Why You Get ZERO Views (10 MISTAKES) | Casey Neistat

Someone who starts something and doesn't finish something, that is a loser. If you commit all that you are and all of your energy to one thing, you'll— YouTube isn't Hollywood. I'm not Stanley Kubrick. You can't succeed here if you're uploading once a month.

Rolling?

Yes.

This is crazy hype. Yeah, it's really crazy.

What's up, Believe Nation? It's Evan. My one word is believe, and I believe that you have the ability to do something special that can change the planet. So to help you on your journey Welcome to The Journey. Today we're gonna learn from YouTuber and filmmaker Casey Neistat and my take on his Top 10 Rules of Success Volume 2. Rule number 1 is my personal favorite, and I'd love to know which one you guys like the best.

Keep your head down. Follow the rules. Do as you're told. Play it safe.

Wait your turn.

Ask permission. Learn to compromise. This is terrible advice. If I were to write an autobiography, a book about my life, one title that would work would be "Do What You Can't," because that idea encapsulates everything I've ever done. Like when I wanted to move to New York City and my dad was like, "You can't. You don't have any money." Or when I first said I wanted to make movies and it was, "You can't. You didn't go to film school." I want to have a TV show? "You can't, Casey. You're not pretty enough." And to go even further, like if I were to characterize what this new generation of content creators and filmmakers, what we all do on YouTube and everywhere else is we do what we can't. You don't have to listen to anyone because in this new world, no one knows anything.

Hi, haters!

The haters, the doubters are all drinking champagne in the top deck of the Titanic and we are the fucking iceberg. Wishful. Do what you can't. That run this morning, that run in the freezing cold, that was at 6 o'clock this morning. That is 6 in the AM. I was up outside running in the freezing cold. It is currently 9 PM, 9 o'clock at night. Tomorrow morning I also have to get up at 5:30 in the morning, but I didn't shoot a vlog today. I didn't shoot a video, which is fine. Taking days off is fine, but I shot this morning, which meant I started something. So if I didn't do a vlog today, it would have meant starting something and not finishing something, and in my book, that's not okay. Someone who starts something and doesn't finish something, that is a loser. Someone who starts something and always finishes it, that is a closer. One of my favorite movies is called Glengarry Glen Ross. Here's a quick scene. A, B, C. A, always. B, be. C, closing. Always be closing. Always be closing. Yeah, I tattooed that on my arm. Last week I talked about that Voltaire quote, "Perfection is the enemy of good." And what that means is you can never let your desire for perfection prevent you from finishing something that's good. Because to finish something, even imperfectly, is to learn from it, and then you can move on and get closer to perfection.

Now, if you're an artist or a filmmaker or a content creator in general, do you feel like you shouldn't even go mainstream towards TV or towards film or towards working with a music label, or should you focus on creating it all yourself? Because it still helps a lot of people who don't know how to do the online stuff.

Yeah, I mean, look, there's, there's no answer to that question. I think that it's One thing that everybody but the successful people fail to realize about any creative industry is that there is absolutely no defined path. There isn't one. So it's about paving your own path. And now for me, my path meant mainstream just didn't work and new media did work. And for other people, it's entirely antithetical to that, where mainstream is exactly the right place for them. So there is no formula that's right or wrong. I'm just much better versed in my own—

Sure. Yeah.

The trajectory that I followed myself, and that includes really, running away from the establishment into whatever the most forward-thinking space is.

