In this first‑person monologue, former physician‑entrepreneur Luke Murray recounts how he spent roughly a year and over $100,000 constructing a YouTube channel that never published a single video. He describes his initial strategy‑focused approach—brainstorming topics, buying equipment, hiring staff—while avoiding the act of recording due to fear of exposing his lack of skill. A turning point arrives when a coach named Ross (from Nice Work) spends a few days with Luke, offering genuine encouragement rather than a new strategy. Ross’s simple challenge—"make a video a week for three months"—pushes Luke to lower his performance bar, record a script, and post daily. This triggers a cascade of momentum: Luke begins producing videos daily, eventually overwhelming his editor, which forces him to confront the core YouTube principle of creating content that audiences want. He realizes his earlier avoidance was not about discipline or task size but about a mismatch between his courage level and the fear associated with recording. Luke reframes the common advice of breaking goals into micro‑steps: the right micro‑step is the smallest action that his current courage can handle, not necessarily the smallest task. He also highlights the power of encouragement—Ross literally “put heart” back into him—suggesting that finding external encouragement can replenish courage. The video concludes with a reflective prompt for viewers to identify a mission‑critical task they’re avoiding, examine the story they tell themselves, and consider the smallest courageous step they could take.
Chapters
I'm going to tell you how I spent the better part of a year and well over $100,000 building a YouTube channel that ended up having no videos on it. And I'm going to tell you how I went from doing everything except publishing to at least recording a video every day. We're on our way to publishing every day. My name's Luke Murray. I'm a former physician. I've been an entrepreneur for about 20 years. During that time, I've done about $100 million in revenue. My current portfolio does about $3 million in revenue, and I make these videos because I'd like to have ambition without the bullshit, and I'm hoping you would too. So back in college, I had this friend Matt, and he was an athletic, super adventurous guy, and we would jump off bridges together, literally the whole, like, if your friend jumped off a bridge, would you follow them? And usually my answer is like, actually, Matt would be following me. Anyway, for years, I couldn't tell if Matt was either dumb or lazy. And I mean, he never really studied, and he'd befriend the smartest person in class and find a way to cheat off of them. And eventually, and I told him this as a friend, and eventually he just admitted, I don't know if I'm dumb or lazy. What I know I am is scared to find out. He figured if he actually tried and he still failed, then he'd have proof that he couldn't do it. So he didn't try. And that way the question stayed open, at least, instead of being confirmed that he indeed fell short intellectually. It was obvious to me, and honestly obvious to him, that he was making a trade. He gave up learning how to learn so that he could protect his ego, which is a pretty shitty trade, we both acknowledged, but at least he was making it consciously. Well, about a year ago, when I finally had the time and the money and the space to start this YouTube channel, I started meeting with these strategists to figure out how do I build the machine that cranks out these amazing videos that Make me look so cool and enlighten the world. Anyway, I ended up doing the exact same thing as Nat, but I didn't realize it. I was just less honest with myself or less able to see this blind spot. So 30 minutes ago, I finally saw it. And this is the series of events that happened so that I could see it. And I want to tell you what happened so that hopefully, again, you could spot that pattern in your own life and stop bullshitting yourself sooner than I did. So the pattern was that I would meet with a strategist and they would ask me good questions like, are you going to be the career guy? Are you going to talk about doctor stuff? Are you going to talk about consciousness? What are your core pillar topics going to be? And I would just say, I don't want to be boxed in. I just want to be authentic. I'm not trying to sell anything. And all that stuff is true. I don't want to be boxed in. I don't have anything to sell. But what did I do instead of like, did I go just make creative, authentic videos? No, I came up with every single idea, every single task someone could possibly do except actually record or post anything. I came up with video ideas, I bought gear, I fixed up my studio, I hired and fired people, and I did not publish anything. Then my business got busy a few months ago, and so I just put the whole thing down. And probably about a month ago, I had one of these strategists that my friend just said, Luke, just let this guy work with you, came out. His name's Ross. Nice Work is his company, so definitely hire them. And he gave me this, he frankly gave me the same strategy packet that every other asshole had given me. And yes, his was prettier. It should have been. It was way more expensive. But Ross actually cared and actually wanted to see me succeed, wanted me to get out of my own way like any, I guess, coach would. And he's not supposed to be a coach, but he was treating me like someone that really cared. He's in South Africa, but came to the States and we hung out for a couple days. And ostensibly it was to get to know my life and to talk about strategy, but really we just hung out and I showed him the bourbon distillery and the Bayview Health Company and some other companies that I had. And he just got to know my world. And at the end, we did sit down and kind of strategize some ideas, but they weren't groundbreaking. And