๐ง๐ต๐ฒ ๐ฌ๐ผ๐๐ง๐๐ฏ๐ฒ ๐ฅ๐ฒ๐น๐ฎ๐๐ถ๐ผ๐ป๐๐ต๐ถ๐ฝ Iโve been thinking about the announcement of two classic YouTubers saying goodbye on their channels, Tom Scott and The Game Theorists (MatPat and team). Is it possible to understand completely how they feel? In some ways yes, and in some ways no. The gravity of passing down something that you may have worked a decade on, I donโt really feel as if even people with tremendous amounts of empathy could understand the full gravity of memories, grief, relief, bittersweetness that that must entail. Matt DโAvella also announced that heโs downsizing his team to just essentially doing solo creation again, partly because of that burden of always chasing and having to manage a big team. I do think thereโs some super important lessons here, though. Lots of YouTubers I know are in their early-mid 20s, or even earlier โ so this is especially important for people where being a YouTuber is a huge part of life and identity. ๐ง๐ต๐ฒ ๐จ๐ป๐ถ๐พ๐๐ฒ ๐ฅ๐ฒ๐น๐ฎ๐๐ถ๐ผ๐ป๐๐ต๐ถ๐ฝ ๐๐๐ป๐ฎ๐บ๐ถ๐ฐ๐ ๐ข๐ณ ๐ฌ๐ผ๐๐ง๐๐ฏ๐ฒ ๐ซ ๐๐ฟ๐ฒ๐ฎ๐๐ผ๐ฟ๐ 1. YouTube has no limits except for your available lifespan. You can spend as much or as little time on it as you want. This will always be at the opportunity cost of things that youโre not spending time on. 2. Ambition towards YouTube has no limits, except for what you physically output. You can make a company of 1 person, or 10,000 people. 3. Often but not always, thereโs much personal value and happiness which is tied to the conventional success of a channel. A declining amount of growth tends to make people unhappy. Similarly, growth makes people happy. This is the nature of games with clear incentives and outcomes. With these in mind, Iโd like to propose a rough but simple framework for making YouTube something that could last for a lifetime. I donโt know if itโll actually work since I havenโt lived for a lifetime yet (fortunately), but itโs worth a shot โ and even if incomplete, you can make your own, I just want to propose the idea that it should exist. ๐ ๐ฎ๐ป๐ถ๐ณ๐ฒ๐๐๐ผ ๐๐ผ๐ฟ ๐๐ฒ๐ฎ๐น๐๐ต๐ถ๐ฒ๐ฟ ๐๐ฟ๐ฒ๐ฎ๐๐ผ๐ฟ ๐ฅ๐ฒ๐น๐ฎ๐๐ถ๐ผ๐ป๐๐ต๐ถ๐ฝ๐ 1. Time spent is time chosen. No-one is โmakingโ you do anything. Therefore, you have the responsibility to be intentional with your time. If you want that to mostly be YouTube, great. If you want to only spend 1 hour per month on YouTube, great. Your life is up to you. 2. Growth does matterโฆbut it also doesnโt matter that much. We should extract the fun parts of growing, whilst discarding the unnecessary unhappiness that comes with feeling a constant lack of something. Marcus Aurelius is the Roman emperor who wrote about this somewhere in his Meditations: that even the most incredible people are forgotten, as we all will be, to time. But, as the billionaire Ray Dalio says in Principles: > โwe are unbelievably tiny and short-lived and no matter what we accomplish, our impact will be insignificant. At the same time, we instinctually want to matter and to evolve, and we can matter a tiny bitโand itโs all those tiny bits that add up to drive the evolution of the universe.โ 3. Our relationship with YouTube is ultimately one that is, for the most part, driven mostly by internal perception and internal choices. Even views donโt dictate what you should do. If views were always the goal: then an important question is, does external validation matter that much to you? And even goals like โI want to make moneyโ or โI want to help more peopleโ or โI want to make sure my team does wellโโฆI mean, one could certainly choose to perceive that as a lot of pressure. Or one could just choose to handle things gracefully, without the friction of mental anguish, and still get the job done extremely effectively. Itโs a motto Iโve been trying to take into 2024: performance is better when happy. 4. At each moment, whatโs a life that I would have fun living, or find meaning living in? If Iโm not having fun: am I simply taking the fun right in front of me for granted? Or is there a flaw in my own design/effort that I need to correct? ๐๐ผ๐ป๐ฐ๐น๐๐๐ถ๐ผ๐ป If I were to try to abstract everything about this tweet into one sentence, itโs this: An internal locus of control is extremely important to be deliberate about, in the design of how we approach our YouTube channels - as a business or as an individual. Our goals can, and will, definitely change as we grow. And thatโs 100000% okay. Thereโs perhaps an analogy thatโs really useful here. In high school, you feel like thatโs your whole world. Everyone who likes you or doesnโt like you, makes a huge difference as to your wellbeing. And when you graduate high school and get into the real world, itโs like: actually, none of those hierarchies or anything really mattered that much at all. Those tests, those bullies, those whatevers โ theyโre all tiny in the grand scheme of oneโs adult life. โฆ But, metaphorically: is all of life just like that high school? A small world that feels like our whole world? Thereโs a lot of great things to live for in this life, which is short. So may as well have the most fun possible. So long as YouTube is done in a way that continues to be fun, sustainable, and - most importantly - within the grasps of our controlโฆthen I think that that will improve the longevity of many creators.
