- Hey friends, welcome back to the channel.
So, we have just hit the big two million subscribers.
Huge thank you to everyone
who's a subscriber of this channel.
But with kind of these sorts of milestones,
I always kind of stop and take stock of like
where we've come and where we're going
and like how my life feels at these kind of milestones
and I feel like a book like this,
"Ego Is the Enemy" by Ryan Holiday is like
a really helpful thing to revisit
at these kind of milestones,
because it's very easy when you like post on Instagram,
it's like hey two million, everyone's like,
"Oh my God, you were amazing, congratulations."
All that kind of stuff.
It's very easy to let success get to our heads.
Maybe you've had this like where you've like
accomplished a milestone or something and it's like,
you sort of get high off your own supply
it's not really a good thing.
And so in this video, I wanna talk about,
I've been rereading the summary of this book.
I first read this a few years ago it was really good.
But I've been rereading the summary over a short form,
LinkedIn video description if you wanna check it out
and there's some lessons from the book
that I'm finding it really helpful to revisit.
So let's just go over those.
Now, Ryan Holiday splits this book into three parts.
Part one, aspire, part two, successful, part three failure
and that's a decent way of doing it.
The way I want to split this is sort of
in terms of the lessons that I feel most applied to me
'cause I can then talk about them
from a personal perspective.
And so we're gonna split this into three parts.
Number one, pupil, number two process
and number three, perseverance.
All right, so lesson number one under the pupil section
is to embrace the beginner mindset.
And I think when I first started out
with this YouTube channel
and basically everything that I do,
I did a pretty good job of kind of seeing myself
as a beginner 'cause I was a beginner, like 100%
and I was then doing whatever it took to kind of
get better at the thing and to improve
and to listen to a bunch of podcasts
and other YouTube channels helping me to grow on YouTube,
to read a bunch of books all around kind of
what makes good storytelling,
what makes good branding and all this stuff
associated with being a YouTuber.
I think over time as we get success in any kind of field,
we can start to lose that touch with the beginner mindset.
I still think I have it to an extent,
but I have to constantly remind myself
to have more of a beginner mindset
because now that we've got two million subscribers
and people come to me asking me for advice
on how to grow their YouTube channels
it's very easy for me to just start to feel like
I have all the answers and hey, check me out
I know all the things,
but what I try my best to do is to kind of
humble myself a little bit like anytime I speak to
like Thomas Frank or Matt D'Avella or (indistinct)
these other kind of friends of mine
who have like ridiculously successful YouTube channels,
they've actually gotten there with less videos
that I've made which shows that
they're doing something very, very right.
I always try and think, okay, this is really cool,
how can I be a beginner here?
How can I learn from these people?
But also within my own Part-Time YouTuber Academy
we've got a bunch of students who have started
YouTube completely from scratch
and the channels are doing really well.
And so I look at those channels and look at their videos
and I try and think to myself,
okay, what are some tips and ideas
that I can steal from these guys's videos
that we can apply to our channel?
Just to try and really embrace this idea that
we're always a beginner in whatever we're doing,
even as we get more success with that thing.
And there's a nice quote from the book where he says,
"The pretence of knowledge is our most dangerous vice
because it prevents us from getting any better."
And the second thing related to the idea,
the beginner's mindset is the idea that he talks about
being a lifelong learner.
And that's another way that we can combat ego and pride
and all those kinds of bad things.
And so, again, here, this is all about like figuring out
where the holes in our own abilities are.
So like for me, the other day, I realised that
now that I've got a team of like 12 people
and we're hiring another eight people every day almost
I realised that there are holes in my ability
to be a good manager and a good leader
and so I actively seek out books and coaches and mentors
and stuff to help with that side of things.
And again, that's just one of those things
that as you get success at stuff
it becomes easy to think that like,
oh, I am king, I know what I'm doing,
but actually none of us knows what we're doing.
We're making it up as we go along
and therefore we can always improve every time.
Secondly we have the idea of process.
Now here, the way I'm thinking of this is that like
to combat the ego and pride and stuff.
we wanna be focused on the process,
focused on the journey rather than the destination.
