But releasing online courses and doing

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sponsorships, I'm doing primarily for money. And it's useful to know what things I'm doing for fun and what things I'm doing for money.

I'm not saying that you shouldn't never do anything for the money, right? Because if you have revenue goals or if you have a, you know, if you want to make some money, you have to do some things for the money.

But it's worth knowing what those things are. And then once you've defined

29:09

what the things are that you're doing for the money, the way I find helpful to think about is like, okay, cool. Now that I know that I'm doing courses and sponsorships for the money, how can I do those in a way that like minimizes the amount of time I personally spend doing stuff I don't want to do?

And how do I maximize the enjoyment? So for courses

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for example, I have enjoyed the process of making all of our courses because I know that like okay, the reason I'm making this course is because it's good for revenue in the business. Now that I know that, let me put that aside and let me focus on autonomy, mastery, purpose, fun, fulfillment.

Like let me make this course as good as I can be. Let me focus

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on enjoying the process. Let me really connect to the impact it's having on our students.

Let's make sure that like, you know, we're getting uh good feedback from the students and like we're using the feedback to make the course better because there's something inherently enjoyable about making a product better. It's like when you know what you're doing for the money, you can optimize for fun within that constraint.

But when

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you know what you're doing for fun, you're okay with leaving money on the table because some things are just enjoyable and interesting rather than things that make the most money. The other question I find myself asking myself and also other YouTubers who I do these therapy sessions with is what is the YouTube channel or the business you would like to have once your financial

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goals are taken care of? And usually that leads to interesting answers because you then realize that it's like, oh, I could actually just do that now.

like I don't need to wait for an arbitrary net worth goal in order to do the thing that I actually want to do if I'm okay with leaving some money on the table. It always comes down to leaving

30:30

being okay with leaving money on the table. Um, and the happiest people I know and the ones who are doing this sort of stuff, online business, any kind of business most sustainably are the ones who are okay with leaving money on the table.

I think this even applies to massive businesses. So, there is a story from

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Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple. I mean it's not from him but it's a story about him where like he was in a board meeting or something and he was really keen on making iPhone and Mac like accessible for blind people.

Uh where he was like you know they were they were spending a lot of time and effort and money trying

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to make accessibility tools so that people who were like blind or partially cighted could still use an iPhone and could still use a Mac. It makes me weirdly emotional to think about this.

It's like I'm surprised by this. Um but apparently one of the one of the people on the board or something asked like what's the ROI?

what's the return on investment of us making our products

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accessible for blind people? And apparently Tim Cook just sort of like scolded the guy uh being like, "Bro, come on.

Like the reason we're making products accessible for blind people is not so that it has a good ROI. Like we're doing it because it's it's the right thing to do." In that context, Tim

31:32

Cook is recognizing that it is okay to leave money on the table in order to do something that you want to do because you think it might have, you know, it's the right thing to do. It's got impact, fulfillment, fun.

Like for whatever reason, it is okay to leave money on the table. Generally, optimizing for making as much money as possible is a recipe to

31:48

burn out very quickly. And it's not just money here.

It's like money, views, subscribers, like any kind of metric. Uh but money is like the most, you know, the the most common one.

Any optimizing for any kind of metric starts to suck the joy out of the process.

32:04

And so it becomes this sort of healthyish balancing act between doing stuff for the metrics and doing stuff for the fun and the fulfillment. Final point is you just really never know how things are going to go.

I could have had absolutely no idea eight years ago that this is where my YouTube channel would end up. And when I think

32:21

about the alternative life I would have had being a doctor right now and I think about just that decision to start a YouTube channel and how it it just completely changed everything that decision to get started and that decision every day to keep going with it even like especially for the first like 2 years where I wasn't really making any money. It has given me the the freedom to be able to basically do whatever I

32:38

want whenever I want, not do things that I want to do, work with really cool people, meet really cool people, uh make a ton of money. You know, I wouldn't even have met my wife if it wasn't for the YouTube channel.

Um cuz we connected because both of us were YouTubers. And I would have had absolutely no idea that that is the stuff that would have happened 8 years ago.

The final reflection is something that Jeff Bezos sometimes says like

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imagine in baseball the highest number of points you can get is four, right? Like you could you could hit a home run or whatever whatever it's called and you can go around the bases and now you got four points.

Great. But when it comes to business, yes, there's a low percentage likelihood that every shot you take is going to be is going to be is going to be successful.

But if something is

33:10

successful, there is no limit to the amount of points you can get. You're not capped at four points.

If you hit a home run, you could get a million points or a billion points. And so given that the the only thing you have to lose like you have very little

33:26

to lose by just taking shots on goal because if one of those shots works man it completely transforms your life. These are not like linear outcomes.

These are very asymmetrical outcomes. This YouTube thing is like my seventh attempt at making a business.

From the age of 13 up until the age of like 24

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when I started my YouTube channel 23 I had like eight different businesses that I was trying to run. Most of them completely flopped.

One of them sort of was moderately successful and made like six figures a year in revenue and then the YouTube channel started age 23. If I hadn't taken those other seven shots, those other seven like swings of the

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bat, you know, six of them were complete strikeouts. One of them got like a double or whatever, but then the YouTube channel has been a home run with a million points relative to all the other things.

In baseball, it doesn't make sense to just keep taking the shots because all you can get is four points. In business, entrepreneurship, it kind of does.

You just keep on taking shots

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until something works. And then then when you find the thing that works, you do it for 10 years.

And then you look back and you're like, "Holy freak." Like my life is completely transformed. And I think so many people, they don't even they don't take the first step because they're afraid of missing the shot.

I missed seven shots before one of them

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worked and they don't keep on going because once they find once you find something that works, the game is to keep going with it for at least 10 years. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

I hope that was vaguely useful. Um, and if you enjoyed this and you haven't yet seen my video on how to get rich, which is another similar sort of sort of speak from the heart and

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share advice that I wish I would have had earlier, then you might like to check out this video over here. Thank you very much for watching.

Have a lovely day. Thank you for 8 years on YouTube and here's to another eight.

Bye.