Mr. Beast & The Work Worth Doing | #176
April 2nd, 2022: Greetings from Austin. I’ve been winding down a bit of the consulting work I was doing in January and February and have felt my creative energy exploding again.
I’m excited to continue to write more and start doing some video essays on YouTube too. If you have things you want to see me write about let me know!
#1 The Mr. Beast Episode
Mr. Beast did an interview with Joe Rogan a couple of weeks ago and I found it fascinating. If you don’t know who Mr. Beast is, he is the #1 YouTuber on the planet with close to 100 million subscribers on his main channel.
One of the coolest things I’ve ever watched was his re-creation of Squid Game. This video has more than 225 million views already and is worth watching. There’s nothing else like it:
I really enjoyed the interview and what stood out most was that Mr. Beast more than most people, knows exactly what he wants to work on, how he wants to do it, and what he values.
I think it aligns with a lot of what I’ve discovered on my own journey. While my version is a much less ambitious one, there’s nothing really stopping you from being bolder than I have been once you find the things you want to spend your time on.
He’s been obsessed with one thing since the age of 13
At 13 years an obsession with YouTube took over his life and for the last ten years, he’s been working on it non-stop. During the conversation, you sense that he absolutely still loves making videos and that there isn’t really any other choice for how to spend his time.
I have found a similar sense of ease with life with other people who have a high degree of curiosity about certain things. They don’t toil about what to spend their time on and just have a deep sense of knowing that they are doing the right thing.
I sense Mr. Beast would continue to make videos even if he stopped making money. In fact, he invests most of the money he earns directly back into the videos, often losing money to continue to push his creative edges.
Certain people have more obsessive personalities than others and I would guess that Mr. Beast is at the extreme edges of this distribution. Yet I would also guess that most of us have the capacity to get excited about things and work on them over an extended period of time and it’s probably worth spending a little more time trying to find those things.
He has never seen South Park and said he hadn’t seen several other very popular movies.
Rogan was shocked that he’s never seen an episode of South Park.
Mr. Beast noted that this sucked when he was younger. All he wanted to do was watch YouTube and make videos. When he was around his friends he felt like an outcast because he had nothing in common with them.
However, he said, “It’s fine now because I’m surrounded by people with YouTube obsession now.”
From conversations with people who are drawn to take unconventional paths, this is one of the hardest things. When you aren’t interested in what most people around you are interested in, you feel like the crazy one.
The antidote and I would argue one of the most important things to do, is to “find the others.” Mr. Beast found them and built a life around them such that he could keep going on his unique path.
“If you do what you love you need less.”
Sounds simple, but hard to understand unless you’ve found work you want to keep doing no matter what. With writing, I’ve found something I want to continue doing indefinitely and this changes the calculus of my life. Much more important than having fancy things or fancy experiences is protecting the time and continuing to have the opportunity to write and do other related creative activities.
It’s not that I’m consciously making a calculation and determining that to do these activities I’ll need to spend less. It’s that my desire for those things has evaporated. It’s hard to explain unless you’ve found those things worth committing to.
Definitely check out the episode (Spotify only):
🎧 #2 New Reimagine Work Episodes
Some of you may not realize that I have a podcast. I’m going to aim to get more episodes of my podcast, Reimagine Work, out in the wild this year. That starts with publishing a few in the backlog.
Music, Accidental Startup & What It’s Like Teaching at Business School - Paul Canetti
Last week I posted an interview with Paul Canetti who wanted to be in a band, ended up starting a company by accident, and now reaches product management at Columbia. You can listen here.
The Money & Life Path With Tim Malnick
We talked about his own unconventional path but spend most of the time talking about money. He helps people improve their relationship with money and has a great framework I really like of thinking about our goals.
The Money Path: “One day when I sorted this out I’ll get to do what I want”
The Life Path: “Do what you love and the more you follow it you will have your needs met with and without money”
Most people start out on the money path (that’s our default economic orientation whether we like it or not) and some decide they prefer the life path. I really resonated with “have your needs met with and without money.” It’s really hard to explain to people (that’s why I had to write a full book 🤣) how you can get compensated for less money with more life but that’s exactly what I’ve found. The creative freedom and ownership of my time are worth millions.
Check out some of Tim’s other essays and the podcast episode here.
Who should I have on the pod?
#3 Interesting Reads & Other Stuff
#1 Conversation With Jonny
I went on my friend Jonny’s Curious Humans podcast. It was a fantastic conversation and a unique one as Jonny has seen behind the scenes of my journey since mid-2018 when we first met. The day after we met, he handed me David Whyte’s The Three Marriages, which sort of changed my life. You can check it out here.
#2 Embracing Accents
I really liked this reflection from Corey Wilks on how he tried to hide his accent from growing up as a “holler” in Appalachia as he started college:
I thought educated, successful people didn’t have an accent.
And then deciding to let his true self show up as he’s gotten older
I realized I didn’t have any models — any mental representations — of successful doctors or entrepreneurs who sounded like me.
That was why I didn’t think I could have an accent and be successful.
But abandoning my roots left me feeling incomplete — I was trying to live without my heart, and my heart was still up the holler.