honestly, the exercise wasn't anything that I hadn't already done plenty of times before. But before he left, he just said, honestly, man, I just think you should make a few videos. If you could make one video a week for the next 3 months, I think that would be a win. And for whatever reason, actually, I've got a guess that I'll share at the end. I just was like, huh, Do I think I could make a video? I mean, Ross just said, just make a video, man. That's all that matters. Just make something. And so I did. I took the idea from our strategy session and I put it into ChatGPT, and then I pulled it over into Word and I turned it into something that I wasn't impressed with, but I realized I didn't need to be impressed. And I finally just pressed record, turned on the teleprompter, And went back and forth between talking to you and reading the script, which was mostly reading the script. But once I did that once, I did it again the next day and then the next day. And it was only today, after almost 3 straight weeks of not missing a single day, that I realized I had a new problem. I'm making so many videos that my editor can't keep up with editing them. So then I stepped back and I started looking at the system that actually makes the videos, and I was like, where is the bottleneck? Or if this was perfectly designed, what would I do? And guess what I suggested? The same damn thing that those strategists suggested. I should actually think, what do people want to watch? That's the highest value thing I could be doing. If you want to make a good YouTube channel, you have to start with the idea, the strategy, the angle, the thing the video is about, which is exactly, again, what I've been told. And I just refused to do it because I thought the excuse was authenticity. But what I realized again an hour ago is that I'm, now that I'm actually making videos, I can see what was really going on. I wasn't protecting authenticity. I was drowning in the anxiety about pressing record, and I was using, I want to be authentic, as the excuse to avoid it. And I didn't know that was happening. Same move as Matt that he could just see clearly. I couldn't see it. Anyway, what does this have to do with you? When I look back at what actually got me moving, it wasn't discipline. and it wasn't a better plan. It was lowering the bar until I finally found the thing I had just enough courage to do. And for me, that was pressing record on a topic that I cared about, about a story that had happened that day with no strategy and no concern about whether it would work. Like, it was successful that I did it. Picking a proven, researched idea built to grow a channel was like too scary, 'cause just like Matt, I could prove that I tried to do something That should have worked because it worked for everybody else and it didn't work for me. So I had enough courage to just record. And so that was the scary enough but doable enough thing. And I started building momentum from that. And then I could look to face the thing that used to terrify me and actually go after it, which is what I'm doing now. Here's the part that I've never heard anyone say and what would've saved me a year of my life. We often talk about, well, just break your big goals into small chunks and attack 'em that way. Like it's a math problem, like an external math problem. Small task, big task, but that was never my issue. My issue wasn't the size of the task. I spent hours, hours doing all sorts of tasks. It was the size of my courage compared to the fear. The right chunk isn't the small one, like as if it's this external thing. It's the one you actually have enough courage to do, to actually execute on. And if I would've spent the mental energy necessary to break things down into microsteps and then super microsteps, and then just kept checking in with my own courage level, I'd eventually get to one that my nervous system could handle. For example, I'll just turn on the camera and then say some stuff and then turn off the camera and then delete it. I probably could have thought of that and that would've been a step. And from that place, I could have done the next thing and the next thing to the point where, again, I'm now making a scripted video almost every day. So again, it's not about the size, it's about the courage level exceeding the fear level enough to take action. The action itself, is almost irrelevant. The motion is what matters. I mean, you can't steer a parked car. So that's the first thing. Does the courage match the action? The second thing I learned by accident is that the word encourage, which is what Ross was doing during his visit, like what it actually means and how valuable it was. I actually looked the word up and it literally means to give courage, like to put courage into someone. And then I looked up courage and it comes from the Latin word for heart. So if you go all the way back to encourage, it's someone putting heart into someone else. And Ross did that not by some kind of strategy, honestly, not by some great idea. He put some heart back into me when mine had run out on this just by spending time and saying, I see that you have something interesting to offer the world. So if you can't seem to encourage yourself into the thing, go find someone. that could put a little heart back into you. It's not weakness, it's how courage actually gets built, and you just need enough of it to get started. So if there's a mission-critical thing in your business you've been circling for months and telling yourself a clean story about why you haven't done it, here's the question I'd ask you. What's the version of that thing you have just enough courage to address? And what story are you telling yourself to avoid finding out whether you're any good at it? I'd love to know in the comments what that thing is and what story you've been using to stay away from it. As always, thanks for watching.
