- I said, "Nobody will ever watch this.
"Nobody will ever watch this
"because traffic safety is not sexy."
(upbeat music)
Let's talk a little bit about four years on YouTube
and what four years on YouTube has looked like.
I'm not one of those superstars on YouTube.
I did not go from like zero to 100,000 people in one year.
I know there are people out there who have done that.
I had to work three years
before I got to 100,000 subscribers.
And last year, this was the year
that I got my Silver Play Button
which is up here behind me up in the corner somewhere.
Where, no, I'm not pointing the right way.
Over there.
(laughs) I'll just turn around and look,
and that way I can point to it.
So this year I got my Silver Play Button.
So it's been a really great three years.
The first two years on YouTube,
I worked really, really hard.
I put up a lot of videos.
This year, I didn't do as much work as I should have
and I'm you know, rethinking everything that I've been doing
on YouTube and stuff I'm putting on social media
and those types of things.
I'm going to try and do better, right?
So I'm re conceptualizing what I'm going to do.
So sort of looking back on four years.
So what happened five years again, I went through a divorce.
As many of you know, I have two kids.
At the time of the divorce,
they were three and five years old.
She took them with her and took them away from me
which was really, really challenging for me
and very difficult for me
because in the five years that I was with my kids,
I was never away from them
for more than a day or two at most.
So I spent a lot of time with my kids.
And so when my ex-wife took the kids away from me,
that was very devastating for me.
That was incredibly hard.
Not to mention, I was working at the truck driving
school here in town at the time.
And that summer, I think there was one week
that I got like four hours.
So my job really went downhill at the time.
And if you look over here on the website,
you can see this log sheet.
The plan was in the fall of 2015,
I finally came up with a plan to try and reboot my life,
so to speak.
The plan was, is I was going to go back to driving truck.
I was going to drive truck for 10 months,
running long haul.
And I was going to make enough money to go back to university.
I was going to go and get my teaching degree,
and I was going to pursue a career as a teacher.
So I told the truck driving school
that I was going to quit,
I was going to go off and drive truck,
and I wasn't going to come back.
Well the owner came and talked to me
and convinced me to come back.
It wasn't very good because I called the guy
that I owned the truck and I said,
"Listen, I'm giving you my two weeks notice."
I hadn't even gotten in the truck yet.
So I went off and drove truck.
And you can see here I'm driving between Vancouver
and Edmonton, here in Western Canada.
So I did that in October for two weeks,
and then I came back.
I went back to the driving school
for a period of time.
Just while I was driving truck,
one of the things that I did, listened to audiobooks.
So I went to the library and I picked up
a bunch of audiobooks.
And they were all fiction.
And I was feeling kind of guilty
about the fact that they were all fiction.
I pulled one of the nonfiction books off the shelf,
and I didn't even look at the title or the cover
or whatever it was about.
I just remember it was purple.
That's all I remember.
And I thought to myself, "Well, if I don't listen to it,
"I can just bring it back.
"I can just not listen to it."
So it laid on the floor of the truck
for about 10 days.
And then finally, I looked down, I saw it there.
And I'm like, "Okay, I'll throw that in."
And I listened to it.
And it turned out, it was Robert Kiyosaki.
And some of you may or may not know Robert Kiyosaki
is the author of "Rich Dad Poor Dad".
And he has a very successful international business.
"Rich Dad Poor Dad" has boardgames,
you know, numerous books he's written.
And he's been incredibly successful.
He's one of the top financial advisors in the world.
And I listened to this book,
and it wasn't "Rich Dad Poor Dad",
it was "Increasing Financial Intelligence",
by Robert Kiyosaki.
And he said in the book,
he said, "You need to build an asset."
And I'm like, "What is an asset?"
And he said, "An asset is something that will make you money
"even when you're not there."
And he started talking about businesses
and those types of things.
And he says, "If you have a business that you
"have to show up to everyday or it won't continue,
"that's not a business."
He said, "You're self-employed."
You know, and I'm struggling with this.
And I'm thinking, "What is an asset?
"What can I do?
"What can I build?"
And so I came back after the two weeks off truck.
I went back to the driving school, I was working there.
And I started doing the videos, right?
And I was struggling with social media.
Social media can be overwhelming.
For anybody who's done any sort of social media,
you know, you got Facebook and you got Twitter
and Instagram and YouTube and TikTok,
and all of these social media platforms.
If you're trying to do all of them,
you're not going to do any of them.
So I came off the road.
I started playing with a little bit of video.
I had been doing a little bit of it before,
but I didn't really know anything about online video.
And I had the Smart Drive Test website
on the back burner for a long time.
I created that in like 2011 with my good friend,
Tim Davis who runs Basic Joomla Tutorials.
He has a YouTube channel and helps people
out to build websites and whatnot.
And I came back to the website.
I was struggling with the social media.
