Filmmaking: how to succeed on Youtube… if that is REALLY what you want to do.

youtube is this remarkably malleable art
form and whether you think of it as a hobby or as a career and i mean this this video is really addressed to people who make the commitment that they want it to be their career they want to succeed and admitting that to yourself is difficult and then really thinking through philosophically and pragmatically what are you willing to do to make it happen so if that's what you want if you if that's what you want is is to succeed now what are you willing to do to make it happen i know a youtube channel who i gave completely unsolicited advice to a youtube channel that does vegan food videos and she had the honesty to come out and admit with some anguish and frustration on camera that what she really wanted was for youtube to take over her life where she wouldn't have any other job for to become her career for her to be making videos on such a scale that you know it's it's all the money she needs in this life and along with that comes fame and other things well you know she makes videos about food what are you willing to do to get it i mean like you know you really want to make videos that are going to bring in tens of thousands of views hundreds of thousands of views have you even really thought that through now i'll come back to that example i the point of this video ultimately is to talk about the stuff i normally don't talk about because it's not what i'm doing myself that's not the kind of success i'm i'm pursuing myself but if admitting that you want it admitting that that's what you try to do is one thing and then thinking strategically about you know your mission your mandate aesthetically in terms of the the container and then also thinking about the content what it is you're going to do to succeed in that way i think that most people really can't be honest themselves not even at that first step one of the most important pieces of advice i give people that i'm giving you right now is to think about how happy you'll be if you get on this path and it ends in failure there are all kinds of things that in your mind's eye seem like they're worth doing if you presume that you will be a success but is it worth doing if it ends in failure or if there's a succession of failures along the way before whatever measure of success it is that you managed to ring out of it i remember meeting people who were getting a phd in anthropology at all phases and stages of that career path and many of them had it fixed in their mind's eye that they would be the lucky minority to go on to get a highly paid highly celebrated position as a published famous anthropologist now that phrase may seem laughable in itself to many of you in the honest a famous anthropologist what does that mean in every generation there are a few there are a few famous anthropologists but how many people with phd's anthropology end up teaching english as a second language in japan how many of them end up teaching there's a second language in taiwan thailand laos you and the various places i met them and i knew one guy with a phd in anthropology uh who ended up getting a job working in the the back of a kitchen as a fry cook and helping to train the other staff then i remember he went on to uh he went on to work in a wine shop selling bottles of wine over the counter now look if you love anthropology if you love reading about anthropology if you love writing about anthropology if this is really part of the meaning of life for you and you're willing to do it anyway you know if you're willing to you're willing to publish a book and you feel that researching and writing and publishing that book about anthropology is worthwhile even if nobody else reads it even if nobody else appreciates it you know i mean there are some people who have that level of commitment to anthropology and i'm going to be real with you i think when i was working as an editor i used to work in the publishing industry i think some of my clients were like that some of the authors whose books i was helping to publish these were these were written by people who had they had no hope that anyone would ever read their book they had no hope of ever getting ahead as a in a career and never being a professor but they were really committed to anthropology they felt that this was worth doing even if it ended in failure or forget the ending in the end we're all dead after all you know sooner or later you die of old age no matter what you specialize in but they for them was worthwhile to fail again and again and again and to keep on failing for them anthropology was worth doing even if it were a failure the vast majority of people who make that decision who make that commitment who decide to spend tens of thousands of dollars in some cases it's it's more than a hundred thousand dollars like getting a master's degree and a phd it can be a lot of money you know uh and to spend many of the best years of their life struggling and suffering and not doing innumerable other things just to get that certification in in anthropology the vast majority of the people i've met uh they have the delusion that they will go on to be the one in a million they will they will be what's a good comparison here in stand-up comedy they will be the equivalent of what who's the famous standard comedian right now they will be the next kevin hart what kevin hart is to stand up comedy if you go into stand-up comedy it's an equally good example and you're going to put in the time and the hours and the effort and suffer the humiliation and suffer the failure have the audience not laugh at your jokes again and again go to open mic nights and try your material and once in a while you get a good joke like you have a bad set there are a couple good jokes and then someone else steals your jokes you get to live through that you have to live through all the shame and humiliation of failure again and again and again well if that process is worthwhile for you if you're motivated not motivated to succeed but you're motivated to fail that it's worth failing then standing up comedy is worth doing then anthropology is worth doing dennis the right then that's the right path for you and in a sense if you succeed that that won't really matter