10 harsh YouTube lessons we wish we knew at 20

TL;DR

Colin and Samir share 10 hard-won creator lessons including storytelling, community, failure tolerance, and clarity being more important than luck.

Key Points

• 1.Nobody cares about your story — until you make them care. Colin ignored a lacrosse trade story until Samir reframed it as a storyteller's job; spending a month with Paul Rabil turned it into their most successful series.
• 2.Context matters as much as the idea itself. Inspired by Virgil Abloh's candle metaphor, they learned that packaging an idea in a pitch deck with a name and logo transformed how people received the exact same concept.
• 3.Success is just the opportunity to do more of what you're currently doing. Editor Steven Marin (who won an Oscar for Traffic) told Colin that staying an assistant editor would only lead to more assistant editing — prompting him to quit and start YouTube.
• 4.Failure always hurts, and that's by design. Their golf video with Good Good was an '11 out of 10' flop despite heavy investment; Colin argues that still caring about performance is inseparable from running a creative business.
• 5.No one is going to save you — the work is the answer. After pitching a documentary to Justin Bieber and Scooter Braun (who got 'chills'), producer JD Roth bluntly told them they'd be cut out because they needed the deal more than the deal needed them.
• 6.Not all views are created equal, and clarity is more powerful than timing. Samir discovered Colin from a 500-view video; Colin notes everything he wanted eventually happened at 37 — just not how or when expected — and they link 16 self-reflection questions to help find clarity.