Let's talk about doing YouTube as an amateur versus a professional, because this is where I see a lot of confusion. I was talking to my massage therapist recently, and she's saying, "Oh, I need to do a video on YouTube every day. But I just started my channel and I haven't done a video yet." I'm like, hold up. The first thing you need to think about is this: are you a professional YouTuber, or are you an amateur YouTuber?
To me, I'm a professional. I've made tens of thousands of videos on YouTube. I've deleted at least 10 YouTube channels. I've been uploading since 2011. I've gotten something like 40 million views on YouTube, plus lots of stuff on other platforms. This is what I do full time for work. I'm not just playing around or hanging out here. Right now I'm live streaming and recording a video at the same time, and I have a four-monitor setup. I'm a professional. This is what I do for a living and for money.
But when I started out, I was an amateur. I was just having fun, throwing videos up whenever I wanted. I think you need to make it really clear for yourself which one you are. Are you an amateur, or are you a professional? And if you're an amateur YouTuber, just have fun. That's all you need to do: have fun and try to help somebody.
The trap of getting away from fun
Even at my level, what I've struggled with is getting away from having fun. It becomes, "Let's get money. Let's get views. Let's take over the world like Mr. Beast." That got me away from what I loved. What I loved when I was an amateur on YouTube was that it was all about having fun, making people laugh, being silly, and coming up with crazy video ideas.
When you're an amateur at YouTube, you don't have to worry about consistency. You should absolutely minimize any kind of editing or professional polish. Just go for real, raw, easy-to-make, authentic content. What you do not want to do is try to build some system. My massage therapist was talking about, "Oh, I'm going to sell people courses." Hold up. You haven't even uploaded a video yet.
People will say, "Well, I want to help people." Okay, then just come up with a video. Come up with a video idea, upload it, and make it as fast and as easy as possible. Don't bother editing it or polishing it. Just come up with a video idea, make that video as fast as possible, and upload it. And then don't worry about getting views. I have a friend who is another massage therapist, and she made a video that was really helpful for me. Her entire channel has gotten 16 views. But the video she made was super helpful for me. So when you're an amateur, you don't even need to be thinking about viewership. You should only be thinking about: is this fun for me? Is this making my life better? Is this helping someone else?
Don't take pro advice before you're ready
You don't need to be taking advice from professionals on how to be a professional either. You might think it's awesome to be a professional YouTuber. It has its ups and downs. It's a job, just like everything else. I've been so aggravated the last couple of days because I feel like such a failure. I've got all these views, but I made only a thousand or so dollars this month, and I'm just feeling like an utter failure.
As a professional, in my experience, you don't want to depend on YouTube for your income unless you absolutely have to, because doing YouTube as a professional is a whole different thing than doing YouTube as an amateur. A lot of you take advice from professionals and immediately try to jump from being an amateur to being a professional, and it's too soon. You need to just be an amateur first and see whether you even like YouTube.
Because if you don't like uploading videos that get no views, or one view, or two views, then you're not going to be successful at YouTube. If you don't like doing YouTube just for fun, if you're not willing to do a live stream where nobody watches or comments, if you're not willing to upload a video that doesn't get any likes, or that gets one dislike, then you can't handle being an amateur YouTuber, and you shouldn't try to be a professional. You should not even consider trying to sell stuff when you get started.
A lot of you are getting way too far ahead of yourselves. You're listening to people telling you about launching courses and all that. Hold up. You need to see if you even like being a YouTuber first. You need to see if you like the actual activity, because being a YouTuber is hard. I'm in my studio in my house just filming videos, and you can't tell if you're really doing any good or not.
Who is actually winning on views
A lot of the people you see on YouTube who are getting lots of views are, in my view, exploiting people. They're cheating people of their time and programming people with bad ideas. A lot of the top YouTubers in terms of views are setting a really bad example. They're not people you want to emulate. By their own definitions, they're insane. They obsess over YouTube views, and it's never enough. You don't want to copy that.
I have a nice setup for YouTube. I have fun. I help people. And most of the time, I'm not obsessing over my views. Most of the time, I feel like it's good enough. Most of the time, I'm having fun, and to me, that's success. I get recognized here and there. We went to Cheesecake Factory a couple of months ago, and the waiter, well, I used to be a police officer, so I pay attention to people's body language and the little signs they do. I could tell this guy had an unusual reaction to me right away. I asked him about it, and he said, "Hey, I recognize you from YouTube." I said, "Oh, nice, cool. What videos do you recognize me from?" Because I make a lot of different kinds of videos. He said, "Your Gods Unchained videos." I'm like, really? I wouldn't have figured it would have been Gods Unchained.
The over-optimizing problem
Here's another tricky thing with YouTube. Almost everybody will try to get you to do this, and it's where a lot of you are messing up: before you've even uploaded a video, you're trying to pick a niche. You're trying to box yourself in, and you haven't even uploaded a video, but you're already trying to over-optimize, even though, from my view, you have nothing to optimize yet.