like if you're incorruptable if you're corruptable success will corrupt you the money and the fame and success will corrupt you of course but if you're incorruptable it won't matter you'll be in a position to say that as an anthropologist or as a comedian you're doing exactly the same thing that you uh you would be doing you're doing exactly the same thing you'd do um if there if nobody was watching if nobody were laughing you know if as a stand-up comedy comedian if no one were reading your book now here's the thing about youtube youtube is this unbelievably malleable uh medium right like the first two examples they're really quite narrow what do you want to do in anthropology anthropology is based on so-called participant observation and you could write up a monograph you know what i mean i'm gonna imagine wouldn't it be great to have a monograph about what was going on with the ojibwe of um the upper peninsula of michigan during the bill clinton years reflecting eight years of field work eight years of research that's anthropology you go out you live with people you listen to them like ideally you don't even ask them questions ideally you don't even ask them what they think about policy you just listen to them when they talk about politics you know you note things down and you do some kind of analysis who's who's going to care you will you can you know but the problem is most people they have attachment to outcomes that it's not that the outcomes are impossible it's not even that they're improbable it is in a sense that those outcomes can't be earned the point is not that you can't succeed the point is not that nobody succeeds the point is not that failure is inevitable the point is not even that success is improbable the point is not that it's that it's one in a million the point is that the difference between success and failure is something you cannot earn right and i mean everyone knows this if what you're chasing is fame and a big audience you know the most the most ridiculous circumstance could happen that makes you famous on the internet you get into a fight with a waitress and a famous person who happens to be in the restaurant at the same time as you throws their drink at you and all of a sudden you're you know a million people are interested some complete nonsense like this can catapult you to fame whereas the diligence and hard work to create a really great album as a rapper uh to create a really great set as a stand-up comedian to do something really worthwhile right or to put in the time necessary to be a youtuber or the time necessary to be an anthropologist right you can't earn that further outcome so you have to commit to you know your own creative role your involvement in the art form in a way where you are going to be happy where it is going to be meaningful to you even if it's a failure so knowing that you know um well what kind of rap album do you want to make how is this going to affect your rap music once you kind of not it's not that you've let go of the process it's not that you've let go of the product like you still care about quality you still care about doing the best you can and make making a great rapper making an album that's better than the rap songs that are in the top 10 whatever okay but what do you what do you want to rap about what is going to be the content of this now i would suggest to you naively that probably you not a general you the actual specific human being in the audience listening probably you would say that you want to make an album singing about or rapping about something that's really meaningful to you something where it's really going to be worth it for you to put in all this effort if it never makes you 100 if it's never successful and where if you're listening to it again again i mean what if you have to perform the song live 100 times you aren't getting sick of it you don't regard it as shallow right where there's something about it where you feel you're doing something uniquely valuable now what if i said to you hey that's a terrible idea how about instead you listen to the songs that are currently on the top 10 for rap you make a new song which is like an average of the lyrics in the top 10 rap songs so you know like you go through verse by verse you're like okay so five of them talk about being a drug dealer five of them talk about pimping well you know you go through you you isolate it thematically and what the raps are yeah um uh conflict with the police conflict with your own parents like take out the different kind of stereotype things okay oh okay no they also rap about how expensive their shoes are you know how they have a better gold watch than a famous basketball player you could go through image by image of mine and you could create a rap song that is indistinguishable from its competition how are you going to feel with that now most people most young people but let's be real most middle-aged people also they will think about this as if success is a foregone conclusion they'll say oh a little it's going to be great they're going to be so happy once this is a hit rap song and once they have you know millions of fans and huge amounts of money oh they they have no problem with their own lack of originality given the presumption of success and success on a massive scale success in a way that's gonna that's gonna change their lives okay okay okay okay but how are you gonna feel if you're committed to this this idea that if you're gonna do this you have to be comfortable with failure it has to be worthwhile for you as a process and as a product if you fail again and again and again now what so i think what's paradoxical about this is that the presumption of failure or embracing failure actually results in you raising your own standards it results in you increasing your expectations of yourself and saying okay then i don't want to do the same thing everyone else is doing because i'm not going to make any money out of it i'm not going to get famous doing it i have to actually do this for for the sake of the art itself or for the sake of the message itself or for me for me myself i have to do this for me i think what a lot of people are addicted to is the idea of effortless success the an end and let's be clear youtube gives you a remarkable number of examples