#53: Becoming A YouTuber While On The Hedonic Treadmill

I took the first six months after quitting my job as an IP lawyer and patent agent to focus on recalibrating. I spent hundreds of hours researching current technology, including artificial intelligence, trying to craft a plan into the future to ride the wave of change I saw coming, writing newsletters along the way.

After 6 months, I felt as though I had a good grasp on the key technologies I needed to understand in order to walk the path I had set for myself. I was ready to start walking it myself while teaching others.

2024 was to be my year of YouTube. My goal for this year was to monetize YouTube so that I could continue making a living off of my specialized knowledge while helping other people level up along the way. Win-win.

I knew I wanted to build a life for myself that involved teaching others complicated things (my speciality), so YouTube was a natural fit. But monetizing YouTube is one of the most difficult things to do as a creator. There is a very high quality threshold, along with those required by Google.

Monetizing YouTube has two checkpoints: reach 1000 subscribers and accumulate 4000 watch hours over the last 365 days.

This week, I achieved step number one: 1,000 subscribers 🥳

I started the year focused on the recalibrating element of my YouTube channel, learning to present myself on camera in a natural way that didn’t burn me out. It was surprisingly difficult to do, as I talk about more in my first video:

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But eventually, I found my voice, I found my flow, and the the threads of my YouTube lifestyle began to weave and warp together.

Except, that is, I wasn’t getting very many views, or subscribers… The few people who did watch my Recalibrating videos got a lot of value out of them and gave me very positive feedback, but my videos weren’t reaching the main YouTube algorithm to the point where I could actually grow on YouTube.

Something had to change.

I took a few months off for the summer to focus on reading (something I had been meaning to do a lot more since quitting my job) and Farcaster (web3 social media that I talk about more here).

I also wrote quite a few newsletters and worked on my photography, both for the solar eclipse and the aurora borealis, two bucket list astrophotography events.

But something still felt as if it was missing.

I was having great conversations with people IRL & URL, but found that many people still had a shocking lack of knowledge on… well… how to deal with their knowledge. Let alone how they were going to deal with the impact of AI on the world of creators and knowledge workers. The world that makes up most of our economy.

So I decided it was time to get back to YouTube. But I wanted to approach it more strategically this time. In the past, my tutorial videos on blockchain & smart contracts had hit over 10,000 views so I knew that the voice I used for tutorials was one that had an impact.

After spending a year planning out my personal knowledge management system and how to augment it with artificial intelligence through my newsletters, I was ready to start enacting The Plan, teaching others while I built out my own system. Learning & building in public.

After just four more videos, I had already hit the first threshold of 1000 subscribers! As of today, I am well on my way to reaching the 4000 hour watch hour threshold (and just passed 1600 subscribers).

It seems as though I have found my groove on YouTube, a mix between 1) my personal passions of educating people on how to leverage tools to track & augment knowledge, and 2) doing so in a sustainable manner.

This last week has been surreal, with tens of thousands of people watching my videos and hundreds commenting how much they appreciate what I am doing 😌. It feels both humbling and exciting to hear how much value I am providing people while talking about topics I’m most passionate about.

Even Google thought my latest video was great 🤯

One of the main reasons I quit my job was because I wanted to make complicated information more accessible to everyone. After trying many different methods of communicating this information to people, YouTube feels like the right fit for my teaching style.

I’m incredibly excited to continue building out a lifestyle as a YouTuber, one where I can travel and work anywhere, making high value videos on the day’s most important topics to help people keep up with, and feel less overwhelmed by, change.

One where I can leverage the skills I learned studying engineering and as an intellectual property lawyer & patent agent. Of helping people deal with information overload, leveraging their knowledge to identify insights and creatively craft their ideas into their dreams.

I have a feeling that understanding the digital world and its impact on the physical world, being able to ascertain truth from fiction, AI from human, is going to become far more important over the upcoming years than most people realize.

I hope that I can do my part, using my voice, to prepare as many people as possible for the rapidly changing world. The age of AI and the age of misinformation.

I hope to help guide people past this age of misinformation to the Imagination Age.

One where we leverage technology to solve our problems while maintaining positive mental health and empathy throughout the world. It’s a lofty goal, but one that we can work on, together ✨

I thought this would be a good opportunity to talk about expectations and goals, since I have been so focused on achieving the two YouTube thresholds over the past year.

As I watched my subscriber count climb on YouTube, I knew that I was about to hit the 1000 subscriber threshold. Right away, I noticed myself looking into the next threshold, the 4000 watch hour mark.

I looked at the first part, thought to myself “check” and then moved on. I only spent a few moments in the headspace of happiness, satisfied that I had achieved part of my goal.

What about taking time to celebrate? To acknowledge that the goal has been met? To recognize that it took me 3 years to get there (albeit, with very intermittent posting)?

I think it’s often easy for us to blow past the celebration phase of achieving goals that we have worked towards for many months or years.

We build up the moment of accomplishment in our minds, only to have it pass us by in an instant, leaving us roughly where we were beforehand, perhaps even a little underwhelmed.

Don’t worry, this is a normal part of being human.