It’s a good read. I’m excited to read more of his stuff.
#3 Hierarchical Growth Trade-Offs
I went into a deep dive into some of Rohit Krishnan’s writing this week and found we have a lot of overlapping interests. I’m diving back into some writing about organizations and complexity so found his essay on growth trade-offs timely. These two paragraphs bring alive why it’s so hard to drive change in organizations:
The CFO meanwhile also has to be comfortable writing off 100 million for an idea which is risky, and do so in a manner that doesn't impact her job performance. The marketing team has to be comfortable writing off a year and a half of work, while delivering on their other pieces of work. The design team has to be comfortable trying to out do the small and nimble start-ups, while also keeping the existing machine in motion. At the end of the day the interfaces don't change enough, so the coordination tax just keeps adding up!
Definitely check out the article.
#4 Barrier To Impact
I also liked Rohit’s essay on having an impact. He argues, “It strikes me that a large chunk of young people, especially smart young people, have the same ambition that they presumably have had throughout history.”
This feels right though I might reframe it as the “potential for ambition” because until the last several hundred years, I imagine people didn’t have the language or the conception of paths that would enable them to map an internal emotion to a certain work path that would enable them to express that.
Rohit points out that traditionally, Academia was a good place to go if you wanted to have an impact. However, that is no longer the case:
And you'll also have to contend with a rather stodgy environment in which to do your groundbreaking work and hope to goodness that what you develop will be received well by others. Not just in the popular sense but also in the peer review sense.
Instead, he suggests that if you are not wired to be the founder, tech maven, or leading thinker, there may be value in trying to be the kind of person that inspires those people.
This indicates that an area with a substantially high payoff that isn’t included is the thesis thus far - to go to the very source of ideas. We can try and spark the inspiration that makes someone go from smart to groundbreaking, whether that's in science or technology or business.
You could try at being the person that inspires the academic, the entrepreneur, the technologist. Someone who creates such yarns as to help spark the collective imagination of millions.
It’s a fascinating thing to think about and in some ways, this is happening on the internet right now. Many people who would have been in Academia in the 1960s are now just sharing ideas openly online and contributing to collective intelligence. In fact, the internet enables many many more people to be part of this than could ever fit within the constraints of institutions.
#5 $41 Million, Four “Secret Books”
Brandon Sanderson is a fantasy book author that recently tried to raise $1 million on kickstarted and ended up raising $41 million. This broke everyone’s brains of what is possible for this sort of thing and people had questions. Luckily Sanderson published a fascinating and extensive FAQ on his site.
The whole thing is worth reading but I really liked his comments on the limits of how we currently sell books:
One thing I’ve heard for years is that readers want to get an ebook with a print book, bundled together. And I think this is an extremely reasonable request. The cost to create an ebook once you have the print book is negligible. Just some basic formatting work.
He tried to do this for years and couldn’t convince the publisher!
I spent years trying to make this happen. I spent long phone calls with John Sargent, then CEO of Macmillan, arguing with him about what I considered his backward view of ebooks. He felt that bundling an ebook with a print book would devalue the ebook. I argued that it’s the text, not the format, that people are paying for. An ebook is worthless–it’s the text that is worth something.
In his Kickstarter launch he found overwhelming evidence that this is what people want (and he made more money):
52% of people, when given the option of a free ebook with their print copy, have chosen to get the print copy. Compare this to the 25% or 17% of my recent New York publisher releases.
By the way, if you bought my print book and want a digital copy, I’m happy to send you all the versions!
#6 Maslow & The Pyramid
I did a thread this week on my essay from last year on “Maslow’s Pyramid” (which he didn’t invent). Currently working on a YouTube video on this as well.
#4 Book Stuff
I had a bunch of shoutouts this past week which led to an explosion in sales. Specifically, Ali Abdaal keeps talking about my book which is pretty cool. Here is one clip:
I also had a nice shoutout from Nick Maggiuli who has his own book “Just Keep Buying” coming out soon
Finally, David Nevinski recorded an entire episode (!!!) reflecting on what he learned from my book. Check that out here.
Overall I’m about 75 days into the book launch and have sold about 1730 books. Here are the numbers so far.
I continue to be blown away by the reaction to the book but am happy that so many people are finding it worth their time. Keep letting me know what you think!
Hey There! Thanks for reading!
I am focused on building a life around exploring ideas, connecting and helping people, and writing. If you’d like to support my journey, the best ways are to:
Buy my book, The Pathless Path
Purchase one of my courses on freelancing or reinventing your path
In addition, I use and love all of the following services and they offer generous affiliates for fellow creators. If you plan on launching a course or e-mail list and you end up using my codes, I’ll gladly spend time helping you get set up and answering questions. Just let me know!
Podia - 14-day free trial (read my review here)
Teachable - 14-day free trial
Skystra - Fast WordPress Hosting
Circle - 14 day free trials
Alternatively, if you simply just want to send me a monthly donation and encouragement to “keep going” the best way is to become a paid supporter of the newsletter (which includes free access to the book and Reinvent).
A reminder: I don’t check unsubscribe alerts and never look at my subscriber list. So if you feel like unsubscribing, you can do so below.