(birds singing) (Craig sighing)
- Which is why, with a heavy heart,
I must formally announce that I am...
(rock music)
(chains rattling)
So as of June 5th, I will have been doing this
for 15 years. (text echoing)
It's easy to remember,
'cause the first thing I said is June 5th, 2007.
Thank you, past Craig.
Dan Howell posted a video, why he quit YouTube,
and then Hank Green posted a video
why he didn't quit YouTube.
Since I'm not afraid of being unoriginal,
That inspired me to make this video.
A kid across the street sees me, okay.
All right, ah, went away.
Visiting Chyna's family in Kentucky at an Airbnb.
Oh now, oh, he brought his mom over.
Now, they're both looking.
After 15 years, it still makes me uncomfortable.
This job is a miracle, I love it.
I get to be my own boss,
I get to say what I want, and people listen.
'Cause of this, I've been able to travel to far away places.
I met my wife. I don't even know I was married at the time.
My band got to tour the country,
but it is time consuming, and stressful,
and unrelenting, and unreliable.
I see you, 2012 YouTube, definitely moving away
from the subscriber system and emphasizing the algorithm,
which I ignored for five years, and unforgiving.
I see you, negative commenters,
but I'm pretending to ignore you.
You'd think after 15 years, I'd move on
to something else wouldn't you?
Well, I decided to figure out why I'm still here
by using my favorite method, a list.
Maybe this can help me figure myself out,
and also help you figure out why you do what you want to do
or don't do, or don't want to do what you do do.
Why haven't I quit YouTube?
Keep in mind, these are just theories.
One, I was older when I started.
I was 27 years old on June 5th, 2007.
I didn't get thrown into a super involved career
until my late twenties.
I had plenty of time to do stupid things
and try to figure myself out,
even though no one really can know themself,
but I think I had a pretty good idea,
better than I did as a teenager, or as a little kid.
I in no way am interested in hockey anymore.
Sorry, Canadians, and my cousin, Casey,
although I could do a why do people
like hockey video at some point.
Maybe I will get interested?
Anyway, I also avoided broadcasting
stupid mistakes young people make.
I thank my lucky stars YouTube wasn't around
when I was a kid,
I'm not saying I would have tried Tide Pods,
but hindsight's 20/20.
Two, I treated it like a job from the get go.
(traffic zooming)
Cars, I didn't just broadcast something ridiculous
and go viral, and then try to capitalize on it.
I went into this knowing this was going to be a grind.
The first three years, the first 100 videos,
I had 32 subscribers.
I was hoping this would lead to doing something
like this for a living.
I didn't know this would be the job,
but I was ready for it to be, (traffic zooming)
and I knew that jobs, even ones you love,
can suck sometimes, like when cars keep driving by
when you're trying to shoot a video.
Why did I do this?
Because three, I love the craft itself.
Not a craft, but those are cool too.
Many YouTubers are interested in something
unrelated to video,
like this channel all about aquariums and fish,
just like, "I like fish, I'm gonna make videos,"
and then you learn the craft so that you
can show the world fish.
My fish is video itself, editing, shooting, performing.
Really didn't have any other interests
I was willing to share.
I liked editing video.
Oh yeah, look at that cut, and that one, oh damn.
So I didn't really care about fame and fortune,
although that would be nice,
or even really what the content was.
It was just content for content's sake.
My mantra was dare to be pointless, after all.
Why did this help me not quit YouTube?
Well, four, I stay flexible.
One of the things I fear is when someone
asks me, "What do you do?"
And I say, "I make YouTube videos,"
and then they say, "What about?"
That's really hard for me to answer.
These days, it's a little easier.
I make videos about improving my life,
and being healthy, and stuff,
but even that's not quite accurate,
but not being able to define my channel
is a feature, not a bug.
(slapping arm) That's a bug.
I can weather the ups and downs of the internet,
and YouTube, and my own mental state,
because I'm not all in on one thing.
If that one thing fails, eh, moving on.