And I think it was November, I came across
James Wedmore, who's built
a very successful YouTube channel.
And he's built an incredibly successful online business.
And he said, "You need to build a YouTube channel."
And I started making videos.
And this video, as I talked to you about in the thumbnail,
"Top 10 Tips to Pass Your Road Test First Time".
This video here,
"Top 10 Tips to Pass Your Road Test First Time",
this video, I put it up on the 27th of December, 2015.
So that's almost four years to the date.
And this video now has almost 900,000 views, 894,000 views.
And it's the fourth most popular video on my channel.
It's the next video that's going to go over a million views.
And I remember this video because I was struggling with,
(chuckles) (crickets chirping)
you know, getting my videos noticed
because the first nine months,
there was essentially crickets.
May of 2016, on my birthday I remember
you know, begging people for two subscribers
because I was at 98 subscribers.
And I remember begging people
to subscribe to my channel so I could get to 100 subscribers
for my birthday (laughing).
I committed to two videos a week,
and there was so much to learn.
If any of you have done YouTube,
have tried to make videos,
have tried to put videos up on the YouTube channel,
it is an incredible amount of work
learning the YouTube platform,
learning how to make videos,
how to do audio,
how to shoot videos.
And I didn't know anything about video, right?
And I was under misconception that you know,
oh, this was going to be fairly easy
because I lectured at universities.
I got a doctorate.
I taught at the universities.
And I thought, "Well, how hard can this be?"
But it took me literally almost two years
before I developed my on-camera persona.
There's a video with me with one arm down at my side
because I'm trying to figure out what to do with my hands.
And my good friend Tim says to me, (chuckles)
I said, "What do you think of this video?"
He looks at it, he goes, "You look like a stroke victim."
Because I was only moving one arm for the video.
You know, so it took some time.
And some of my first videos are not very good.
I mean, you look at that video on top 10 tips,
and I look very, I look constipated (laughing).
There's no comfort on camera.
So you know, if any of you are thinking about building
an online channel and doing online video,
you know, just go with it.
Because later when you get good at it,
you can have a good laugh about the whole thing, right?
All of the experts, you know, Sean Cannell,
video influencers, Nick Nimmin, all the rest of them,
they will all tell you,
your first videos are your worst videos, right?
And for anybody's who's done YouTube,
it's not views.
It's not how many subscribers you have,
it's watch time.
Watch time is what matters on YouTube.
So in September of 2016,
I got two minutes of watch time,
two days of watch time.
And I thought, "Okay, this things finally on."
People are now watching this.
And it's from September till about November,
I made one video a day, six days a week.
Which I would not recommend for anybody to do (laughs).
It's an incredible amount of work.
I was working from like five o'clock in the morning
till 11 o'clock at night making videos.
And it was an old computer.
It didn't work very well.
It's not like the setup that I have now
which is like everything runs super fast.
So my goal was from September to at Christmas
to have 10 days of watch time at Christmas.
I hit 10 days of watch time in like to October.
And by Christmas, I hit 20 days of watch time.
Now I'm averaging somewhere between
70 and 100 days everyday, 1,500 hours of watch time a day.
The channel is doing incredibly well.
But I want the channel to do better.
I think that we can help more people.
And I'm going to do a couple of international trips coming up.
My goal next year, I have a very lofty goal next year.
I'm going to 10 times the channel.
That's my goal.
So it's a big goal.
So that's essentially the founding story
of the YouTube channel
and how Smart Drive Test got started.
And of course, you know, it's a business.
Smart Drive Test is a successful business.
I make my living off Smart Drive Test.
So it's been very successful.
I've helped a lot of people pass the road test,
CDL licenses, motorcycles, trucks, buses, all that stuff.
I've helped people.
You can do it.
The message, just to kind of come back
to what the message of all this is about my founding story,
if you believe magic happens,
if you believe that good things will happen to you,
if you believe that you're going to pass
your road test first time,
that will happen to you.
I can sit here by myself, in my house,
in my studio with my lights and my thing,
and I can livestream to the world.
It's absolutely incredible.
It is so magic.
And it's the things that I try to tell my kids.
I try and tell my kids, everything you say,
everything you think is real.
And it truly is.
The world is a magic place.
The world is incredible.
And if you think certain things.
If you shoot for the stars, you can get there.
You can get there.
Think of it like this.
If you take an ax
and you go into the forest
and you find the biggest tree you can find,
say it's like 30-feet around.
If you go to that tree everyday and you take five whacks
at that tree, eventually, the only thing
that stands between you and success is time and space.
Because eventually, you're going to cut that tree down
if you come back everyday and do the same thing.
This is the message that I want to leave with you
for the great holiday season,
the world is a magic place.
And whatever you think is going to be real for you.
If you have lofty goals
and you take those five whacks at it everyday,
you do the things everyday that you need to do,
you will eventually grow that.
You will eventually be successful.
You will eventually get there.