Gather Lunatics

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

I’m always encouraged when I get the backstory of a super-successful creator (like Beeple, whom I saw at sxsw), because, here’s the thing: everybody starts off “small time.” It’s so important to remember that. And further, the best of the best keep on putting in unreasonable-seeming amounts of effort, even after they’re at the top of their game (cut to one of my all-time favorite anecdotes about Kobe Bryant). A good friend who’s an actor recently recounted how, when he worked with Meryl Streep, she was consistently the first to arrive on set, and the last to leave.

Which brings me to an unexpected source of inspiration, someone so far out of reach that I’d never think to seek out his origin story. A colleague recently recommended Mr. Beast’s interview on Joe Rogan. If you don’t know Mr. Beast, he has the most popular YouTube channel on the planet — routinely generating 50M+ views, including this “Real Life Squid Game” with 236M views!! — and 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.” Which is why I loved hearing how he got started making videos at 11, and how it took over 7 years before he achieved the incredible milestone of making one dollar 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.”

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.”

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!

I’ll close the post with a fantastic summary that this clearly thoughtful, shockingly articulate YouTuber delivered on the fly, mid-conversation:

“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 or 50,000 hours.”

Lunatics, failing and sharing freely, enable exponential learning. Fellow lunatics welcome to join us on discord.

Related: Sacrifice for Your Craft
Related: Daily Rituals
Related: Convene A Junto
Related: Rally A Cohort
Related: Paint & Pipette Discord

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