I Worked Hard Every Day. Nothing Changed
I worked so hard, I never had time to question the work.
I thought things would never change.
I worked 14 hours a day.
Every morning I opened my analytics.
Nothing had changed.
Looking back,
If I had kept working that hard, nothing might have changed.
Maybe I wasn't working on the real problem.
I’m sitting at my desk after taking a year off from school.
I had to make this YouTube gaming channel work. For my mother who was exhausted from her 9-5.
I’m sitting and working as hard as I can, and while things look like they’re moving.
Almost everything I upload gets minimal views.
I genuinely thought the videos were good.
I open my analytics after months of work.
277 Subscribers.
My views are going down.
Why isn’t the channel growing?
I’m literally doing everything I can.
…
But something had to change.
I was making the same videos, mostly for myself.
Same mistakes with the ideas.
Eventually I stopped asking,
How many hours did I work?
And started asking,
What did I actually change?
…
I wake up one morning after working just a few hours the day before.
I’m so tired I can barely open my eyes.
But I glance over at the analytics.
What the hell…
WHAT.
I’m shaking, I tried something different.
Something that had worked before...
But this time I finally understood why it worked.
…
I stopped asking,
What do I want to make?
And started asking,
Why would someone click this?
And kept changing how I do everything,
Better packaging.
Better storytelling.
Listening to feedback.
Iterating.
…
I’m shaking.
It worked.
Finally.
This is it.
I figured YouTube out.
My mother will be free.
...
A few months later...
The views started dropping again.
I’m on vacation in Croatia.
And I was about to start high school after taking a year off.
But the channel wasn’t doing so well.
I had gone back to working hard again, because I thought what went viral is what I should do forever.
But I actually needed a sustainable audience, and revenue.
Okay, I need to start thinking…
…
I’m on this boat in Croatia.
No laptop.
No analytics.
No comments.
Just the Mediterranean stretching to the horizon.
For the first time in months...
I wasn’t trying to make another video.
I was trying to understand why the last hundred hadn’t worked.
…
And I just look up into the sky and say this one sentence
I Spent 100 Days…
…
I started studying what actually worked.
I stopped protecting my own ideas.
I let better ideas replace my own.
I used my unique strengths.
And with that I started making videos that were unique to my game.
I never knew my whole life would change because of the thinking I did, whilst on vacation.
…
I never really worked during that wonderful time,
but it was the most important work I ever did
I had iterated for so long I finally found a way to sustain myself.
Not just for months, but years.
I had finally built something that didn’t depend on one lucky video.
People came back.
Again.
And again.
For the first time...
Growth became sustainable.
…
My mother has never been happier.
And while I had to work 14 hour days to realize that working hard didn’t work.
I now only work about 4 hours a day, whilst spending other time ideating and iterating.
Because if I spend all my time working...
I stop doing the one thing that actually changes my work.
The hardest work wasn’t working harder.
It was admitting the way I’d been thinking wasn’t working anymore.
I thought things would never change.
Looking back...
They couldn’t.
Because every day...
I was becoming better at doing the same thing.
The day my thinking changed...
Everything else finally did.