MrBeast

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TLDR: An unlikely teenager from South Carolina spent a decade obsessing over YouTube and is now the most-watched person on Earth - more than 10 million people watch him everyday. Here are 4 things we can learn from him.

46 billion. Forty-six billion……That is how many times MrBeast’s videos have been watched. To put that into perspective, the TV show Friends has been viewed 100 billion times but has been around for 30 years - MrBeast’s views have almost all come since 2018. The road has been long and slow but, as we will come to learn, obsession and persistence resulted in his publicity rising to a point no other human has been able to achieve.

He employs hundreds of people, owns a chocolate company, turned down an offer of $1 billion for his channels, has founded a charity funding more than 2 million meals per week to food banks and has just signed the largest deal to host a TV game show in the history of television - rumoured to be well over $100million - with Amazon Video.

He is the King of the internet age and will go down as one of the most viewed people in the history of our era. Here are a few things we can learn from MrBeast’s unlikely ascension.

Obsession

There is perhaps no better word that would explain MrBeast’s rise, than that of obsession. He described his approach to work as “obsessing every single day until I have a mental breakdown.”

When describing his early days on YouTube he tells the story of a group of 4 young, like-minded, individuals who spoke every day on Skype for 1000 days in a row analysing their videos.

When they started they all had around 10,000 subscribers, but by the time the YouTube analytics marathon had finished they were all in the millions - he described this not as obsession, but “hyper-obsession”.

His friends described many years when they couldn’t hold conversations with him, due to YouTube being the only thing he would (could?) talk about and his mother explained that Jimmy would purposefully work extra hours on public holidays as he knew his competition would be taking a break and he would get a comparative advantage.

In our last post on the pioneering behavioural economist, Daniel Kahneman, we spoke about how surrounding yourself with the correct people can have hugely amplifying effects - perhaps Jimmy hadn’t read Kahneman’s writings, but he is certainly a wonderful example of it holding true. This group of YouTube renegades allowed them all to reach heights previously unimaginable.

This obsession has never waned.

Boxing legend Marvin Hagler once said, “It's hard to get out of bed in the morning to go for a run when you're sleeping in silk sheets”. The point is that once you achieve success, especially meteoric success, it is hard to find the motivation to continue. Making hundreds of millions of dollars per year and seemingly having little else to achieve on YouTube, it would be understandable if Jimmy were to take his foot off the pedal. True to form Jimmy doesn’t see it this way, though. 

In fact, he is pushing harder than ever.

Howie Mandel recently took a tour of his office and learnt that Jimmy lives in a bedroom in the warehouse, where lots of the videos are filmed, so he can save time on his commute and spend more time on filming.

Take a look at Jimmy’s living area in his warehouse below:

Perseverance

Jimmy has to be one of the most consistent and persistent people on the planet - to a maniacal extent. 6 years into Youtube he only had 1,995 subscribers, yet he persevered. Think about what you were doing tinkering with 6 years ago - would you still be doing it today if you’d seen next to no progress? 99% of people would have quit at this point, if not long before, but Jimmy kept at it.

Video after video. Edit after edit. Jimmy never stopped. Here are a few things Jimmy tried:

1. Counting to 100,000 - 24 hours in one take

2. Saying “keep net neutrality” for 10 hours straight (no idea what this means…)

3. Saying Logan Paul 100,000 times

In other words, he did whatever it took to make it. 

This graphic below demonstrates well how people often miss the “treasure” at the end of their journey through a lack of persistence. MrBeast never let this happen.

The reason Jimmy is able to be so perseverant is that he has an incredibly deep interest in YouTube and content creation. Paul Graham, the legendary founder of Y Combinator, wrote about how to build persistence in this essay, titled How to Do Great Work.

Do common things uncommonly well

A focus on interesting stories, great editing, good character arcs and great promo was certainly nothing new for YouTubers. What MrBeast did differently was break down each video into the most granular of details. Does a thumbnail that’s 10% brighter get more clicks? Does a 12-minute video do better than an 11-minute video? How many cuts do we make in the edit? Do we record at eye level or slightly below?

While in isolation few of these changes make a material impact, but the cumulative impact of them compounds to a significantly better product. The results are not linear - they are exponential. This is perfectly evidenced if we compare MrBeast’s subscriber growth to that of an exponential chart.

In other words, much like the compounding effect of money, in the creative process, small but consistent progress is unbelievably powerful over long periods of time.

Growing the right way

In my research for this post, I’ve read interviews, listened to podcasts and obviously had to go back and watch a load of MrBeast videos….What is striking about everyone who interacts with Jimmy is that they all say he is a grounded, generous, and kind man.

There is often a narrative that to make it to the top of whatever field you choose, you need to approach it with such directness it can approach aggression and ignore everything that doesn’t help you achieve your goals. While MrBeast has taken his obsession to new levels, he’s managed to combine it with other initiatives he wants to achieve.

He set up a channel called Beast Philanthropy - boasting over 23 million subscribers - enabling him to leverage his expertise on YouTube to bring charity and awareness to causes he believes in. A few of his initiatives:

• Raised over $24million to plant trees and revert deforestation

• Built numerous schools

• Built over 1,000 wells in Africa to provide clean drinking water

• Funded over 2,000 prosthetic legs for amputees from mines

• Gave away 20,000 shoes to kids in Africa 

• Gave over $3,000,000 in aid to refugees from Ukraine

Changing the world requires enormous work, considerable skill and a healthy dosing of luck. MrBeast tried to remove luck from the equation as much as possible and just worked until people watched his videos - it seems to have worked so far…

If this is the first time you’ve heard of him, I suspect it won’t be the last!

Some interesting resources:

• [Watch/Listen] The Full Story of MrBeast

• [Watch] MrBeast’s most viewed video (594 million views), costing over $4million

• [Watch] 24 hours with MrBeast as he opens his first burger restaurant - over 10,000 people turned up