(intense music)
- You have it so good, and you don't even realize it.
(tape rewinding)
I have a confession to make.
Okay, well, two confessions.
The first one is I have to admit,
I've been half-assing it.
Pretty much all of the work I've done
on this YouTube channel up
until this point has been an afterthought.
Something that I just kind of spew out in my free time,
hand it to somebody on my team,
and let them deal with it.
The second confession is a little bit more complicated
but very important.
It's also gonna sound a little weird to you, and that is,
I envy you.
(melancholy music)
(upbeat music)
If you're still watching this,
chances are you are a young person who is interested
in self-improvement material.
You are a person who wants to get better,
who wants to change,
who wants to be happier, more fulfilled,
more productive, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
(intense tone)
And chances are, you are probably still
in a position where you don't feel
like you're very far on your journey.
You feel like you still have a lot of things to achieve,
that you're actually not very close
to where you want to be in life,
and that's exactly what I want to talk about.
12 years ago, I was like you.
I was young, hungry, ambitious.
I had a small blog, a crappy website, but I had a dream.
I wanted to become a writer, an author.
I wanted to reinvent the self-help space.
I wanted to create a brand
of self-help understood by millennials.
It seemed like it would be impossible.
It seemed like I'd probably spend
my entire life trying to do it.
I was at the bottom of a mountain,
but I was ready to climb like a mother fucker.
And for years, I did climb.
I fought, and clawed, and grinded my way
to the top of the mountain of my dreams.
That tiny, crappy website eventually grew
into a blog with millions of readers.
That blog then got me a book deal,
which then turned into three
Number One New York Times Best Selling Books.
I toured the world speaking to audiences of thousands.
Basically, I went from the bottom of the mountain,
to the top of the mountain.
From having my dreams, to living my dreams.
But something weird happened in the process.
Something that I did not expect at all.
(upbeat music)
See, the predominant emotion
at the bottom of the mountain is excitement.
You are excited for what's ahead of you.
You're excited at the potential, the possibilities.
The predominant emotion towards the top
of the mountain became fear.
Fear that I was going to lose everything I had gained.
Fear that everything in my future was going to be downhill.
It was going to be worse than it was before.
Fear that people were going to steal ideas,
use my brand and image in really shitty and stupid ways.
Fear that I was going to lose what I had gained.
Fear that I was going disappoint people or alienate people.
Before, I would take bold risks.
I'd put out crazy fucking content.
Some of it would go viral,
and some of it would bomb terribly.
After success, I started to become more calculated.
I stopped taking risks.
It became less about art or creativity,
and more about managing a brand, managing an image.
And so to me, it felt like I was half-assing things.
Not in that I wasn't trying or I wasn't working hard,
just that I wasn't taking risks.
I wasn't pushing myself creatively.
And as a result, I was no longer excited about the work.
Instead, I was anxious about the work.
And I think this is what happens
to a lot of people who achieve success very,
very quickly or at an early age.
It's why they burn out and leave platforms like YouTube.
I think it's why a lot of celebrities have public meltdowns
and struggle with drug addiction.
You're so disproportionately rewarded for
one fucking thing that you almost
become trapped by that thing.
It's your public identity.
It's the expectation.
It's the basis of your financial life.
My career started to feel like a gold plated prison,
like I was no longer creating anything
but simply managing a brand.
And last year, I too became severely burnt out
to the point where I almost quit entirely.
(upbeat music)
In the meantime, I took some time off.
I moved to L.A.,
I focused on my health.
I spent a lot of time with some family and friends,
and I eventually started to realize something about myself.
I like being bad at stuff.
When you're good at something,
it means that there's pressure and expectation to perform.
It means you have little to gain and a lot to lose.
But when you're bad at something,
there's nothing to lose and everything to gain.
I like the process of learning, and fucking up, and growing.
I like climbing the mountain.
I don't like being on the mountain,
I like climbing it.
Those are two subtly different things.
So when I say that I envy you,
it's that I envy that lack of expectation.
I envy having nothing to lose.
And so in my time off this year,
I realized I want to be a beginner again.
I want a new mountain to climb.
I wanna learn, I wanna fuck up,
and I want to feel free to fuck up.
Like I'm not gonna complicate a bunch
of contracts if I fuck up.
And it's not because I feel like I have to prove something,
it's actually because I don't wanna prove anything.
I just want to create.
I wanna have fun again.
So I've decided to spend the next couple years
climbing a new mountain, and that's video content.
(calming music)
I've spent the last few months educating myself
on cameras, lenses, lighting, editing.
I rented a small studio space where I can record everything.
And unlike everything else I've done in the last five years,
I'm doing all of this myself.
I have no team, I have no help.
It's just me in an empty room fucking up,
and it's glorious.
And it's because it's hard, it's difficult.
I don't know what I'm doing,
and I'm figuring everything out again from scratch.
And I miss that feeling so much.
The other reason I'm really excited
about this next phase is I feel
like YouTube as a platform has so much potential,
and it's not quite there yet.
So maybe this is a little bit arrogant
and I'm up my own ass here,
but I'd like to think that I'm gonna bring a little bit
of why to YouTube.
Not just great, fun content,
but something with a little bit of purpose.
And before you ask, no,
this doesn't mean I'm gonna stop writing.
I'm still gonna keep up with the monthly newsletter,
which you can sign up for in the description.
I still will be writing more books in the future.
It just means that most of my creative energy
is gonna be directed here into the camera.
This is the place where I'm gonna experiment
with new ideas and new directions for myself.
This is what's exciting me at the moment,
and my only plan is to continue doing it
while it feels exciting.
Basically, I'll either climb this mountain or I'll fall off.
In the meantime, I've got a bunch
of amazing videos queued up.
I've been working very, very hard the last few months,
so be sure to subscribe if you haven't
because I will be back before you know it.
Until then, I hope you appreciate the climb,
the freedom to fail, 'cause that's what it's all about.
This is Manson,
I'll see you soon.
(upbeat music)