And so one of the points that Ryan Holiday
talks about in the book is about how
we should be keeping our ambitions internal.
There is a whole sphere of self-help advice
that's all around positive visualisation
and this idea that the secret, the law of attraction,
that if you really, really, really want something
and you put that intention out into the world
then you will get the thing.
And there are a lot of self-help type people
who would say that you really wanna visual your goals
and visualise success and have very strong ambitions
and kind of know what drives you
and share it with the world.
But what Ryan Holiday talks about in the book
and sort of lessons from stoicism is that like,
when you share your ambitions and your goals
with other people, there's a decent amount of evidence
that that actually prevents you from achieving them
in some contexts.
So like he tells the story of this guy, what's the name?
Upton Sinclair who wanted to be like
Mayor of New York or something,
I don't remember the exact story,
but he wanted to be the mayor of some town in America
and he wrote this whole, like manifested this whole book,
talking about exactly what he was gonna do
when he became mayor and all of the different ways
he would cure poverty and all this kind of stuff
and he wrote it in the past tense.
So he acted as if he had already achieved the thing.
Now, this is a pretty standard in the self-help world
where you sort of act as if you are more successful
than you actually are.
But this guy did this and then what he found is that
his motivation to actually become mayor and do all these
things went completely down the drain
'cause when we talk about our goals
and we talk about our ambitions it's sort of like
our brain has decided that we've already done those things
and so we have less of a drive for them
and you might've had this, I've certainly had it when
if I've got a project in mind,
like I wanna make a new course,
or I wanna write this thing,
or I wanna make a video about a certain topic
in a way the more I think about it
and the more I plan it out the less likely
I am to actually do the thing,
because now I've done the fun bit of like strategizing
and planning and I was just down to the execution
and the execution is like, oh, I'll just do that later
and I keep on putting things off.
And so for me, what I'm trying to do
is get this kind of balancing act between
keeping my ambitions internal.
Like I have goals, I have things that I wanna do sort of,
but I'm trying not to openly overly share them
with other people because I know that that's probably bad.
But also when I do decide I wanna go for a project
I'm trying not to overly like positively visualise
the context.
Like for example, we're in the process of hiring
like 10 new people for the team,
more on that in a future video
and potentially getting in like a real life office space
in London with studios and stuff
and so I've been looking at people like MKBHD
and Linus Tech Tips and what kind of amazing studios
they've got.
I was kind of getting high with when it's applied
the other day where I was like,
oh my God, imagine how amazing the studio could be
and then I read one of the summary points from the book
and I thought, okay, now I need to stop thinking about that.
And actually, one of the things that they talk about
on short form, it's quite good
'cause they've got like a summary of the book,
but they also talk about like the nuances
and the criticism of the book.
And one of the things they talk about
is the idea of negative visualisation.
Like when it comes to positively visualising stuff
like achieving our goals further down the line,
that is apparently good.
If you like to help reduce our stress levels,
it can reduce our anxiety because
we can imagine ourselves as being successful.
But in terms of actually getting stuff done,
negative visualisation has a lot more evidence
that it's actually successful.
So like imagining the worst case scenario
and imagining how this might not work.
And so what I'm trying to do a little bit more of
is imagining what would happen if the business failed,
if the YouTube channel failed,
if our courses stopped and students,
if our content became irrelevant
at that point what I do and what I'm hoping is that
that negative visualisation will A,
make me more prepared if that actually does happen
so it will be less devastating.
B, hopefully it'll light a fire underneath me
to kind of take the YouTube channel more seriously,
and to put more and more effort into it
so that we can get to that point
and avoid that negative visualisation stage
so long and rumbly way of saying that like
one of the things that Ryan Holiday talks about
in the book is to keep our goals
and our ambitions to ourselves for the most part,
not be overly keen on visualising success
and thinking that we're the legends,
but actually taking a bit of a step back,
doing the stoicism thing
or negative visualisation potentially instead
and hopefully that will help us more in the long run
and help us to combat our own ego.