I can just look for the nexus of things I'm interested in,
and things other people are interested in enough
to sustain this thing,
maybe not rise it to super stardom, but I can still do it,
and that's really all that matters, which brings us to five.
I focus on what I want first.
If you notice, I rarely ever ask the audience
what I should do next.
I also don't pay that much attention
to audience retention or other analytics,
besides, you know, just making sure people are watching.
Selfish and arrogant, maybe, (swing creaking)
but also, then I'm always just doing what I want.
If I'm just gonna do what the audience wants,
that's gonna lead to burnout,
because I'm gonna just be not doing what I want,
or it might mean I don't even know what I want,
and then that's an even deeper problem.
So basically do what I want,
rest of the world be damned, sort of.
Oh, kid looking at me again,
at the car. (car beeping)
I think he heard me say that.
Now, he got in the car.
(door slamming) And now, his mom coming out.
Okay.
(birds chirping) Just waiting for them to leave.
This attitude is probably why it took me
a long time to go viral.
My first video, you could maybe say went viral
was the bad parkour video, a little bit,
and then a little bigger, the proposal video,
but I never went really viral until four years ago,
when we quit sugar for a month,
and then after that, 13 years after starting,
I hit a million subscribers.
This channel is a slow burn,
but that means I never fell
into the pitfalls of super stardom.
It seems to be why Dan Howell went on hiatus for a while.
He suffered from huge anxiety,
and I also felt like I still had something to achieve,
get that million subscribers,
and that just reinforced the cadence of production,
where I could just slowly build the audience,
and really get comfortable with this being a job.
And all of this has helped me
keep everything in perspective.
The fact that this site exists at all,
that I can even just show one person
on the other side of the world my video, immediately,
is amazing,
the Partner Program, where they share Adsense
at a higher percentage than anywhere else,
just being able to do this for a living at any level
is wonderful.
I still don't take it for granted.
I mean, I'd be lying if I didn't say
I take it for a granted a little bit more
than when I started, stupid human nature,
but my lack of early success has led
to my continuing modest success,
so if I'm not paying attention to the audience,
the algorithm, going viral, what am I paying attention to?
I make sure I have a purpose.
Early on, that purpose was pointlessness, but really,
it was just having some kind of content
so that I could make video, which I like doing,
but I have several purpose metrics.
One, is it fun?
Two, is it valuable? Do other people get some use out of it,
or do I get some use out of it?
Does it challenge me, do I learn something?
Am I satisfying my drive to create more?
And all of that has, I think, led me to what I make now,
which is videos trying to improve myself and share it,
so maybe that can help you improve yourself
if you feel like you need to improve yourself.
Things like quitting sugar, alcohol,
doing exercise, getting better sleep,
getting 10,000 steps a day, 20,000 steps a day.
That's what I'm currently doing.
I up'd the ante, because many of you in the comments
were like, "That's not enough."
I see you, negative commenters,
but I'm pretending to ignore you.
Yoga, meditation.
Speaking of meditation, segue, segue, segue,
which is not what I'm using right now,
'cause that would hurt
my 20,000 steps a day goal. (car zooming)
I'm also not using a car, which just drove by, ugh!
It's time to think today's sponsor, Ten Percent Happier.
Some things I discovered when I did that meditation video,
it works, it makes me feel better,
helps me relax, helps me sleep,
reduces stress, all that good stuff,
but it's harder than you think to turn off
the evil voices in your head (car zooming)
telling you to throw eggs at cars that are passing by.
is that what everyone has in their head?
I don't know, and it takes time, it's a skill.
Ten Percent Happier helps you hone that skill.
I tried apps that give you a routine to go through,
but I kind of stopped after a while,
if you recall in that video, it just didn't seem to work,
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They're a team of real scientists
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you know what I'm saying?
Different meditation styles that work
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Everything from the meditation coach to NBA legends,
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You can learn the basics with Joseph Goldstein,
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Anti-diet with Registered Dietician, Christy Harrison,
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I don't know if he's related to Katherine or Audrey.
Maybe you should ask him if you sign up?