Other than hard work, what advice would you give to better yourself both in life and in your career field? Focus. Focus is super underrated. Like, if you commit all that you are and all of your energy to one thing, you'll— Okay, this like, this diagram This is— I took this from a book called— I don't know what it's called, but it goes like this. All right, you can do 10 things to like the first degree, like this right here, and that's how well you'll do all 10 things. Or you can do one thing to the 10th degree, right there, and look how much better you do that. So when it comes to focus, to put all of your energy into one thing is to do that one thing really well, to the best of your abilities, to take it all all the way. And to scatter yourself means you're never actually accomplishing anything. You're just sort of chipping away at a bunch of nothingness. And this is true for work, this is true for like dating versus committing yourself to one person, friendship, everything. Like really focusing and investing yourself into something you're passionate about will always yield better results than scattering yourself around and spreading yourself thin. What's the best way to find time to make films while in high school? I don't know, I don't have any sympathy for you. I've got a full-time job, 2 kids, baby, wife, house, bills, life, reality. And if I can find time to make some videos every day, then you can too. I know what high school was like. I did it for like a very short amount of time. If it's something you really wanna do, you will find the time. Let's talk about 1 year of vlogging. Before I started vlogging, I had a YouTube channel for 5 years. And in those 5 years, I had a whole bunch of huge viral hits. Movies that got like 15, 16 million views. But my subscriber growth was anemic. The channel growth was anemic. Flat like that. 5 years, 500,000 subscribers. Then I started uploading daily, and in 5 months I had 500,000 more subscribers. That's 1 million subscribers. 5 years for the first 500,000, 5 months for the second 500,000. So I kept uploading, and 2 months later I had another half a million subscribers. Now here I am, one year after doing daily uploads, and I've got 2.5 million subscribers. YouTube isn't Hollywood. I'm not Stanley Kubrick. You can't succeed here if you're uploading once a month. If you want to succeed here, you've got to show up for work every single day. That, that took me 5 years to learn. I didn't start daily vlogging to grow my YouTube channel. I did it as a way to kill all of those excuses I used that kept me from making more movies. Because at every single inflection point in my life, Doing the work has always been the thing, has always been the catalyst that took me from where I am to where I wanted to be. So like 10 o'clock last night, I was at the gym getting swole. I was listening to a guy named Dan Ariely, who's a behavioral economist. He was talking about why we work, and his entire sort of thesis was predicated on the idea that we work because we want to, not because we have to. It made me think about my YouTube channel and the fact that I've made like 600 videos in the last couple years and and how much I— and all the things I don't get to do in life because I'm so focused on my work. The vast majority of the work that I do, including here on YouTube, I get paid for. But it definitely is not why I show up. I did it out of this like longing or hunger for accomplishment or this idea of needing to complete something. Professor I was listening to, he equates it to like climbing a mountain. Which is a perfectly— it's an appropriate analogy because I love climbing mountains. Look, here is a picture of me and my homie Graham at nearly 23,000 feet above sea level.

My brother Van put that note in there right after we got back.

So why would we climb mountains? I don't get paid to climb mountains. It's not fun. Do I look happy there? I'm not happy. I'm close to death right there. We climb mountains for the same reason that we work. It's because as human beings you have this desire to do something, to complete something. How do you not give a shit about what people think of you? Hmm, I should preface this answer by saying I definitely got made fun of a lot for the way that I look when I was in school, and all those bullies that picked on me are all losers now. So never forget that. People who judge others. Especially people who judge others based on things like looks, on whether you're black or white, whether you're Jewish or you're Muslim, whether you are gay or straight, because of their body type, whether they're fat or skinny, whether you have pimples or whether you have a big butt. These judgmental people, their opinions don't matter because they don't matter. Judgmental people are of a lower moral authority than those who don't judge. And we, people who don't judge, we have a responsibility to crush, to destroy those mean judgmental bullies. And we do that with an overwhelming positivity, and we do that with our extreme open-mindedness. And when you subscribe to those values, you really stop caring what other people think. Because chances are if other people are judging you, they're wrong.

Hunger is a very, very powerful motivator. And when I was living in that trailer park with the kid, like we were on welfare for a while. I was a dishwasher. I worked in a crappy seafood restaurant as a dishwasher, which now just sort of parenthetically, my favorite piece of advice to give to young people saying, I don't know what I want to do with my life. I say, get a job doing something you hate. 'Cause the fastest way to figure out what you love and where you want to be in life is by spending a lot of time doing something you hate.

So it's miserable.

Yeah. So, you know, spending 50 hours a week scrubbing pots and pans was like— I was just in my head the whole time fantasizing about what I want to do in life. I was making enough to like feed my kid and pay my— I think it was $300 in rent, uh, $300 a month rather, the mortgage on my trailer. Um, but my biggest fear was not being broke because like when you're at rock bottom and you're on welfare, you can still like afford food.

Get by.

Yeah, yeah, get by might be a stretch.

Like, I could afford food and I could afford my trailer, right? So it was like we weren't homeless and we weren't starving. So to me, that was absolute destitution.

Wasn't really like that bad. There's no dignity in it, but still, it wasn't—

you weren't on the streets.

That's right.

So with that, like, my—

it's like, what is it, Maslow's hierarchy of needs? Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Like, so like, once the basic needs were met Basic needs were met, then I started to look around, I realized like the greatest fear for this like beautiful little baby boy was that he would grow up and see his dad as a loser. And that is a, once those basic needs are met, that's an incredibly powerful motivator. Because, you know, my dad who's absolutely not a loser, but I watched my dad to provide for his family of 6, I watched him work 60 hours a week, hating every minute of it. And he came home from work just hating his job and feeling trapped, probably. I'm sure. Yeah, he had a family to take care of. He struggled. Um, now he does what he loves. He has a coffee shop now, and he's never been happier.

But I watched that, and like, I just saw myself going down that trajectory.

And it wasn't just a job that I hated, it was a job that I hated that didn't provide. It was a job that I hated that did nothing but cover those basic needs.

And that was the motivator.

