I failed at YouTube, until I understood this

I want to show you something this is my most successful YouTube video it's gotten over a million views it's earned me close to £2,000 or $25,000 and it took me four hours to make this video on the other hand only got a little over a thousand views it's earned me no money it took me months to make it and I think it is my favorite thing that I've ever made it's not necessarily technically the best video I've ever done but I feel genuinely so proud of how it turned out and the work that I had

to put into it it makes me happy watching this video back so when it comes to YouTube is there a way to get the best of both worlds to have the money and the success but also have the satisfaction too and why should you listen to some nobody who you've never heard of like me well it's true I'm not Mr Beast but I've been on YouTube for four years now I've had a couple of channels and I've learned a lot in that time for those of you that are bothered about the numbers here's the numbers

at the end of the day there's thousands of YouTube advice videos out there and they all kind of say the same sort of thing you know the things that you need to do you know that you need decent titles and thumbnails that are catchy you know that you need to have some sort of upload schedule if you want to get growth that's all obvious what I want to talk about though is something that those videos don't talk about and something that I think will help you a lot more in terms of not only doing well

at YouTube YouTube but also not burning yourself out and feeling completely miserable during the process of doing so and to help explain it I'm going to use the aid of a drawing that I did heads up I'm not an artist but I think this is going to do the job so this is my very simple but straightforward guide to How To Succeed on YouTube if you can get your head around these ideas you will do fine on this platform so let's talk about this first idea on the left this is the Trap and this really

just describes the Bas cycle of events when someone starts out on YouTube you start out doing something you really quite enjoy you not really got many expectations from it but then at some point one video seems to do a little better than the rest and you think oh views I like views how do I get more of those views and then you go down the rabbit hole of learning YouTube you watch YouTube advice videos you watch YouTube gurus doing education on how to get the best metrics and how it all works and you kind then

go around in this cycle you think when you watch these videos that you can go back to making just your normal little videos doing whatever you want and the views will come but the more you go through this cycle of watching YouTube education and then making your nice videos and you end up watching YouTube education again because you're not getting the views that you want you start to realize that these nice videos that you make not all of them get views it's only videos on certain topics that you happen to hit on that really take

off but these YouTube advice videos have you believing that you could be the next Casey neistat or Emma chamber in people that just make videos about anything and they do well if you make them in a specific way and this makes people feel confused what am I doing wrong why are my views not going up I've been down this whole Rabbit Hole myself countless times and it took me a long time to finally break out of it but the reality is that these people that we look up to the Casey stats of the world they're

exceptional and most of us are just normal and that's fine if everyone was exceptional then that would be normal and therefore not exceptional so it's okay to not be at that level there's plenty of room for normal on YouTube so we don't want to think that being exceptional to that degree is the only way to go I don't think that's a healthy mindset and once we accept the fact that we're normal we can move on to the next part of this whole thing which is the choice before we accepted this and we were dreaming that

we might become the next big star we were trying to achieve growth money all of that stuff by just doing whatever we want pure creative freedom as if that was going to work but the way this works is that you can only have two of these you can't have the growth the money and all the success and all that stuff and the freedom to make whatever you want whilst being normal it it doesn't quite work like that and that's okay but here's how it works if we accept that we're normal and we want to make

whatever we want in the whole world anything we can imagine just whenever then we can't expect that we're going to get the growth that's not how it works you you can't have all three things in the same way if you want to have growth and you're also a normal person you can't have the freedom to make absolutely everything you want all of the time and have no real running theme that doesn't work either so we have to accept that we only get to have two of these things that's how it works and that's fine for

me I've kind of started to lean more towards the growth and being normal a little bit of Freedom's okay once in a while but on the whole there needs to be a bit of a theme to The videos I can't just make whatever I want all the time and expect that everyone's going to think it's amazing that's not how this works at the end of the day neither one of these two options is wrong it's okay to just make whatever you want and kind of let the whole success thing go and if you can be

