Just Start: The Wow Factor
Hey all,
This week, YouTube creator MrBeast’s onboarding guide for new hires got leaked to the general public, and I read all 36 pages of it. You will have your own opinions about MrBeast — it definitely hasn’t helped mine that this week also marked his announcement that he’ll be working with Logan Paul on a children’s product called Lunchly — but you can’t really deny that he’s very good at what he does (he currently has 316 million YouTube subscribers, the most on the entire platform). And so the whole document is interesting, and a pretty good guide to how YouTube actually works and how YouTube people think, but what I want to talk about today is this bit:
An example of the “wow factor” would be our 100 days in the circle video. We offered someone $500,000 if they could live in a circle in a field for 100 days and instead of starting with his house in the circle that he would live in, we bring it in on a crane 30 seconds into the video. Why? Because who the f- else on Youtube can do that lol.
Anytime we do something that no other creator can do, that separates us in their mind and makes our videos more special to them. It changes how they see us and it does make them watch more videos and engage more with the brand. You can’t track the “wow factor” but I can describe it. Anything that no other youtuber can do. And it’s important we never lose our wow.
At first glance, it might be tricky to see how this relates to you: you probably don’t have $500,000, a field, a crane, a spare house, or even a YouTube channel. But the important part (for a lot of creative endeavours), I think, is this bit:
Anything that no other youtuber can do.
This might sound difficult, but actually I’m not sure it is: there are simpler ways to do stuff that nobody else on YouTube can replicate than recreating the entirety of Squid Game or going on a million-dollar jet. Fundamentally, doing things that nobody else can do is what every mid-to-big-name YouTube creator is doing: they’re finding intersections between things they’re good at that other people are interested in watching. MrBeast is very good at creating watchable ideas (and then editing them well), but combines that with having a lot more money than most people. Other people are very knowledgeable about science or engineering and really good at explaining things, or are interested in both philosophy and film and good at finding places where those things feed off each other.
If I have a ‘Wow!’ factor, then, it’s probably that people are impressed by how much I get done.
There are probably a couple of dozen Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belts with really nicely produced YouTube channels, and maybe a hundred thousand people on the platform who play the piano better than me. There are even channels where people do martial arts and go to the gym and play an instrument and read a lot. But I don’t think there’s a channel that does that where the creator is a dad who also has a reasonably demanding job, and that’s where the wow factor comes in: I quite regularly get comments along the lines of “I can’t believe you actually do all this.”
How I do all this is a topic for…almost every video on on my channel (TLDR, I’m pretty organised, I don’t have to commute, and I don’t watch much TV), but the point of this post is that whoever you are and wherever you are in life, you probably have a Wow Factor of your own, that comes from the bit of the Venn diagram where all your interests intersect. How you convey that to other people is another question — I’ve made an entire video about the skills that can help you to communicate your ideas better — but it’s also important to note that this isn’t just a skill that’s useful if you want to be big on YouTube. Want to write stuff? Look at the places where your knowledge gives you an insight into news or culture that other people don’t have. Want a cool job? Work out how to communicate your passions to other people in an interesting way. Want to meet someone lovely to share your life with? Honestly, it’ll still help. Some wow factors are probably better than others — but I’m pretty sure we’ve all got one. There’s something you can do that nobody else can. The trick is:
Working out what that is
Working out how to tell people about it (if you want to)
Have a great weekend!
Joel x
Stuff I’ve done
📝 Article - How revenge rampage Rebel Ridge is reinventing the action movie
As I mentioned last week, I loved Jeremy Saulnier’s Rebel Ridge — here, I get a bit more in-depth about why. Spoilers if you haven’t seen it, but you should see it anyway.
Stuff I like
📖 Book - Is Maths Real?: How Simple Questions Lead Us to Mathematics’ Deepest Truths by Eugenia Cheng
I’ve been reading a bunch of maths-adjacent stuff this year, and this is great on that score — but it’s also sort of a book about how to think and how to talk to other children, starting from some of the most basic questions anyone would think to ask about maths and then getting surprisingly complex. Also, Dr Cheng uses quite a few piano-based analogies, which I’m always a fan of.
📝 Article - Capcom’s Seth Killian explains the most famous minute in competitive gaming
This year is the 20th anniversary of the Daigo Parry, one of the most ridiculous feats of videogame playing ever captured on camera. This piece (which I had to dig into the Wayback Machine to find) perfectly explains why the parry was actually even more impressive than it looks, with insights from a man I was lucky enough to play at SFIV a bunch of times at a Capcom event (I think I took a round or two off him, but he was being incredibly nice).
🧐 Quote of the week
“The real goal in climbing Everest is not to reach the summit. It is, understandably, the focus of enormous attention, but the ultimate goal, in the broadest, most realistic sense, is to return safely to the base of the mountain.”
From Quit: The Power Of Knowing When To Walk Away - by Annie Duke
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