That was when And that was the motivator. The catalyst for me giving up and moving to New York and going for it was, I still look back and I don't know what that was. There are only like 2 times in my life where I genuinely have no fucking idea what I was thinking. And I moved to New York City in June of 2001 with $800 and a place to stay for 3 months. And that was it. Rolling?

Yes. This is crazy hype.

Yeah, it's really crazy.

Make It Count was a movie about seizing the moment, grabbing life by the balls. I made that movie for Nike because that's an idea I believe in. Now, the FuelBand, our motivation for the movie, keeps track of how you make it count. But back when the movie was made, it hadn't been released yet.

I wasn't actually wearing a FuelBand.

Ah! But I have one now. So I thought I'd revisit the idea. Hi. Hi.

Hi.

So what this thing does is it provides you with a number, a number that keeps track of how active you are. Active can mean a lot of things. Give me a budget, ask me to be active, and I'm on the next flight out. Air travel is the closest thing to time travel. Start in Africa. Always Africa. We had an idea of what we were doing, but the idea was vague. It's the only way I like to do anything. You could see two oceans from up there. That counts. Only flight we could find was to Amman, Jordan.

This guy kept us out of trouble.

Welcome in Jordan. Motorcycled in Vietnam. Jet skiing in Doha. So much wind in Amsterdam. We missed the train, but the adventure doesn't begin until something goes wrong. We were always moving. Always the stairs, never the escalators. Got a car in Israel. Played in the mud 1,300 feet below sea level. Then went up. Way up. From 12,000 feet you fall fall for a full minute. That counts. I had heard about this waterfall in Africa. There's this great quote, and I don't know who said it, but it goes, "Without a goal, you can't score." You see, it's not a bungee cord. It's a static line, a rope. We bought our tickets at the airport. We planned nothing. Because when nothing's for sure, anything can happen.

Thank you guys so much for watching. I made this video because Luke asked me to. If there's someone you'd like to vote on for the next top 10, check out the link in the description and go and have your say. Finally, I want to give a quick shout out to Tuan from Dude Buddha. Thank you so much, man, for picking up 10 copies of my book and gifting them out to your friends. I really appreciate the support and I'm so glad that you enjoyed the book. So thank you guys again for watching. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is. As always, much love. I'll see you soon.

How I have confidence in who I am and the decisions I make is that I have this moral compass in life, and it is like— it is a summation or an amalgam of everything that I believe in, everything that I think is right and fair and just. And every decision that I make I make, personal, private, business, every decision that I make is made through the looking glass, through the perspective of my moral compass, of what I believe is right and what I believe is wrong. And if it's wrong, I don't make that decision. I only make decisions that I believe in. And the aggregate of that, you do that over enough time, and it gives you a sense of pride. It gives you a sense of confidence in what you've done in life. What do you think about the comfort zone? I think it's the worst place you could ever be. When you're hungry, you want more. When you're wildly successful, you can embrace your hard work and be proud of it. When you're in the comfort zone, it's just blah.

What's the key to being successful on YouTube or creating content online right now? Is it having the nice fancy camera? Is it the production value? Is it—

look, if I could If I could define what it took, I think a lot more people would follow that trajectory.

It's the greatest job in the world. But so I don't know what's right, but I can definitely tell you what it's not. And what it's not is having the best gear, first of all. You know, like the vlog that I posted this morning, which is— I posted like 5 hours ago, and it's really— I'm looking at my cell phone right now to figure out to tell you guys exactly how many views it's done in the last couple of hours.

I don't know what I did.

How did it—

Is it on the ground? How do I lose a cell phone? Like, I'm sitting in one spot.

Here it is.

But what the key is not is the gear.

And I think that's what's so limiting for people when they think, I've got to have the right gear, the right mic.

Yeah, that's wrong. Like, my HBO show was shot on a point-and-shoot that we bought at Walmart.

Really?

But I mean, so much of my YouTube— one of my most watched videos on YouTube called Bike Lanes, which has over 15 million views, that was shot on the crappiest of point-and-shoot cameras. Really? Yeah, just so— it's not. It's what you do with the tools, not what the tools are themselves. So I'm just looking at my stats right here. So my video that I posted this morning— so I posted it 3 hours and 58 minutes ago, and it has 140,000 views on YouTube. Yeah, in the last 3 hours. This video primarily was shot on my cell phone.

Wow.

Because iPhone 6.

Because MTV didn't allow any cameras at the VMAs, but they did like allow cell phones. So I'm like standing there being like, you guys realize that every cell phone is a video camera built in, how ridiculously contra— all this means is that there's gonna be a million bad videos posted instead of a million videos.

Regardless, like, you know, half that video was shot on my cell phone.

Yeah.

And it's just not—

it's like, if you can do great things with a terrible camera, you can do great things with a great camera.