Ok, so i'm probably literally the last person on Youtube to do this
But when I asked you guys what you wanted me to make, this was the most requested thing
so here we are
before I begin I just like to make the point that i can't draw
for shit so that this is just just gonna be horrible
hi I'm Dan Howell and this is my story in the beginning woah not that early
hahaha...ha so I was born in southwest England in berkshire the Royal county in a kind
of crappy house with mom and dad
I had quite young parents which is actually kind of cool as my mom
graduated in philosophy and my dad was a DJ / special effects guy for films who
used to sneak me into movie sets which was pretty cool
we had a dog which they got just as i was born which used to run into me as a
baby and tear up the furniture
I was apparently the happiest child of all time who never stops smiling or
laughing or bringing joy to others so basically I was the freaking sun from
the teletubbies I was brought up watching too much winnie the pooh which
is why I have my posh but not- articulate voice so yeah life was always
sunshine and flowers until
preschool I suddenly encountered the first negativity in my entire life when
i meet other children but it's okay because the guy that pushed me over on
my first day was obsessed with this girl who kissed me in the playground and said
she wanted to marry me and he cried so lol
too bad i have memories of my dog finding a huge bone in the woods and me
freaking out and doing a lot of traveling with my parents which was
amazing but hey who needs that when you have a playstation 1 yeah suck it
universe crash bandicoot and Final Fantasy characters can be my role models
from the age of five I supposedly expressed an interest in acting when i
was cast in the lead role of Santa in the school's obviously satanic Christmas
play
yeah i was one of those guys who actually joined the theater club when I
was about eight so my parents decided to send me to a musical theatre school on
sundays as much to the horror of my Christian grandma
I went to my first proper date with a girl to the cinema who is scared by the
movie we watched and cried for two hours before being picked up by her parents
smooth moves down my mom then popped out a little brother and before i knew it was
time to go to secondary school
so hey this is the part of the video where the music stops and it gets really
sad and I explain that sometimes it wasn't that great because the place was
full of giant dick heads
now if my utterly friendly and joyful personality didn't help me out in
preschool it definitely didn't help me out here as for some reason being nice
was clearly a bad thing that needed to be punished
the thing was I never retaliated to anything which when I look back I thought
man I wish I just threw my shoe at that guy all made a classy your mom joke but
now I realize all these kids probably had shitty things happening in their
life and I was kind of being the bigger person
so yeah the joys of being a teenager school homework family drama friend drama
dog dies hormones fun fun fun
but guess what everybody had to deal with that kind of stuff and like
everyone says it gets better you just need to survive and one day you'll be
where I am seeing that they're all unemployed burger flippers and
unfriending them on facebook
out of pity I did they have a few good friends and a couple inspirational
teachers and all that coupled with video games equals a lot of procrastination
I was so lame back then i remember seeing pictures of emo guys on
myspace and being like wow are they look so cool
yeah I'm totes emo now ugh just give me a moment to cringe and be filled with
regret
thankfully i got over that and had the piano and my nerdy obsession with acting
to keep me occupied as i was in load of productions in a nearby theater for Romeo
and Juliet, West Side Story, blah blah blah but then when I was 17
I kind of changed my mind I don't know why these kids who are mildly cooler
than the nerds i ate lunch with we're all like hey Dan you should come down liters of
cider with us in the woods at 10pm and this little voice in my head said and
Dan, you'll never actually an actor you know that right, so I went yeah probs
okay then and ditched everything I had a lot of fun and sometimes incredibly
embarrassing moments with these guys including going to Reading Festival for
years in a row and the time we went on a surfing holiday where I accidentally
pulled the string off a girls bikini on the beach and felt so bad about it i
cried i actually had a girlfriend for over three years which is cool but
that's not really the period in your life where you need a commitment we
inevitably broke it off because it was time for university
yup suddenly out of nowhere BAM
hey Dan childhood over so what are you doing with your life
oh well I wasn't doing any of that acting crap so I thought hmm
as I have no idea what I want to do with my life I'll go to university for a few
years
I got quite good grades so I thought what degree will make me look clever and
employable
yeah law so I took a gap year that i spent getting fired for selling axes
to 10 year olds and playing a lot of xbox and this is when I started goofing
around on youtube I have been watching things on this website since the
beginning like you guys I watched YouTubers for years people like
Shane Dawson, charlie mcdonnell community channel and after being persuaded by
some friends I decided to start making my own YouTube videos then before I knew
it I was at the University of Manchester
traditionally in English universities you spend most of your first year not
doing any work and drinking until your violently ill which is a exactly what i
did but i had some incredibly fun times with the friends I made so I was very
glad to have had pretty much the perfect first year experience
I then decided for the next year to move into an apartment with my internet
friend Phil as we both needed someone to live with and we knew by then that we
both like the same TV shows and food which is literally all you need in a
friend but it was also cool because we both did youtube then out of nowhere
came the existential crisis
I don't know where it came from but one day I was just studying for an exam and
just freaked out I was like I hate law this is so boring and awful and I don't
want to be my life so what do I want to be my life Its too late to go back and
make other choices Oh God
so I took a year out from uni to basically roll around on the floor
pondering about the universe for 10 hours a day and go to a bunch of YouTube
events
I call this my internet hobo year then luckily in the summer someone from BBC
radio one called our house and was like hey you and your friend phil are cool want
to do a weird video show on Christmas and we were like hells yeah
so I took the plunge with my mother's blessing and decided to go for it
I dropout pursue this radio thing and actually start trying with the youtube
thing i do so me and Phil decided to move to london where it was all happening and
for the first time I really started putting effort into my youtube channel
and is starting to pick up steam
this is when people from the radio were like want an official weekly radio show
and we were like holy crap ok so as of 2013 me and my friend Phil have a show
on BBC radio 1 every Sunday which goes out to the entire world which is crazy
but we think our show is awesome and we're loving it
then soon after my youtube channel hit 1 million subscribers which is something
in my three years of YouTube after having watched an idolized other
youtubers for almost a third of my life I never thought would ever ever ever
happen and I was basically
so I am now happier than I've ever been because I finally feel like I'm in
control of my life and I've grown enough and have the confidence to be the person
I want to be i literally hated life from the ages of 5 to 20 but now I feel like
the people i meet are finally treating me in the way I've been treating others
my whole life back to tell you tell me sun
and now i'm spending my days telling stories and opinions on the internet
like a philosopher who could be great but just turned his brain to mush by
sitting on Twitter all day
it's weird that I'm doing something that I didn't even know existed when I was a
kid but I love doing it and that's what's important no regrets
if I ended this video by saying will be yourself follow your dreams it'd
probably be so cheesy you throw up
but seriously my only regrets on that moment when I doubted myself and took
the safe route and all the time I wasted trying to please other people
as I've said before on youtube life's too short to waste any time being
unhappy don't care what other people think
you decide who you want to be and do what you want with your life
i wish i had someone to tell me these things so no matter who you are or how
old you are I hope you're listening
ok I honestly have no idea what my future holds but it kind of looks
exciting so anyone that's interested i look forward to coming on this journey
with me and learning more about the world as I do
I'm Dan Howell and that's kind of my life so far
the end it's there sexy stickman dance this just looks actually awful but oh
well
please hit the like button if you enjoyed this video and you can click
here to subscribe to my channel if you want to see more of my videos
thanks
and seriously look at my hand you see that that's what it's like to be
left-handed all the time
can you imagine writing essays with that yeah yeah yeah yeah you want to be me
no I don't think so