I've been a content creator online for 14 years, and one of the hardest things for me has been figuring out how to define success without depending on money, views, and minutes watched to tell me what kind of success I'm having. I finally cracked that in a way I can clearly explain today, because this has literally been the hardest question for me as a content creator.
I've always looked at it this way: my primary intention as a YouTuber and as a Twitch streamer is to get out there and help somebody have a better day, help somebody learn something, teach something, help somebody feel something. And the way I've always defined whether I'm achieving that intention is by how many views I'm getting, how many live viewers I have on a live stream, how many members I have on YouTube, how much money people are tipping, how much ad revenue I'm getting, how much people are paying to schedule calls, and how much I'm getting in sponsorships.
The trap of measuring service with self-centered metrics
In all of this, the trap I've kept getting into is that because I'm measuring whether I'm helping other people, I'm using a metric that is also self-centered. What keeps happening to me is that I show up thinking my primary intention is to serve others, to make somebody else's day better, to give somebody else quality information. But then the way I'm measuring whether I'm doing that tricks me right back into being self-centered. I think of the line from Scarface: he's a pig, he wants more than he needs.
Here's what I've come to believe. When I'm really helping others, I feel good. I feel balanced. I feel centered. To me that's because of something bigger, the way we're all connected telepathically and energetically. But the challenge is when I'm judging whether I'm helping others by looking at views and money, and then I start optimizing what I'm creating for views and money.
What I've found is that if I optimize for views and money, if I adjust my titles, if I adjust my content just to want the most views and money in the short term, all I need to do is grind out crypto videos about altcoins that I don't think are a good investment. If I make videos about those altcoins, that will, in the short term, get me the most views and the most money. That, to me, has been the absolute biggest trap as a content creator: the metrics. I think I'm showing up to help other people, but my emotions indicate that I'm mostly self-centered in the extreme. All I'm thinking about is how many views I get and how much money I make. And if I'm not getting views and not making money, then forget helping other people. That's the unfortunate reality I've seen.
I see so many other people tricked into this, and I'm even starting to be able to hear it when people talk. Do you really want to help other people, or do you really want to be special and famous and just print money for yourself at home? I ask because I've done that.
Winning on the metrics while feeling like crap
There's been a battle in me between the metrics saying I'm getting so many viewers and the honesty of admitting I feel like crap. When I was live streaming Warzone on Facebook, I was one of the top Facebook partners, getting millions and millions of views. I was very well known. I made over $100,000 in 2021 playing video games on Facebook, uploading videos to YouTube, live streaming to Twitch, and so on. So externally, all the metrics were going great. But internally, most days I felt stressed. It wasn't good enough. I felt constantly under attack. And every day I'd think: is this the best I can do for other people? I felt like I wasn't delivering real value.
I've been struggling for years to figure all this out, and today it all just came together and made sense. Why was I playing Call of Duty Warzone? Because the algorithm was pushing that the most. If I played other games, the algorithm wasn't pushing them. Even if I wanted to play other games, even if it might have been more helpful for other people for me to play different games or to not even play games at all, I played Call of Duty Warzone almost every day because that's what the algorithm wanted to push. And why did the algorithm want to push that? Because that's what the audience was addicted to watching.
But what I noticed is that a lot of times what the algorithm's pushing, and what the audience is feeding off of, often leaves me feeling horrible. When I create something that I really need to say, something with a strong message behind it, something that's good for me to create because I need to learn it, something that's truly different, that's a different experience entirely. This is not meant for a general audience. This is meant for YouTubers who are not self-centered.
I have to say, as a content creator, there are a lot of us who are very self-centered. Our mouths will say it's about helping other people, but when you watch our emotions and our actions, it's all about serving the algorithm and making ourselves as famous and as rich as possible.
Why feeling bad eventually sabotaged everything
I can only handle feeling bad so much. I'm sober in Alcoholics Anonymous almost 11 years, so I don't have anything to take the edge off. What I've noticed in the past is that a bunch of times when I've been doing great getting money and great getting views, I've sabotaged it in one way or another. Sometimes it was with a great idea. Sometimes it was with a blatantly, obviously bad idea. But often it was just running my mouth from a place of criticism and not feeling good enough. I'd put that out there, and eventually I'd get canceled, or go off the algorithm, or delete my channels, or stop creating content.
The common theme among all of that is this: no amount of views and no amount of money will leave me feeling good, but feeling good eliminates the need for any amount of views or money.
Defining success as feeling good
So today, what I'm obsessed with, and what I really want to communicate in my videos, is the love and care I have for each of you as a viewer. But I have to start from a place of feeling good and refuse to optimize for views or for money. This is probably not a video that has that shallow, grab-everybody's-attention energy. This isn't the one little trick you do to trick the YouTube algorithm. But this is something that could really change one YouTuber's mindset or one Twitch streamer's mindset.
The content I'm most proud of, out of the tens of thousands of videos I've created, is the things that were created with a pure intention to help somebody else. My Alcoholics Anonymous speaker meeting. Playing a video game and just having fun with my friends and having a great round. Creating content like this that takes a lot of learning I've earned the hard way by wasting a lot of time, and then collapsing it into one simple, easy-to-understand idea: success is feeling good. Feeling good in the sense that what I'm creating is making a difference in my life and that it might be useful for other people.
So how do I define feeling good? Well, I have to know what it feels like to feel good, and I need to pay attention to how what I'm creating impacts what I'm feeling. When I played those Warzone streams, lots of days I made lots of money and got lots of views, but I felt bad after the live stream. I felt spent. I felt drained. Even when everything went great, a lot of times I felt kind of disgusted or used afterward. Whereas when I create something with the pure intention of service for others, I feel awesome afterward and I can't wait to do more.
You also can't force the creating and the feeling good. Yesterday, for example, I didn't have anything I wanted to share, but I did want to go to the Apple store and get a new phone and a new laptop, so that's what I did. If you want to go deeper on this mindset shift, I share a lot more of it in my YouTube Coaching playlist.
Success, to me, is feeling good. And I'm setting this as a very clear intention: going forward, I will stick to defining success as feeling good. The views and the money are not up to me.