And a lot more, there's over 500
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That's a ton, that's almost as many cars
have driven by since I've been shooting this video,
and they have podcasts, and a newsletter,
and books, and pets, I assume, at their homes.
I don't know, that's unrelated.
That's none of my business.
Seriously, if you wanna get into meditation,
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Go to tenpercent.com/wheezywaiter.
Now, back to the list.
Another thing that I do that helped me
avoid quitting this god forsaken website?
I do other stuff too.
I don't think of myself as an influencer
or a YouTuber, I really don't.
I don't know what I consider myself.
A human, I guess, a hairy human?
I'm also a singer and guitar player in Driftless Pony Club,
been an actor in a few things,
like "Platoon of Power Squadron,"
I'm a podcaster, a Wheezy Newser, that's my second channel
where I also do videos, but just different,
a newsletterer, a dumb tweeter,
most importantly, a husband and a dad,
- [Audience] Aww. - A had, dusband,
dasband, husbad?
I think it helps that I don't mentally
put all my weight on one thing, being a YouTuber.
That's too much pressure on that one thing.
That would add stress and make it not fun.
The bad reasons, fear, (woman screaming)
ego, sunk cost fallacy.
I've been doing YouTube for so long
that if I quit, what am I gonna do?
What if I get rejected doing anything else?
Fall into a fit of depression as an inadequate human,
because I can't work with others?
Everyone finds out I'm the imposter that I think that I am.
On the flip side, ego, it makes me feel amazing
that lots of people watch the thing that I do,
and I truly am great.
You can feel both of these things,
and I go from one to the other, and I try to avoid both,
'cause they're both stupid.
(car zooming)
Also, sunk cost fallacy.
I've been doing this for so long,
put so much work into this thing,
that it would be a shame to lose it all,
even though if I don't like it,
it shouldn't matter if I lose it all.
So I always try to avoid that type
of thinking when I'm thinking
about what I'm gonna do next,
but I'd be lying if I said (car honking)
those thoughts don't sometimes occur.
I feel like I'm not done.
It still feels like what I'm meant to do,
even though I don't necessarily believe
in something like that.
I've been making dumb videos since I was a little kid,
and it's just what I love, and I still love it,
and I feel like I haven't done it all yet.
There's more mountains to climb, worlds to conquer.
I might wanna do even longer form documentary stuff
on YouTube, or make a movie.
I definitely want to make a movie at some point.
I have a big list of ideas of things I wanna do.
Occasionally, I get the feeling
that I've done everything I can,
or someone out there is already done the thing I've done,
because there's millions of people uploading every day.
What's the point?
But then I remember, I made a video 11 years ago
called "The Most Original Video on YouTube,"
in which I talk about how nothing is original.
You could pick any point in history,
and people thought, "Oh, what else is there to do?"
Or they thought, "I don't have any more ideas."
One of my oldest comments that I still get repeatedly
to this day, "Running out of ideas, are you?"
I've heard that for 15 years of 1,800 and something videos.
That's an example of why maybe you shouldn't listen
to the audience too much.
I do believe that nothing is 100% original,
but I think there's always new ways of doing things,
and if you are just being true to yourself,
no one is exactly like you,
so it will be authentic, and that's more valuable than new.
If you have a parent that loves you,
and they say, "I love you,"
and you're like, (scoffing) "Heard that before."
That's not how it works.
So I guess that's my ultimate point.
I just feel like, as I said in my very first video,
I'm not done.
Okay, I'm not done.
(traffic rumbling) Okay?
So that's it.
Oh, one more announcement,
(birds singing) (Craig sighing)
which is why, with a heavy heart,
I must formally announce that I am quite excited
to continue making videos.
Why with a heavy heart?
I don't know, 'cause it's so full of love?
Thank you for watching.
In my previous video, Chyna and I talked
about how parenting changed us.
YouTube thinks you'll like that video.
You can subscribe there, and you can support me
on Patreon, if you'd like.
And now for the 1,800 and somethingth time,
(piano plinking)