Point number four from the book,
it's the idea that we should do something
rather than be someone.
This is similar to some of the stuff that James Clear
talks about in, "Atomic Habits" another very good book
whereby the way that we approach goals
can often be around like identity rather than around action.
So, for me it's like I want to be a successful YouTuber,
or I want to be a writer,
or I want to be a best-selling author.
These are all things that I want to be,
but that is kind of an ego-driven way
of approaching our goals.
And what Ryan is arguing here is that
we should instead think about doing the thing,
doing the verb rather than being the noun.
So instead of, I want to be a best selling author
instead the doing is I want to write a book
that I'm really proud of that sells well.
And instead of I want to be a YouTuber,
it's the doing is, I want to make two videos a week.
Instead of I want to be an entrepreneur
the doing is I'm starting my business
and so shifting from a being mindset
more towards a doing one is another way
of combating our ego which of course is famously the enemy.
And key point number five
another thing that Ryan talks about is
how we should basically keep our head down
and do the work as a way of combating the ego.
He talks a lot about like the idea self promotion,
there is value in self promotion
once you have something to promote
and certainly Ryan Holiday has gotten famous of
the back of a tonne of self-promotion and done it really well
like he's a professional marketer as well as a writer.
I had the privilege of having a phone call with him
a few months ago, asking for advice
on the book that I'm writing and I said to him, I was like,
Ryan, how do I make this book become a best seller?"
And he was like,
"Okay, dude this is the kind of the wrong way
of approaching it."
The only thing about actually writing
a really, really good book first
and then once you've written a really fricking good book
at that point you can start doing the self promotion,
the marketing side of things.
But his advice was, don't think about the marketing
right now, put your head down and actually just do the work.
And I was thinking about this 'cause
that was very much the way that I approached
this YouTube channel in the early days.
I knew a few YouTubers who were quite big and I was like,
"Okay, maybe I could do a collaboration with them."
But instead of kind of going straight for that,
what I thought initially for the first like
nine months of the YouTube channel was,
"Okay, I just need to put my head down and do the work."
And even to this date,
I haven't actually done that many collaborations,
especially kind of collaborations with bigger YouTubers.
And even now I still think the model is
put your head down and do the work
and the collaborations and the friendships and the network
and stuff will ultimately follow from that.
Whereas I know quite a few YouTubers
who have started out and thinking and thought,
"Hey, I need the fastest way to grow my channel,
why don't I try and get a collaboration
with like a big famous YouTube or whatever"
But they haven't done the work at that point.
And so, putting your head down and doing the work
is one way of combating the ego problem.
There's also sort of also a more sure-fire way to success.
Something that Matt D'Avella famously says,
which I think is a really nice quote, which is that,
"Be so good that you can ignore the algorithm."
And so that's sort of how I try and think about
kind of the YouTube channel and the businesses
like how do we just get so good
that we don't need to really worry
about the promotion aspect of things
we don't need to worry about the collaborations?
How do we put our head down and just do the work?
Something I'm still kind of...
This is all a work in progress.
I'm kind of making this video
as a way of giving advice to myself,
especially when it comes to growing the channel,
growing the business, writing my book.
Sometimes you just got to, most of the times
you gonna put your head down and actually do the work
and not worry about all the other BS
that comes with the marketing
and self promotion side of things.
So we've got number one pupil, number two process
now the third P is a persevere
and the whole kind of third section of this book
is about failure and our relationship with failure,
which is obviously in large part related to
this idea of ego and pride that we all have,
especially when we're successful at something
that often like if you get success at something,
then that success can inevitably lead to failure
because the perfectionism that we have
through the success can hold us back from taking risks
and doing more experimental things
and potentially growing as people.
And there's like a chapter in here that I really like
it's called, the effort is enough.
And basically what he's saying here is that
we want our barometer for success to be our own effort
rather than the results of our effort.
And this is similar to my view around goals,
like having goals that are a 100% within our control
rather than goals that are outside of our control.