happy with that and you're not expecting any money or or or a great big following that's probably the best way to go for genuine fulfillment but if you want to actually make a bit of money on YouTube if you want it to be a little bit of a job where you can bring in a a bit of a living from it that's fine too you just got to be pragmatic about it and realize that you can't go about it in a naive way and you have to accept the cards you were given which leads me

on to the most important part of this diagram sustainability we'll leave that there if you want this whole thing to be sustainable you kind of have to accept that there are cards you are dealt in life and there are cards that you are not play the cards that are in your hand don't try and pretend like you have a card you don't it doesn't make sense and you won't get anywhere for example are you really attractive are you really relatable are you hilariously funny or do you have a particular skill like photography or video graphy

or whatever it might be if these are the cards you have use them this is how you're going to separate yourself from everyone that thinks that they can be the next big thing on YouTube and you know it's good to dream but you also have to be realistic and most people are dreaming a little bit too much if you can be realistic about what your strengths are and what your weaknesses are and play to those strengths you're going to have a way better time making videos because for one you're going to be happy because you'll

be aligned with who you really are and two it's going to mean that your videos do better because you've actually got something to share with other people imagine if you put on a fake version of yourself and it happened to do well and then you had to just continue doing that for the rest of your life in order to have a career on YouTube would that not feel completely Soul destroying and isn't that why so many people are feeling burned out and kind of like the they' ended up stuck doing something they didn't really want

to do and then all the the videos suffer for it there is short-term success to be had in that approach but not much happiness there is also a right way and a wrong way to play these cards are you approaching this whole making videos thing with the mindset that you want to give or with the mindset that you want to take for example someone that's got a lot of comedic Talent could use that talent to either cheer people up and build people up through making the laugh or they could use it to tear people down

just for the sake of getting a few extra laughs from a certain group of people in the same way someone that's really attractive could use that as a way to give people Insight in how to make themselves look better and feel better about themselves or they could use it in a way that would damage their viewers not for me to make any comments I suppose but we can probably all think of examples of that what you choose to do is going to dictate how you feel long term if you're constantly tearing people down instead of

just focusing on making people happy that's not going to be very fulfilling for you it will eat away at you the best part about this mindset of giving as opposed to taking is that it doesn't have to always be that you're giving to other people too you can choose to give yourself a video you know if you've been working hard and you're like I just need to make a project for myself that's going to make me happy that isn't taking from your audience necessarily that's giving to yourself at the same time you can trick yourself

into thinking you're giving to your audience but what you're actually doing is just making videos around topics that you really think will get views and really what you're looking to do is take from the audience you're not actually looking to serve them so this whole mindset playing the cards that you were dealt and giving as opposed to taking if you can do that successfully and honestly then you're going to feel so much better about the things that you make on this platform and you're not going to end up burning out at least not as often

as someone that is just constantly chasing the views for themselves or trying to benefit themselves at the expense of anyone who might be watching so in review don't fall for the Trap of thinking that you're something special when you might just be normal that's fine normal is good normal is more relatable than special in a lot of ways secondly you need to make a choice do you want to have the creative freedom to do whatever you want or do you want to grow usually you can only pick one of those and of course if you

want this to be sustain able you've got to be pragmatic about it you got to play to your strengths use the cards that you were dealt not pretending to be someone that you're not and focus on giving rather than taking if you can do all of these things it really doesn't matter how many views you get in the long run you are going to be way happier than you would have been had you just continued in this initial cycle chasing money chasing views internet Fame and just feeling kind of miserable if you liked this drawing

by the way this kind of HTH inspired doodle that I've done you can actually buy it it's part of a bundle on my website where you'll get this in the form of kind of like a screen saver Type image there's also a film making cheat sheet with a ton of helpful information on that you usually end up Googling because you can't remember and I've also thrown in a few editing assets things like aspect ratio overlays and also a b-roll placeholder which I use because I often forget to shoot things and this little placeholder just helps

me remember that I need to do that and you can get it all for the price of a cup of hipster coffee on my website the links in the description if you'd like to buy it it support the channel so thanks and that is all from me today thanks for watching I'll see you in the next one it's a wrap