The demand for people that are actually “hardcore good” at YouTube has increased a LOT in the last 2 months.
But what’s interesting is that “hardcore good” is the main criteria for a YouTubers who talk to me, wanting to hire someone to help them with their channel.
This article is about how to achieve that. If you’re looking for work in the YouTube space, or you’re a YouTuber yourself wanting to get better, I’ll explain one critical piece of mindset for you to have to get really, really good at YouTube.
This is something that you don’t have any specific pre-existing skill to accomplish. But you may need a lot of willpower.
Make 100 videos?
You see, we have a situation. People in general these days are getting much worse at delayed gratification.
There was an OG idea that you had to make 100 videos before one gets good at YouTube videos. But that mindset is becoming much less common.
Most people just give up in the first few videos. But for those who push through, even if purely quantity-wise, they tend to get good at it.
The decreasing numbers of people who believe this, may be interpreted as a phenomenon regarding attention span. But I think whilst that’s an easy explanation, it’s actually only a pretty superficial one.
Reasons there’s a lack of perseverance on YouTube
One part of it is that people in general feel more insecure about what they’re doing, have many fears, and house many pressures. Fair enough: you can’t think about wasting 6 months making YouTube videos, if you must survive to put food on the table.
But the other part is that peoples’ desires are different.
It’s really sad, but the number of people who just want to make a tonne of money on YouTube has increased drastically, and the number of people who are inspired to become great YouTubers themselves (perhaps because they’re inspired by another YouTuber) seems to have decreased proportionally a lot.
Whilst I feel there’s a lot of reasons for this too, I feel like Jensen Huang of NVIDIA has explained one reason all perfectly, in the form of a statement he gave to a recent graduating University class:
“I wish you ample doses of pain and suffering.”
In that speech, he said it was important for those students going into the real world to have low expectations.
Low expectations are important because they essentially give you the ability to persevere through much more than lofty expectations would.
Want $10K/month? Start with a $10 sale.
Want 1 million subscribers? Start with a video that gets 100 views. Make 100 videos. And be prepared to make 200 more.
Finding YouTube talent has always been really difficult, just because there’s not much supply. But the reason there’s not much supply is exactly this lack of hardcoreness that once defined YouTubers themselves, and also people who are YouTube-adjacent.
LLMs as a reason this occurs?
To a mild degree, perhaps it’s an LLM-esque mindset shift.
There was a recent study in Chinese schools where they compared the test scores of those who used AI, vs those who never used AI.
The grades were similar between those two types of students.
But guess who did substantially better on test scores?
It was actually those who never used AI.
Now, in day to day life, I use AI an extraordinary amount. But every now and again, I find myself being lazier with the way I articulate things. Why think when you can prompt?
Why use full sentences when etc.?
But, it turns out the skill of YouTubing abides by the exact same nature:
Friction and struggle is necessary for learning.
So one core reason I think there’s a lack of talent to hire on YouTube across the board, is simply that all the people who were willing to put in that hard work are all taken because they’re now *good* at what they do. These are people who developed that hardcore good.
And the result is a heavy demand but short supply. Because there’s lack of talent/character/willpower in everyone else that aren’t those people, to fill that gap.
Conclusion
So, my advice to any individual who wants to work with YouTubers or become a good YouTuber themselves, is simply: become enthusiastic about struggling. Pain and friction is necessary to get better. Thinking hard and deeply about something *feels* effortful, like lifting a weight that’s just a little too heavy at the gym. But if you feel that heaviness, it’s wonderful because it means that you’re actually pushing yourself towards something greater.
Someone who has low expectations, is willing to hustle, have humility to realise there’s a huge pool of knowledge to acquire, and be professional/courteous — they will always go far in YouTube and life.
(If you wanted to improve your YouTube storytelling skill and want to learn a hardcore way of doing it, storytelling.creatorside.io — a course I made myself — may be useful for that endeavour. But honestly if not that, you could also just study a few hundred videos and that would achieve a similar result.)