For example, the goal of writing a book
that I'm proud of is within my control,
the goal of making two videos a week is within my control,
but the goal of the book hitting the New York Times
Bestseller list or a video getting
a certain number of views,
that's kind of outside of my control.
And so what he talks about is one way of
being more okay with failure is to recognise
and reward ourselves internally for the effort
rather than the outcome.
He says,
"John Kennedy Toole's great book,
"A Confederacy of Dunces" university turned down
by publishers news that so broke his heart
that he later committed suicide in his car
on an empty road in Biloxi, Mississippi.
After his death, his mother discovered the book
advocated on his behalf until it was published
and it eventually won the Pulitzer Prize."
Think about that for a second.
What changed between those submissions?
Nothing.
The book was the same.
"It was equally great when Toole had it in manuscript form
and he fought with editors about it
as it was when the book was published,
sold copies and won awards.
If only he could have realised this,
it would have saved him so much heartbreak.
He couldn't but from his painful example,
we can at least see how arbitrary
many of the breaks in life are.
This is why we can't let externals determine
whether something was worth it or not, it's on us.
The world is after all indifferent to what we humans want.
If we persist in wanting and needing,
we are simply setting ourselves up for resentment or worse.
Doing the work is enough."
It's really nice.
That's like a really nice sort of every time I read that
kind of section of the book
it feels very like heartwarming that,
yeah, doing the work is enough.
That like doing the work and putting the stuff out there
is the thing that I should be basing my own
kind of self-esteem off of rather than
how it's received by other people.
And I think this idea of ego, the idea of like,
oh you've hit a certain subscriber count,
oh this video made this many views,
oh you hit this much money in the bank account or whatever,
any of that kind of stuff these are all externals
and those are all focused on the destination
whereas I think following the advice of
Brandon Sanderson in the Stormlight Archive,
journey before destination,
the more we can think about the journey,
about the process and the less we fixate on the destination,
the more likely we are to combat the ego thing
at least that's what I'm trying to do.
And we're also gonna be more likely to have
a healthy, happy, fulfilled sort of life
following the journey rather than the destination.
Now, if you wanna learn more about this sort of stuff,
"Ego Is the Enemy" is based around the concept of stoicism,
which is the ancient Greek school of philosophy
that a lot of people subscribe to.
Derren Brown's book, "Happy"
is also based around the concept of stoicism.
You could read these books, genuinely I'd recommend them,
they are very good,
but if you're not much of a fan of reading,
what you can instead do is watch my online class,
All About Stoicism, which is hosted over at Skillshare,
who are very kindly sponsoring this video.
You probably heard by now Skillshare incredible platform
with online classes, from all sorts of things,
from like a design and typography and illustration
and like cooking and all that fun stuff.
I've got a bunch of classes in skill Skillshare,
I think I've got like 10 different classes on Skillshare.
All of which you can access completely for free
with the one month free trial option.
So if you're one of the first 1,000 people
to hit the link in the video description
you'll get a free one month trial to Skillshare
where you can watch all of my classes
to your heart's content.
And the one I'd recommend if you enjoyed this video
is about stoicism and how stoicism improved my life.
And that is a collaboration class with my friend, Sam,
who is a teacher of philosophy,
studied philosophy at university,
teaches at schools in London.
And it's all about like the practical ways
in which the lessons from stoicism have improved our lives
and made us happier.
If you're into that kind of stuff,
you should check that class out.
You should also check out three different classes
about productivity.
The most recent one is about Productivity For Creators.
So if you're interested in the journey
to getting to two million subscribers on YouTube
and how we can do that while working full-time job
or things like that definitely check out that class
on Skillshare.
So thanks Skillshare for sponsoring this video.
First 1000 people hit the link in the video description
you will get a one month free trial.
And if you enjoyed this video about "Ego Is the Enemy"
by Ryan Holiday you might like to check out this video
over here which is all about the mindset
that changed my life and that is all about the book
"Mindset" by Carol Dweck which some people have said
is the most important book ever published
in the English language.
That will be summarised in a video over here.
Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video.
Bye-bye.