Jay Shetty explains why stories beat data for changing minds, and breaks down his viral video formula: open with music to set the tone, end with shareable wisdom, and write like you're having a private conversation. His early videos hit 1M views in a week and 40M in three weeks.
Questions this video answers
About one week ("first one did a million in a week").
Reached one million in 24 hours; grew to about 40 million views in roughly two to three weeks ("that video did 40 million views in like two to three weeks").
Every day for six months; one-hour live videos each day ("every day for six months, I went live on Facebook every single day for an hour").
Chapters
See, I have this belief that we don't change and transform because of science. We change because of story. Science informs, but story transforms. We see that every cigarette packet in the world tells you not to smoke. But data does not stop you from smoking. When you lose your friend to smoking, when you lose your friend to cancer, when you lose a mom or a loved one to throat cancer, whatever it may be, that stops you from smoking. So these videos have to be stories to really penetrate human emotion, to really connect with people. You should know the feeling you want people to have after they watch your video. So mine was very clear from the start. My feeling was people should want to share it with their friend and say, we were just talking about this. So I wanted to create content that deeply connected with the conversations people are having. And I wanted them to feel a sense of belonging when they saw my videos, that they were not the weird person in the room who's having a deep conversation at midnight. Hence, starting a video with music allows someone to be gradually entered in and allows you to put your message forward. So never start a video with your own camera because that can always completely push an audience away if you don't look like a demographic people want to watch. And so my point being that you, you've got to really think about how to start and end. And the ending is super important because you want to leave a message that people feel that they want to share. The ending has to be something people feel compelled to pass on. And so you've got to end with a piece of wisdom, advice that penetrates through the whole video and almost encapsulates the whole video. And so when a video is able to do that, at the end, you're only helping someone else press share because they that message resonates, it hits, it lands. My first ever video is called there's no Such Thing as An Overnight Success. My second video is an appropriate title. I know that was my first video and it's all about the most successful people in the world and how we just don't see their backstory. Then the second video was called Changing the World Starts with youh. And that video did a million in 24 hours. So the first one did a million in a week. The second one did a million in 24 hours. That video then did 40 million views in like two to three weeks. And every day for six months, I went live on Facebook every single day for an hour. It's a one hour live video, one hour live videos. And so everyone has their unique element in which they thrive. In. In front of camera. And what I see is everyone's trying to sound and act and be like other people rather than figure out. So my style that I invented was me thinking out loud, rhythmically about life. It's almost me philosophizing to myself and asking rhetorical questions. I rarely say you in the video. I say us and we. I'm never saying you and me. I'm completely talking about. As if I'm just thinking out loud about the biggest topics in the world, because that's how I think them through in my head. What are people worrying about? What are people needing? What are people dreaming about that they only share in private conversation. So what I'll do is I'll usually be on a plane and I'll be writing notes on my phone and just like, okay, this sounds good. This sounds good. And I'll piece it with this, and I'll piece it with with that. And then what I do on the day is that I learn page by page, and then I'll freestyle it. So I'm not tied. I'm not tied to the words I say. I'm tied to people making feel it. Because I'm so tied by what someone feels after a video, not what someone learns after a video.
And that's a really key point. It's about what the person feels. I like that. Do you have your videos on Facebook and YouTube in a different style to leverage each platform method?
Yeah, absolutely. So what I've seen with YouTube and Facebook is that the people who rose on YouTube primarily did it before 2010 even. They started very early 2013. And the latest, I came late to the party. So when I. What I saw on YouTube is that it was so much harder to get traction because you can't share as easily on YouTube. YouTube already already had. It has its prominent people, and it's quite happy there. So it's quite hard to break in. I see very, very few people break in on YouTube yearly, whereas Facebook is kind of at its growth curve, period. It's like at that point where you can grow and have acceleration. So this is a mistake I think people make. Now we see YouTubers on the Forbes list and we go, oh, I think I need to be a YouTuber. But what you forget is that YouTuber's been making YouTube videos. A lot of my friends are successful YouTubers. They've been doing it for 10 years, whereas Facebook's at the beginning of that journey. So my recommendation to new creators is focus on Facebook and Instagram and then recreate for YouTube, ideally at a longer length. One of my other favorite things to do is to write a message that I feel people are that allows people to understand the video. So if the video has a really big twist at the end, my caption will always say, what's this? Till the end? But only if it has a twist. And so where this goes wrong is when you start using it as a technique and you haven't built the content for it. So if you watch this till the end, but there's nothing new that happened at the end, you've just lost your audience.
