In 2022, I almost quit YouTube.
I actually almost quit everything I'm working on. And no,
that's not clickbait 2022 kicked my butt in a lot of ways.
I learned some hard and very expensive lessons.
So in this video I wanna tell you about, give you a look behind the scenes,
the things you don't see now,
what it's kind of like to run a YouTube channel with over two and a half million
subscribers. All the dark and dirty secrets, like what's he actually drinking?
What's in that mug? You know, it's coffee, don't be silly. But seriously,
in this video I just wanna have a conversation. Normally my videos are like,
Hey, here we go, A new thing. Right Now,
this one I want to lower the energy a bit, just kind of talk. So here it is,
all the stuff that happened in 2022. But first I,
I do wanna start with the good things because it wasn't all bad actually.
2022 was kind of a great year for network. Chuck,
let me give you some of the highlights before I show you the expensive,
stupid hard things that happened. Coffee,
freaking break, dude. Looking at the numbers, it's kind of crazy.
65 million views, 6 million watch time hours,
which is just crazy. And we grew by 936,000 subscribers,
almost a million. So if views in watch time, were actually up from last year,
35% on views and 17% on watch time subscribers actually gained about a
million in 2021.
But I can't really complain about this because we're at 2.7 million subscribers
and this is something I never, ever, ever dreamed of happening. So thank you.
And it happened fast, like too fast for me to process.
Like I never even showed you this
My golden play button for passing 1 million subscribers.
I know many of you have been with me since the beginning,
so thank you and thank you to everyone who's subscribing now.
You guys are awesome and you helped me do what I do.
So from the YouTube perspective, things are pretty great,
but that's not the biggest thing that happened to me last year.
If you follow me on Instagram and Twitter, you'll see that I had another kid.
You may not know that I have a lot of kids, .
I actually have six daughters, including the one I gained last year,
ranging from zero to 11. So yeah, I'm busy.
Another really amazing thing that happened is I bought a studio,
which you may not have noticed because I didn't talk about it and we'll go into
why I didn't talk about it here in a moment. But yeah,
I used to be in a little bedroom in my house. But with me having six kids,
we were kind of outgrowing ourselves. So I decided to buy a another house.
I bought a whole house to serve as my YouTube studio and that's where you're
watching me at right now.
This is one of these studios we have in this house doing this was scary It,
it was a blessing just a lot.
And I know you're probably wondering like why hasn't he done a studio tour?
That's what YouTubers do, right? I, I'll get into that. Uh,
I'll get into that. This is gonna be a hard video. I also hired more people.
I hired three more full-time people and at the peak my team was at like five
full-time employees this year, which is crazy,
but it also drove me a little crazy. We'll get into that. It's not you Austin.
It's okay. I'm lucky. Something else Cool that,
that you may have noticed within the last week as I built a new website,
this thing took forever to build. It just launched last week and here it is.
I think it looks pretty cool, but it took a lot of time and a lot of work.
And again, we'll get into that look. It even has a crane and Moses's tail moves.
I love that. So yeah,
I launched a new website and I also launched some new coffee,
which you probably don't know because I haven't talked about it yet. Again,
we'll talk about that later. But here it's all, this coffee is amazing.
It themed roasted locally close to me. I've got it right here.
This one's empty cuz it's my favorite one. But default route, pseudo
on call 200. Okay. I mean they're just fun.
The coffee is incredible.
But that was a huge labor of love to get this live and launched.
Now another good thing that happened this year is my password manager didn't get
hacked because I used Dash Lane.
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50, get 50% off. So overall,
2022 was a year of incredible blessing. Honestly,
too much for words and it's kind of silly for me to even continue to talk about
bad things, but I'm gonna do it anyway. ,
because this year was hard because while you see all the good things behind the
scenes, there are things that you have to get through the hard stuff.
So lemme tell you about the hard stuff.
I'll go from like least bad to most bad worst , that's,
that's the word I'm looking for. I hit a good amount of burnout in 2022.
And this is common amongst content creators cuz you're coming up with ideas,
you're having to put yourself out there and to do that consistently week after
week, it is hard. Yes,
I know I do have the best job in the entire world and I wouldn't trade it for
anything. But even the best jobs are hard.
And if you don't take care of yourself, your mental state,
if you don't take breaks, burnout will slap you in the face.
And it did both sides.
And honestly what really contributed to this burnout are gonna be some things
I'm mentioning here in a bed. But also just all the change,
all the blessings that came also kind of were, I,
I hate to refer to them as this, but they were kind of a curse as well.
Moving to a new studio, um, that was a big change. It took time,
it took money, it took effort. I'll talk more about that here in a bit.
Having a new kid was a big change. It changed our entire family dynamic.
Also hiring new employees and just man, everything,
all that stuff takes just a little bit of your attention,
causes just a little bit of stress and it all adds up to a lot of stuff.
So burnout was a big thing.
And you'll see this as a recurring theme as I go through my list.
The next thing, the next hard thing was actually the studio.
It was both a blessing and a curse. I can't tell you how much right now.
I miss my little bedroom I had in my house because it was convenient,
it was nice, it was comfortable. I know you guys liked it,
like why did I ever move? Well cuz I had a lot of kids and it was,
it was necessary. I know it was, but it wasn't just moving from there.
It was building out this new space, building a new studio, making it look cool,
making it what I wanted to be took time.
And the reason I haven't showed it to you yet is because it's not done.
Like we're still working on it. We started this in August.
It's been over six months and even what you're seeing now isn't exactly what I
want. It's a work in progress.
