The number one lesson from 14 years as a creator
Right now I'm going to tell you the number one lesson I've learned as a content creator, after 14 years, more than 10,000 videos uploaded, and thousands of hours of live streams. The first thing I want you to think about is this: what is your primary intention? And be honest about it. Is your primary intention to go out there, serve others, and make a better world? Or is your primary intention to be famous, to get money and views for yourself?
This is an easy question to be deceptive with yourself about. Most of the time I've been online, I would say, "I'm here to help other people. I'm trying to make everybody else's life better. I'm trying to help people get sober, feel better, and learn the things I've learned." That's what comes out of my mouth. But when I'm back in the analytics, looking at the views I'm getting and the money I'm getting, that's where I'm really feeling something. And that's how you know your truer intention. Regardless of what you say, if you're really feeling something around the money and views you get, if you're creating videos and live streaming and you're not feeling good about it, that's because your down-deep intention is that you really care about getting views and money. You really care about being special. You really care about being famous. That's what's actually number one, beyond what you're saying.
What I've just gotten clear about is this: I literally wrote a Word document out with my intentions. In my experience it's really valuable to go within and explore your intentions honestly, to ask, "Hey, is money and views what I really care about?" Because if that's what I really care about, then let's just be honest about it. There are certain things you can do on YouTube and these other platforms that will get you going off in the algorithm, that will get you money and views.
I've chased the views so you don't have to
Here's the conflict I've found. I've gone viral on most of these platforms. I've had videos with millions of views on TikTok, tens of millions of views on YouTube, something like a billion impressions or so. I hit the Twitch homepage and got 6,000 followers on Twitch. On Facebook and YouTube I got millions and millions of views, and I was one of the top Facebook streaming partners. On Instagram I had a few thousand followers and some videos that went out, but I never really got much traction there. On X, I've also just gotten 10,000 followers on my new account and had posts go out to hundreds of thousands of people. And what I can say, for me personally, is that I've struggled a lot with wasting my time chasing things that don't satisfy me.
Someone in my community said their intention is to learn from someone who's done the work. Well, I've done the work. I've wasted the time so you don't have to. I've chased the views, and I've gotten them. What I've found out is that if you want views and money, there are very specific things you can do that will almost guarantee them. For example, in crypto, if you talk about certain coins and put certain coins on your thumbnails, there are bots that will push your videos. Then those bots help get you out to real people who have also been tricked into these cryptos by bots. Shill certain coins or certain exchanges and they'll share your projects out and push you with bots. There's an exact formula you can follow to get views and get money.
And what I've found is this conflict within me, where I want my primary intention to be to serve others, to help people, and to do so with joy. I don't believe in just self-sacrifice and being miserable. That's not real service to others. That's actually more service to self, but a self that is this unsatisfied ego. To me, real service to others is to do something joyful that I'm having a great time doing, that I feel passionate about, and then to give that. I feel good by doing that. The opposite of that is constantly looking at my YouTube Studio, my TikTok followers, or my Facebook studio, never feeling like it's enough.
The day-to-day reality was stress
Maybe it felt like enough for a moment. There have been moments where my live stream took off, I had thousands of concurrent viewers, people gave me hundreds of dollars in donations during the stream, and I won the Warzone game. There have definitely been moments where it felt like enough. But what was the reality of the day-to-day experience most of the time? Stress. Either I'm on top and I'm afraid of losing it, or I'm not on top and I need to get there. The views I'm getting are not enough, or they are enough and I'm afraid of losing them. The money I'm getting is not enough, or it is enough and I'm afraid of losing it.
Where I've wasted my time so much is in going for views and money, then honestly seeing that's what I'm doing, hating myself for it, and then sabotaging it. So I've gone back and forth a lot, to where I just create and have fun. Like today, I'm just creating. I'm having fun. This is what I need to say. Even if nobody watches this, it's important for me to create. It's meaningful to create. And then I feel really good because of that.
I've had some great periods where I just created and had fun. When I started playing video games in 2020, I was just creating and having fun, and my streams went viral. They went viral because people saw someone showing up genuinely having fun and enjoying the game. That stands out. A lot of people who are creating are not having fun. They're grinding for the algorithm. I switched too. At some point, I stopped having fun. And this has been the biggest thing for me as a creator: when you start out, it's often very easy to have pure intentions, to just make something because you care about it.
Pure intention is easy when nobody is watching
The idea is that when you're very clear about your intention, you don't want to deviate from it. As a small creator, it can be very easy to be pure with your intention, because you don't have an audience, and a lot of the time there's not even the prospect that you might have one. So you just share with joy. When you do that, you can create some things that are amazing. If you're just sharing with joy, you don't need any views or any money to validate that. Even if you change one person's life sharing with joy, you've done something useful.
That's something that totally got lost for me. Almost all the advice you see on YouTube and these other platforms is shallow. It's all about getting views, getting popular, impressing people, and making your ego bigger, and then tricking people into buying your course or getting your coaching. Whereas if you really help one person, you might only get one, two, or five views on that video, but you could totally change somebody's life and make a real difference. They might not even share the video. They might not even tell anybody about it. The algorithm might not even push it out.
To me, the biggest waste of time is just being shallow, and getting tricked into chasing metrics. When I first started making views on YouTube videos, I just screwed around having fun. A lot of smaller creators are often really unsatisfied, because you tell yourself you're serving other people, but you measure whether you're serving other people through shallow metrics like views and money. Unfortunately, views and money are not a metric that accurately reflects how much you're serving people.
A better metric than views and money
For example, I have a yoga instructor, and sometimes he only has a few people in his class. That doesn't mean he's helping fewer people. He's helping me a lot to feel better and be healthy in my body. And those are the people who wanted to be there for his class. You don't want to try to help people who didn't want to be helped. What I've noticed is that a lot of videos on YouTube have been a waste of my time, and especially with my kids watching YouTube Kids. A lot of these really popular creators are wasting people's time. They're not providing any value.
So here's what I hope you've gotten out of this first part: don't waste other people's time, and don't focus on trying to get views and money. There's a different metric you need to focus on instead, and that's how you feel. If you want to go deeper into this kind of thinking, I've gathered more of it in my YouTube Coaching playlist.