For top 0.01% YouTubers who get stuck on future channel/video directions

Novel concepts for top 0.01% YouTubers to focus on: 1. Risk. - YouTube channels can go stale with riskless content - Bravery/boldness should be considered as a new variable to directly optimise for - “What‘s the version of this idea that is most likely to just be at the edge of impossible?” — will lead to something truly novel 2. Expansion of self-concept of viewers. - A viewer is the protagonist of their own lives - In their Hero’s Journey, you briefly become the Guide, when you’re telling your own story - An incredible channel-defining video is not just one that pushes a viewer to think “I could do that”, but instead, “I didn’t know that was even a possible thing to do” - Much extreme performing content lies in the nice intersection of “I understand what happened” x “I can’t believe that just happened” 3. Step ahead ideation. - Since outliers are so easily and rapidly capitalised on, it’s worthwhile to think in multi-idea formats that can be produced IF a certain concept does well - Formats, of course, will fatigue over time — but more rapidly than ever before - ⚠️ YouTube performance is ALWAYS a measure of past performance. It is an insight into what happened at a specific time, but not necessarily what will happen in the future. - Outliers are good models for understanding how views are flowing, but the nodes (videos) that have views flow extremely tapidly towards them *likely don’t not yet exist* - So basic (fundamentally sound) ideation is understanding the past states - And advanced ideation is understanding how your action affects the future states (more simply, how good are you at predicting whether a video can get views or not?) 4. Masking as a form of deliberate practice. - If you’ve lost your YouTube muscle for a niche, here’s an exercise that will help, adapted from a technique found in training world models (C-JEPA in particular). - Take any YouTube channel in your niche - Cover up the view count, e.g. with a physical piece of A4 paper - Guess the number of views - Specifically write down why you think it will do that number of views - Reveal the true number - Write down a reflection for EVERY video, analysing why your view counts do or don’t differ from predicted - This prevents you from falsely assuming you know a niche/storytelling/whatever when you don’t — because you’ll objectively be wrong or right - No-one talks about “etudes” in YouTube strategy (ways to deliberately train your YouTube strategic intuition), so this is already an extremely uncommon exercise - It’s specifically useful because of the extremely fast feedback loop - It also helps to train your future prediction capability 5. Curation of taste affects videos. - Your YouTube videos are reflective of your own tastes and sensibilities. - So if you deliberately take time to explore uncommon or new tastes, your videos will absorb a new flavor. - Deliberately seek out non-YouTube things that are beautiful, wonderful, inspiring, thought-provoking, whatever. - Then bring them into YouTube. - This protects you from AI, because even copycats won’t have original sources for context 6. Effort as a proxy for value - In a world of artificially generated things, sheer effort is always respected immensely - We will always respect a hand crafted pot that took 100 hours to make, than a factory produced 100 pots that took 2 minutes to make - It’s because of a weird property that your work IS in itself a character. People emotionally respect work almost as if it is its own being. They will love or hate it. They will care for it. - Videos are themselves characters in people’s minds (in a very abstract sense). They have form, direction, and intention. - This is an extremely unconventional way of thinking of course, so most will just find it strange rather than insightful. My point here is namely to provide a framework for understand how videos affect people. - It’s not just an experience, but an object.