It’s called the hedonic treadmill.

Humans tend to return to a base level of happiness after either a period of great euphoria or sadness. After both good times and bad, we normalize to whatever state is our default happiness state. Our own personal happiness baseline. It’s almost form of homeostasis, of balancing our relative experiences so we can continue moving forward in life.

The hedonic treadmill is not a bad thing; the relative happiness line gives contrast between the good times and the bad times. The bad times make the good times seem better.

Rather than relying on goals for our expected happiness, we can recognize that goals are merely stepping stones to the future, a good time that is to be appreciated, but not held onto in a way that we regret the less good times.

I think this is why it’s so important to set directions, rather than goals. Goals are momentary achievements, fleeting, that we move past often without acknowledging as much as we should.

Directions have no end, there is no threshold, we merely move along a path forward and upwards into the future.

Journey >>> Destination

Rather than thinking about meeting the threshold of 4000 hours, a goal, I am recalibrating my mindset to focus more on being a YouTuber and the path that takes. The path of making the best videos possible for others, while maintaining my own voice, authenticity, and well-being.

By doing so, the pressures of creation fade away as I remove the destination from my mind, focusing on the journey and the direction I’m headed. Step by step rather than milestone by milestone.

As another example of the hedonic treadmill: a good “views per hour” rate. Views per hour are what they sound like: how many views is a video getting per hour.

As I began my YouTube series on Obsidian, each video performed better than the last. I would put out a video and be thrilled that it reached 100 views within a few few days. I would put out the next video, only to have that video reach 100 views in a single day.

My next video reached 1000 views after a week, then 2000 after two weeks!

Then came my best video yet: Obsidian for Beginners. It reached 600 views in less than 24 hours. Many told me it was the best Obsidian tutorial they had ever seen, which, given the sheer volume of Obsidian videos out there, really meant a lot.

After spending a year planning my ideas, connecting them together and augmenting them with AI, I had finally turned my ideas into a video series. I was overjoyed at such positive feedback. People were truly valuing what I had to say, and how I said it. They were resonating with my voice.

Knowing that I had given people a good overview of Obsidian, I decided to make a video on NotebookLM: Google’s new multi-modal AI tool. I wrote about this earlier in the year, excited at how Google would be using Gemini (their LLM) as a multi-modal tool.

I had a gut feeling that NotebookLM was an extremely underrated tool, so I wanted to make a video educating people as quickly as possible, hoping to show people the magic of AI.

So I made a video explaining NotebookLM, including how well it fit with Obsidian and how valuable of a tool it could be for both knowledge workers and creators.

It reached 960 views in the first 24 hours, and 6300 after 48 hours. At one point, it was getting over 350 views per hour 🤯.

Really puts my first video into perspective, doesn’t it?

It’s amazing how much a little reflection can completely shift our perspective, change our worldview. Recalibrating our sense of self and where we fit in with reality.

At the time of writing, my NotebookLM video just crossed 10,000 views, after just four days.

Everything I’ve been building: writing, scripting, editing, shooting video, ideating, building my Obsidian, personal knowledge management system, and more is finally culminating to this moment.

A moment of emergence (see the spike on the far right?), something outside the pattern. The good times.

Rather than getting too caught up on what this means and how this applies to the next threshold of 4000 watch hours, I’m merely taking it as a signal that I am headed in the right direction.

I’m going to keep moving forward, learning and passing on that knowledge, taking in the data & experience, working to reduce the bad and increase the good. Recalibrating as I go 🧭✨

If you’re interested, here’s a quick recap of the videos this month that have been performing so well:

Obsidian and Digital Garden. This playlist starts at the beginning of Obsidian and works through how you can set up an automatic note system and selectively publish those notes to your own website for free.

If you’re interested in learning nonlinear note-taking as part of your own personal knowledge management system, this is a great place to start. I use Obsidian every single day and it is by far the best note-taking app I’ve ever used. The way I can connect ideas and thoughts and convert them into useful action is incredible.

test video, NotebookLM, provides a complete overview on this AI tool by Google, along with many use cases and practical tips on how to get the most out of AI. NotebookLM is both free and private, letting you chat with your own sources or information from others.

h any of the videos, please let me know in the comments on YouTube! The more I learn about what people find helpful the more helpful I can make my videos, so please let me know your thoughts, confusions, and questions.

I’m always interested in hearing what people resonate with as that helps me hone in on new video ideas.

I’m still working at finding a balance between writing and making videos, as they both take up so much time and cognitive energy.

Monetizing YouTube is a huge accomplishment for me and I am hopeful that I will achieve it soon. Not to reach it, but so that I can continue building from there.

Thanks so much for reading my words.

I’ll see you in the next entry.

Callum

P.S. If you’re interested in supporting my work to make information more accessible to everyone, please consider subscribing to my Hypersub. You can think of Hypersub like a web3 Patreon that gives me more control over how I can give perks to members.

I will also be turning on YouTube memberships & Supers, which are easy & cheap ways to give recurring or one-time donations to my work directly through YouTube. Stay tuned as I get the rest of my infrastructure set up ✨