It was just something I I hodgepodge together to make it look okay. Now,
don't get me wrong again,
I know this is a crazy blessing and a lot of people will kill for this and I
love it. And I know once I finish it and I get it exactly where I want it to be,
and I show you guys, it's gonna be amazing. I know it'll be all worth it,
but I'm just kind of telling you the story of like why this may have contributed
to my burnout and my stress and been one of the harder things this year.
So yeah, I do miss my little room, my little geek nerd cave.
But this place will end up being a huge blessing and I cannot wait to show you
what we're gonna do with it. Now the other hard,
hard thing this year was me becoming more of a manager.
So like most people,
I used to be an employee and then I quit that job to become an
entrepreneur,
a solopreneur where it was just me making videos and talking to a camera,
talking to you. I outgrew that and hired some people to help me.
And now I have people and a team.
And managing a team is different than being by yourself,
especially if you don't just have the skillset to do that by default,
which I don't.
So it's been a huge learning curve and something I wouldn't say that I'm
necessarily gifted at and probably one of the hardest things I've dealt with
this year. Now I do wanna put this out there. My team is amazing.
I love all of them.
And I could not do what I do now without them being without them.
I would be helpless. But when hiring a team,
yes it's a blessing to have people help you do what you you want to do.
But I didn't fully account for or wasn't fully prepared.
Like you don't know until you're in it, how involved it is to manage people.
It does take energy, it takes your time,
it takes your focus because a team is people and people are hard. Now again,
my team is fantastic video editor editing this, Austin, you're amazing.
But management is a different thing.
It was a new thing for me and I'm still learning it, honestly,
I'm still kind of garbage at it.
And because I'm not that great at managing a team yet. And 2022,
I made a lot of just ambitious plan. I wanted to do so many things with my team.
I had vision and I made a lot of decisions to support that vision.
But ultimately it didn't end up happening. It didn't pan out.
Some things just occurred and it left me kind of vision less.
I had to reevaluate a lot of what I plan to do and kind of change course. Like,
you know how you feel when you're just like going strong in one direction.
You're confident like, yes, we're gonna just be the best in this area.
And then er boom boom.
And I had to like kind of refigure out what I'm doing.
That was probably the hardest thing I dealt with this year was just that change.
Because you can deal with hard things when you know where you're going,
when you have vision. The Bible says where there is no vision, people perish.
And when you lose your vision, that's a, that's a difficult thing to ha uh,
lose.
So I feel like that one sh probably should have been the last one of the list
because it did affect me the most.
But I think the most shocking thing for me was building
my website because it wasn't just this website I built. Um, this,
this website by the way is amazing. The team I hired to do this are,
I'm still working with them and they're incredible.
But I wasn't just building this website, I was building something else.
Many of you may know that I have kind of an academy.
It's called Network Chuck Academy and it's kind of my baby,
something I want to build and make. Awesome. So in 2022, my ambitions,
my plans were to make a lot of courses, create courses and have them on there.
Which I did not create courses because of see all the stuff I mentioned in this
video. So my ambition led me to want to build a place, a website,
this amazing custom place that'll host and house all my courses.
And I had some cool ideas for it,
like ideas I was really proud of and I was so excited to share with you guys
cause I really thought it was gonna help you guys learn.
But it did involve contracting a dev team and a lot of focus and,
and stress and time and money, the money.
And then here's where it just all went. It just all went to poop. .
I made some mistakes. My team and myself,
we made some bad decisions on hosting and platform and everything.
So as the dev team, we contracted to build all this cool stuff, uh,
as they built on top of this thing,
we at the LA last moment realized it wasn't going to work.
It was like stinking getting to the moon landing or like Elon Musk getting to
Mars and realizing they forgot their landing gear.
Like it's just not gonna happen. So I spent, um, a lot of money ,
uh, an amount that I'm too embarrassed to even mention on camera.
And I pretty much ended up with no product, nothing to show for it.
I do have this beautiful front end website, but my backend that I was building,
it's just didn't happen. So I learned a very hard and expensive lesson,
a lesson that had me going back to the drawing board and going,
what am I doing ? Like, what,
what am I actually doing with network Chuck? What am I doing with this channel?
So that was 2022. It was a lot of just getting slapped around,
kicked around a bit, amidst all the crazy amazing blessings that happened.
So 2022, I'm wrapping it up, I'm putting it behind me. I learned a lot.
So here it's 2023. What is Network Chuck doing first,
it's just gonna be a lot of finishing. What I didn't finish in 2022,
this studio courses that I have been wanting to finish, Python,
Linux, bash, ccna,
all those things I want to produce and make awesome. But as you can see in 2022,
I had a lot of distractions and things that took me off the mark that took me
off my focus, my vision. And that's,
I want to double down on my vision to create content that will help you and your
IT career. This means YouTube videos, consistent YouTube videos.
This also means providing courses,
amazing courses that I'm gonna pour my heart and soul into and I'll do my best
to make them affordable. Actually, I wanna make them all free. That's my goal.
Now,
that's about as much of detail as I want to give on my 2023 plans and goals and
vision because I want to let it speak for itself. And ,
I don't want another 2022 to happen and just unkept promises
to just abound in my my channel. So yeah, that's pretty much it. Um,
I hope you enjoy just kind of chatting with me having some coffee,
doing more of a low-key video.
Let me know if you wanna see more of stuff like this.
Maybe I should bring back the live streams because we did do a lot more of this.
And also, I wanna know what you want to see me do more of in 2023.
What do you wanna see on this channel? What do you wanna see course wise,
video wise? Let me know. And yeah, that's about it.
I'll catch you guys next time.