One of my biggest challenges as a professional YouTuber has been over-optimizing. Instead of considering what was fun, and instead of following my heart and having a good time, I was constantly over-optimizing. "I have to just do gaming videos." "I have to just do crypto videos." "I have to just sell online courses." You really can't afford that as an amateur, because you generally won't have any audience and you won't have much positive reinforcement. You can't afford to be over-optimizing from the very beginning.
What you need to do as an amateur is just see whether you would like to upload videos for fun. Would uploading videos be a fun activity for you to do? Because I just love doing videos. I just love doing live streams. I just keep doing videos over and over again, no matter what's happened, no matter how bad things have gone on my YouTube or how good things have gone. I keep uploading videos. If you're an amateur, that's all you really need to find out: do you like uploading videos? Would you like to keep uploading videos? That's all you need to find out to begin with. You don't need to know about anything else. Is uploading videos something you would do for free, for fun, with no positive reinforcement?
The reality of depending on it
A lot of times you'll find it's not. My brother has a great job, and he's like, "What you do sucks." I've had months where I made $100,000 in a single month. And I've had lots of months where I've lost money, where I've spent more than I made. My brother's like, "What you do sucks. You have no job security. You have no benefits." And he's right that there's no job security. The algorithm can leave me behind. I can get banned or demonetized, as I have been on some platforms, for literally no reason at all, just because they didn't like what I said.
I feel like I'm a slave to technology a lot of the time. All I do is serve this system. My one massage therapist friend messaged me and was talking like, "Yeah, I'm going to be free on YouTube." I'm like, really? Because I feel like a total slave here a lot of the time. I'm just working, and I'm not even getting paid a lot of the time. You're trading. If you think YouTube is going to set you free, it may set you free from one set of limitations, but you're going to inherit another set of limitations. Don't get it twisted. You're going to go from serving a boss at work to serving the algorithm god. You're going to go from saying you don't get paid enough at work to not getting paid anything on YouTube. Or you'll get one big payday and you'll think, all right, this is how it's going to be from now on, and then that's not how it is at all. The money gets less and less. The views get less and less.
YouTube is a cruel, tough environment to be in a lot of the time, and it's not a good place. I've seen so many people I know who tried to put all this energy into making videos and buying these online course platforms and email lists, and all they do is quit. Almost everybody who started doing YouTube since I did has quit. Almost everybody who was creating YouTube videos back when I started in 2011 has quit. This is not rewarding a lot of the time. I just love it, though. There's nothing better I can think to do with myself at this point. So if you've got better ideas, you might want to consider some better ideas.
YouTube is isolating, so your real life has to be solid
If you can do things in person and be with people in person, you may find that a lot more rewarding than doing YouTube, where you're in a room with a screen by yourself. If you want to do YouTube successfully, in my experience you're going to need to be able to have a great social life outside of YouTube, because doing YouTube is often very isolating. And it is extremely intellectually challenging too.
I'm intelligent. I've got all those scores on tests and everything. I got really high test scores when I was a kid. I got a scholarship to do my PhD, but I quit at the master's level. Long story short, I'm smart. And this is the hardest thing I've ever done intellectually by far. It's brutal. What makes it hard is that you need to be skilled in so many different areas. If you're weak in one area, it shows, because you need to have at least basic general-level proficiency across so many areas to do YouTube. You just have to be able to do everything yourself.
You have to do it all yourself, and you have to stay lean
With YouTube, you have to do it all yourself. You have to be able to do your marketing. You need to be able to make the videos. You have to be able to public speak. There are so many things you need to be able to do, and if you can't do something yourself, there's no backup. And you don't want to hire people either. Some of you are like, "Oh, I don't want to edit videos, I'll pay for an editor." No. If you want to do YouTube, you really want to stay lean. You do not want to have expenses, because even if you have income, you need to be good with money to do YouTube, or have a wife that makes money like me.
You need to be good with money because here's what's going to happen with YouTube: even if you do make some income, it's going to be really inconsistent a lot of the time. There are going to be a lot of stretches where you make no money, and you're going to need to be prepared for that. You're going to need to have some money saved. Ideally, you'd live somewhere where you can live for free so that you can afford to do YouTube without having any financial pressure on you.
The glamour versus the reality
So that glamour you see with some people on YouTube, where it's like, "Yeah, I'm going to get rich, have this great lifestyle, and be famous" — I've come to believe the reality of it is more like you're going to live in your mom's basement and hope she can pay the rent for you, and then maybe she kicks you out, or you keep making YouTube videos. And you might do that for years and years. The reality of what you think YouTube is versus what it actually is for real is just way off.
So I'm here to tell you, if you want to be a professional YouTuber, it is a whole other level of commitment than being an amateur. And I'm happy to make the commitment. But if you're an amateur, just have fun. Don't worry about views. Don't worry about money. Have another source of income. Upload whenever you want. Don't sell anything. Just focus on your videos.
And if you want to be a pro, well, I would follow somebody else who is a pro and who has the kind of life you want. I've got a nice, regular life. I'm not someone like Mr. Beast, who has essentially ruined the regular life over YouTube, where he can't go anywhere or do anything. If you're going to be a full-time YouTuber, you want to pick a good role model. I hope I can help out with that, and you can find more of how I think about this in my YouTube Coaching playlist. Now let's get into this Warzone game.