of effortlessly successful people um you may think that you can just come on camera and talk about your own life the way trisha paytas did so i think trisha paytas goes back more than eight years more than 10 years maybe 15 years now on this platform and that you can for example be a fat self-pitying uh former stripper who comes on camera and breaks down weeping about your breakup with your ex-boyfriend breaks down weeping about your struggles to lose weight and how you never lose weight she breaks down weeping with a misery in her life that you can be a fat sobbing fool on camera that's what trisha paytas did and you will be elevated to success just like treasure buddies no game plan no strategy where you don't think of it as filmmaking you don't think it was any effort now look the the problem with youtube is that you can't learn from success right success on youtube is self-instantiating these instances like present themselves and the easiest examples to see well why don't you come up with an arithmetic estimate for me of how many fat self-pitying middle-aged people come on youtube and talk about breaking up with women and they never get 100 views they're never gonna and how many of them did it fifteen years ago one treasure because you can you can say usually oh well she was here at the beginning yeah there were a lot of those channels have been deleted like a lot of the evidence has disappeared most of them didn't keep their channels up but you know what there were a lot of people coming on and talking about their lives autobiographically and again ultimately it can't be about the odds it's not about a gamble it's not about rolling the dice and seeing who wins seeing who gets to be the next trisha paytas because the investment of time and energy you're making is a hundred percent certain it's only the outcome that's uncertain right so regarding it as a gamble is misleading learning from success is very difficult especially if you don't know people face to face they don't really talk you through what they went through and and how they how they succeeded and where their money comes from i used to work in the publishing industry and there were a lot of really weird publications for editors and publishers they're kind of publications they're not secret but they're only read by people who are who are inside the industry and i can remember reading articles talking about the fact from different angles people have this assumption that you're getting rich from books like whether you're the editor or the author or whatever and people do show up at these uh conventions in the publishing industry they're different kind of book events and they may show up driving a ferrari or a lamborghini or something and people think oh you know that's because he published his book or oh that's because he is an editor or a book publisher he's making all this this money out of out of books it's like no this guy inherited several million dollars from his parents and then decided to go into the book publishing industry as a kind of charity and this applies to the authors also so i mean anything like this this is a simple example but boy is it is it deep i mean you know there are so many people on instagram today i heard about one in specific from a specific youtuber she was talking about her ex-boyfriend there are people who photograph themselves leaning on an expensive car with a woman in a bikini and the illusion the audience has is that this guy owns this expensive car because of the money he's making out of instagram itself regardless of the extent to which you know the model is paid for and the car is a rental you know those things aside um you know what is success and where does the money come from and to what extent is your own position uh bought or paid for what the public regards as an asset can really be a liability if you don't know people face to face if you don't work with people face to face it's very hard to learn from other success and you may you may end up imitating the aspects of their business model that are liabilities you know and not not the real source of their of their success so james newman says that there are so many videos on youtube from authors talking about how poorly paid they are uh yes i can send um i could send a link on that but i have to go dig through my my email there are websites that collect together the complaints from successful journalists about exactly how little they got paid to do a feature story in rolling stone and it'll list the amount of money they got paid the number of months of work they did the number of pages of text it was like how much how much time went into the research how much time went to the writing how many pages was and then it's like and then rolling stone paid me 400 us dollars um so you know i'm using rolling stone as an example that's one that sticks in my mind it's so that authors can compare notes with one another and say well look i only got paid two hundred dollars what did you get paid and these people are already in the incredibly uh privileged cast of of being able to publish and get and get paid for it at all i remember a particular article and i think in this case it was in the guardian but maybe maybe it was in publishers weekly or new york new york review of books or something because i used to read some weird publications connected to the potions a woman describe a certain hit author uh he was at the one of the book launch events uh launching one of his books and there were many people at the event who were in the know that this guy was basically born a european aristocrat like his parents owned a castle you know we had to get money this way and he got a question from the audience which was completely sincere and the person still says hey look i'm a fan of your books you know this is the third book of yours i've read and i love but tell me you know i i see you know you have a wife and kids and you know you're a little so what i don't understand is how could someone like you devote your time to writing this kind of philosophical stuff with no other no other job or career the guy gave an answer which was 100 insincere he stood there and said yes it's very difficult but you know i have to supplement my income by also placing uh short articles in newspapers and