Everybody starts off “small time.” One way to hack your way up the learning curve is to forge a Junto.

It’s easy to be intimidated to start something new — whether it’s a new business venture, or a new hobby — because there’s a huge gap between where we are, and where we want to be. The best performers are already way ahead. We can think, “Why bother?” especially when the learning curve is steep. But remember, they’re only farther down a path that we can travel too, if we’re willing to put in the work (like Jerry Seinfeld does, to this day)!

YouTube sensation Jimmy Donaldson — aka Mr. Beast — has the most popular YouTube channel on the planet. His videos routinely generate 50M+ views, including this “Real Life Squid Game” with 550M views!! Donaldson has 200M subscribers across his channels, which is to say, he’s a prime example of someone who’s “intimidatingly far ahead down the path.”

But he started out “small time,” just like everybody else. In a recent interview, Donaldson recounted the story of how he started making videos at 11. It took over 7 years before he achieved the incredible milestone of making $1 per day on YouTube.

Let that sink in.

One of the parts of the conversation that resonated most with me — which is saying a lot, as there are many resonant moments over the course of the two-hour conversation — was when he talked about his Junto.

Mr. B: “I had to self-teach myself everything.”

JR: “How did you learn, from YouTube tutorials or something?”

Mr. B: “Most of my growth came after I graduated high school. I somehow found these other four lunatics. Three of us were college drop outs, one was a high school drop out. We were all super small YouTubers, and we basically talked every day for a thousand days in a row and did nothing but just hyper-study what makes a good video, what makes a good thumbnail, how to go viral. We would call them daily ‘masterminds.’ We’d just get on Skype every morning and like, some days, I’d get on Skype at 7am, and I’d be on until 10pm, and then I’d wake up and do it again.”

Donaldson found his people ~11 years into his journey, and he describes them as fellow YouTube lunatics. What in the world do such lunatics do?

Mr. B: “We’d take a thousand thumbnails, and see if there was a correlation between the brightness of the thumbnail and how many views it got, or videos that get over 10M views, how often do they cut the camera angles? Things like that… We we very religious about it. So that’s where most of my knowledge came from. I just surround myself with these lunatics, and just every day, we didn’t do anything. We had no life.”

JR: “But everybody had a sort of similar vision.”

Mr. B: “Yeah, exactly. So we all had like 10-20,000 subscribers when we met, and by the time we stopped talking, we all had millions of subscribers. We all hit a million subscribers within like a month (of each other), which is crazy.”

(As an aside, I wondered whether the word “lunatic” was offensive. Last night, I asked my Junto how they felt about the word, and a radically diverse group (across gender, age, race, and geography) found it absolutely delightful. Because we are lunatics, too!)

Donaldson articulates why, exactly, finding one’s people is so important to hacking the learning curve to greatness: “If you envision a world where you’re trying to be great at something, and it’s just you learning from your mistakes… You mess up, you learn from your mistake; you mess up, you learn from your mistake; you in two years, you might have learned from twenty mistakes. But if you have four other people, who are also messing up, and they are also learning from their mistakes, and they teach you what you learn, then hypothetically, two years down the road, you will have learned five times more the amount of stuff. It just helps you grow exponentially, way quicker.” (Certainly resonates with my own observations of learning cohorts I’ve been involved with.)

JR: “It’s interesting that you thought about it that way, in a systematic approach. So it’s not dumb luck.”

Mr. B: “Ugh, no. They say it takes 10,000 hours to master something? We probably put in something like 40,000 or 50,000 hours.”

Lunatics — or whatever you happen to call your people — who are failing and sharing freely, enable exponential learning. If you’re longing to find your people, consider joining the Try Ten™ community. We’ve got ~50 folks committed to honing their creative craft, checking in regularly, sharing tactics tips tricks, and seeking collaboration along the way.

We had our first community gathering last Friday. Folks from Cambridge, Sweden, Texas, Canada, Oregon, Chile — in industries as wide ranging as grocery to elite medical training to executive search to fintech to “global corruption reduction” — shared inspiration and pressing problems. We’ll be meeting many more times in 2024.

Related: Daily Rituals
Related: Convene A Junto
Related: Rally A Cohort
Related: Try Ten™ Community

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