It's February 22nd, 2025, my 5,017th day on YouTube, and today's theme has been focus. I noticed that I'm often frustrated. I feel like I don't have enough time and I don't have enough energy, but then I'm also diverting a bunch of time and energy to places that don't matter. X is a perfect example. I've been wasting so much time just posting to X and trying to grow my account there. But for what? YouTube is where my strength is. YouTube is where the majority of my income is, the majority of my influence, the majority of my viewership. The thing I'm really good at is YouTube. I'm not really good at X. I'm not really good at Twitch. YouTube is what I'm good at. So why do I put all this effort into X and Twitch? It's time to go back to YouTube and just crank my videos out there. That's it. I can talk to my community in open chat. Maybe I'll at least mirror the most popular crypto videos that I put out on YouTube and upload those to X. But the challenge is that even using something like X is such a distraction.
Making videos that are essentially for me
For these vlogs, I'm remembering that I don't have to go viral everywhere on YouTube. I don't have to put a clickbait title on everything. I need at least one channel where I can stop all the clickbait stuff and just make videos that are essentially for me, but also for the inside followers. Something that would be like an autobiography. The problem is that I tried this, and it's good to experiment. I filmed a video yesterday where I shot all these short little clips and edited them together. It was a nice experiment, but I love filming in my studio right here. I'm really happy filming right here. I'm not happy filming all over the place all the time.
I started filming one today, and then I saw this woman. I don't even remember her name, Madeline Arby or something like that. She's just sitting there in her car with a podcast mic doing a 30-minute talk, and her video is going off. And I thought, I've already got the great setup. I'm already professional at this. I've already done 10,000 videos. I don't need to try to push the limits at this point.
YouTube is just going to be a grind
I had a really good talk with Joe Parys today. He's a very successful crypto YouTuber. He sold millions of dollars in online courses like me, and he passed me up on his main crypto channel versus my main channel. He's doing great. It was a great conversation about how YouTube is just going to be a grind. You make video after video after video. The strategy I was all hung up on with Mr. Beast messes me up. Every time I watch Mr. Beast, it screws me up, because Mr. Beast said it himself: he's like, I'm insane. People don't want to do what I do. They just want to make a little money and be comfortable and relax. And I think, yeah, that's me. I'm not looking to take over the world and have everybody on the planet watch my videos.
Mr. Beast's life is not what I would like to do. To be so famous I can't go anywhere without a disguise, to have so many people wanting so many things from me all the time, with so much to do. He said he hasn't had time to work out recently because he's that busy from the second he wakes up. He sees a board game he'd like to play and he doesn't have time for it. I don't want to live that way.
I am a dad
I played Monopoly with my kids today. I finally beat them at the Harry Potter Hogwarts Monopoly game. I wiped them out. I ended up stealing the yellow and the green properties and wiped them out with house points on those. I won because my son landed on my Lumos spell, went out on me, and gave me all his mortgage properties. I want that. I am a dad. Mr. Beast is not a dad. I am a dad. My kids are nine and six. The time is slipping away rapidly with them. Sure, I can always have more, although my wife said I'd need a different woman for that. But I want to enjoy this time with my kids and not piss it away chasing subs and all of that.
What I've noticed over all these years is that YouTube is one of the most stable platforms I've found for creating. It's the platform that's been the most tolerant with my content. Out of all the videos I've put up on YouTube, only one ever violated the content or community guidelines, and it was no big deal. I got demonetized on Facebook. I got suspended for weeks on Twitch. But YouTube has treated me better than any other platform, and YouTube is where my talents shine.
What I'm actually good at
What am I good at? I'm going to come into the studio and crank out a bunch of different videos. That's what I'm good at. With live streaming, the way to really do it is to be able to do eight 12-hour live streams once you get that momentum going. I did longer live streams back when I was into it a lot, but I don't want to do eight of them. That's the meta for live streaming, and it's not for me right now. For YouTube, what's awesome is that I can just crank out little quick videos like this every day and make a full-time income, which I've been doing for a long time. I don't need to do anything else.
I want to have time for fun. I want to be able to diversify my content on YouTube, music, gaming. I want to make videos about a lot of different things, including crypto. I'll put up my old videos that I deleted that are still worth watching. And I want to do an autobiography that's just real, just raw, no clickbait BS, where I just talk about my day.
Why I've been thriving
I went to dinner with Laura and the kids tonight. One of my friends was there from AA, and she was all excited to see me. It felt a little awkward, because I'm out with my wife and kids, and this is a kind woman from AA who's been very nice. The first time she ever met me, she said, I heard you share at a meeting, and I've thought of you every day since then. I want to have the joy that you have in your life. I had been sharing about how in the middle of the hurricanes, I was able to say thank you. This is fun. This is a good time. I'm going to enjoy cleaning up.
A lot of people don't experience it that way. I talked to a guy tonight who was just miserable, circling the drain, drinking a whole bunch and stressed over the hurricanes. In my experience, I've been shining because of these hurricanes that came through. I had adventures cleaning up. I enjoyed the walks when the power was out and seeing what it was like to live in a third world country, except with fewer bullet holes and a lot more food. I've enjoyed it. I've been thriving during the hurricanes. Money was coming in all over the place right when the ICP price dumped, which was convenient. So I'm really proud of my life today. I really love the life I've got.
I just went through kind of an emotional, dark spot, but as I'm coming out of it, the message is focus, focus. Even doing things like Twitch and trying to grow on X is an admission that I don't think I have enough on YouTube. But I'm averaging 10,000 views a day. I'm averaging a full-time income, thousands of dollars a month. I just made 500 bucks twice in the last week or two for sponsored videos, and it took me about an hour to film each one. I think I'm making it. I put my gaming channel back up, and the YouTube algorithm is actually pushing people to a nine-year-old video that I re-uploaded on the new gaming channel. Things are going awesome.
The small things that make a good day
I went for another one-mile run today. The most difficult part was the first couple of minutes. By the time it was over, around nine minutes and change, I started to feel in the zone, like, OK, now I could run farther. Then I took the dogs for a walk. They pulled like crazy, but I had a nice walk and laughed with the kids. I laughed a bunch with my son yesterday playing soccer in the house. I kept putting a spin on the ball, and he whiffed it. He's six. He whiffed the ball like six times in a row, and I was laughing so hard. I love laughing.
I had such a nice time putting my son to bed tonight. We don't usually do screens, but my daughter is off at the aquarium with Laura tonight, so I let my son watch some Winnie the Pooh with my mom. I have this movie, Bedazzled, on my movies-to-watch list. There's literally one movie on it. Somebody recommended it to me lately. I'm going to upload this video, and then I'm going to watch this movie. Watching a movie is a treat that I don't engage in that often.
I'm also thinking it might be fun to play some video games again. Where I ruined gaming, even though I was successful and was a pro gamer from live streaming, is that live streaming competitive games was awesome and a lot of fun sometimes, but I don't need competitive games in my life right now. I'd much rather play tennis. I'd much rather get on the basketball court. What gaming can do for me is be a game I can relax and chill with, and I don't want to live stream a relax-and-chill game.
So I'm so glad to make this video today, and I'm glad to get back to it. If you want to follow along as I work through this whole creator-focus journey, I keep more of these conversations in my YouTube Coaching playlist. I hope I remember to keep this in this exact format going forward on the autobiography channel.