See, I have this belief that we don't change and transform because
of science, we change because of story. Science informs but story transforms.
We see that every cigarette pack in the world tells you not to smoke,
but data does not stop you from smoking. When you lose your friend to smoking,
when you lose your friend to cancer, when you lose a mom or a loved one
to throat cancer or whatever it may be, that stops you from smoking.
So these videos have to be stories to really penetrate human emotion,
to really connect with people. You should know the feeling you want
people to have after they watch your video. So mine was very clear
from the start. My feeling was, people should want to share it with their
friends and say, "We were just talking about this." So I wanted to create content
that deeply connected with the conversations people are having,
and I wanted them to feel a sense of belonging when they saw my videos,
that they were not the weird person in the room who was having a deep conversation
at midnight. And starting a video with music allows someone to be gradually
entered in and allows you to put your message forward.
So, never start a video with you on camera because that can always completely push
an audience away if you don't look like a demographic people want to watch.
And so my point being that, you've got to really think about how
to start and end. And the ending is super important because you want to leave a
message that people feel that they want to share. The ending has to be something
people feel compelled to pass on. And so you've got to end with a piece
of wisdom, advice that penetrates through the whole video and almost encapsulates
the whole video. And so when a video is able to do that at the end,
you're only helping someone else press share because that message resonates,
it hits, it lands. My first ever video's called, "There's No Such Thing
as an Overnight Success." My second video was…
What an appropriate title.
- I know. And that was my first video and it's all about the most successful people
in the world and how we just don't see their back story. Then the second video is
called "Changing the World Starts with you." And that video did a million
in 24 hours. So the first one did a million in a week, the second one did a
million in 24 hours. That video then did 40 million views
in like two to three weeks. And every day for six months,
I went live on Facebook, every single day for an hour.
One hour live video.
- One hour live videos. And so everyone has their unique element
in which they thrive in, in front of camera. And what I see is
everyone is trying to sound and act and be like other people rather than figure out.
So my style that I invented was me thinking out loud rhythmically about life.
It's almost me philosophizing to myself and asking rhetorical questions.
I rarely say "you" in the video. I say "us" and "we."
I'm never saying "you" and "me." I'm completely talking about as if I'm
just thinking out loud about the biggest topics in the world because that's how I
think them through in my head. What are people worrying about?
What are people needing? What are people dreaming about that they
only share in private conversation? So what I'll do is I'll usually be on a
plane and I'll be writing notes on my phone and just like, okay,
this sounds good, this sounds good. And I'll piece it with this,
and I'll piece it with that. And then what I do on the day is that I
learn page by page and then I'll freestyle it. So I'm not tied,
I'm not tied to the words I say, I'm tied to people making feel it.
Because I'm so tied by what someone feels after a video, not what someone learns
after a video.
And that's a really key point. It's about what the person feels.
I like that. Do you have your videos on Facebook and YouTube in a different style
to leverage each platform's method?
Yeah, absolutely. So what I've seen with YouTube and Facebook is that,
the people who rose on YouTube primarily did it before 2010, even.
They started very early, 2013 in the latest. I came late
to the party. So what I saw on YouTube is that it was so much harder to get traction
because you can't share as easily on YouTube. YouTube already has its prominent
people and it's quite happy there. So it's quite hard to break in.
I see very few people break in on YouTube yearly. Whereas Facebook is kind of at its
growth curve period. It's like at that point where you can grow
and have acceleration. So this is a mistake I think people make.
Now we see youtubers on the "Forbes" list and we go, "Oh, I think I need to be
a youtuber." But what you forget is that youtuber has been making YouTube videos,
a lot of my friends are successful youtubers, they've been doing it
for 10 years. Whereas Facebook's at the beginning of that journey.
So my recommendation to new creators is focus on Facebook and Instagram,
and then recreate for YouTube ideally at a longer length. One of my other favorite
things to do is to write a message that I feel people are…that allows people
to understand the video. So if the video has a really big twist
in the end, my caption would always say, "Watch this till the end."
But only if it has a twist. And so where this goes wrong is when you
start using it as a technique and you haven't built the content for it.
So if you write, "Watch this till the end," but there's nothing new that
happened at the end, you just lost your audience.