magazines and so the woman writing the article that i was reading she said there was a very telling laugh and it was laughter that didn't come from one part of the audience but here and there throughout the audience there were enough people who knew what this guy's real financial situation was and the reality that this was you know an aristocrats hobby he didn't rely on his books for money at all and that indeed every stage of his career including at least initially publishing his first or second book was directly paid for many authors now launch their careers by paying you know they pay the publisher to print and publish the book so the book itself is is money losing for the author not not money making the point is there is a problem here with strength being misperceived as weakness and weakness being misproceeded as strength and it is very very hard to learn from successful examples if you don't actually know those successful people if you can't actually listen to them and talk to them and see ideally you participate in the process and you really understand how their business works as well as really understanding uh how their art works uh this video is addressed to people and it may be none of you in the audience you know it may be none of the particular people with science right now but it's addressed to people who've admitted to themselves that they want youtube to be their only career that ideally they'd make a transition from this being a hobby to being there to being their sole source of income so the question and actually you do to ask joke about that and again many of these kind of reflections they apply to many many other lines of work many other i don't know many other interests in life whether they're research interests career interests educational interests or what have you i you know my girlfriend and i we read a lot of literature from ancient greece in rome within the last four and a half years we have had a lot of stuff we've been reading from ancient athens in rome i think melissa i think you're also impressed now by looking at appian i know you haven't had that much time with it so you know really we first did athens but lately we've also read so from it would be quite a decision to make that your career to say hey i don't want to do this as a hobby i want to make reading and talking about ancient roman literature in latin i want to be and could do it i could do it too look let's not be humble i also could compared to other languages of study you know latin would be incredibly easy uh no offense what a leap and what a thing to admit to yourself now we've already brought into this conversation the other kind of philosophical question which is okay if you want to do this you want to do ancient latin and or ancient greek okay and you want that to be are you going to be happy with yourself if you fail if you commit to this you give it 110 and i don't just mean that you fail in the end you fail in the process you fail again and again and again you know now maybe it's worth it maybe it's going to be great maybe you can really feel good about yourself and you say you're going to get a part-time job working at arby's i don't know does rb's exist in europe maybe i should use a less specific cultural example i don't know you're going to get yourself a part-time job as a librarian there's something more vegan you're going to get yourself a part-time job as librarian you're gonna put all your time and energy into studying latin and greek and maybe publishing your own additions and writing your own research and coming on youtube and talking about what you're doing you are gonna do this and even if nobody ever cares and you never earn any money out of it still you know this is worth it to you right you you you love it enough that it's going to be worth it to you okay you know so so that works right if you're if you're committed to it where you're not just committed to success you're willing to make the commitment you're willing to put in the effort even if it ends in failure or even if it's a failure at every stage okay so now you've got the winning formula like there's a sense in which you can't lose because even if you lose you're when you win because you're going to be so happy with yourself and so happy with your life that you managed to learn latin or you managed to learn ancient greek and you managed to do this research and publish these studies and come on youtube and share that with a few dozen people who care whatever if you can be happy failing okay you've gotta you've got a working model have you ever known someone who decided to become a bodybuilder and uh come on youtube and talk about weight loss and fitness and they never get more than 500 viewers do you know anyone like that i know a lot of people like okay okay the problem is in terms of the content you're doing in terms of the choices you're making right is it going to be worth it to you to sacrifice your whole life to going to the gym and eating that regimented diet and photographing yourself in that bikini or if you're a dude photographing yourself in those bikini bottoms you know whatever you know what i'm saying and and paying for the waxing and paying for the laser hair removal okay and all the work you're putting into your appearance and your health and fitness to come on youtube and give a message and again before i talked about being a rapper where your rap lyrics are like an average of 10 other rappers rap lyrics right you are probably giving health advice that could be generated as the average of 10 other bodybuilding youtube channels right like i can take those put them into a computer and get the average and you're saying something that approximates what 10 other youtube channels said right and you are devoting all of your time and energy that and you probably made that commitment or made that decision with success as a foregone conclusion and you didn't think about how meaningful is this going to be from how rewarding is it going to be for me if i fail if you know anyone who is an aspiring youtuber aspiring professional youtuber share the link share the link with them i'd be nice to have someone here is actually in the struggle but as i say a lot of these reflections are meaningful to every other every other kind of struggle [Music] you