That said, it might work out, who knows? But at some point it looks like gambling with your time and energy trying to seek fulfillment. Again, they are free to do this, just try not to harm others in the process.
Then those aren't people Jimmy wants to hire for his company. There are hundreds of millions of teenagers on this planet that want to stake everything they own to make a YouTube channel and reap the rewards - ownership of their work, being their own boss, potentially lucrative amounts of money, microcelebrity if not greater levels of fame, etc. Some will do it, and some won't. Jimmy is very clearly talking to those people.
I know because I was one of them, making my first few hundred dollars ever from adsense at the age of 14 (till I was demonetized a year later and my channel got taken down for copyright, but hey, you learn). I've since grown a bit a taken that energy and it's helped guide me as I learn to make my own startup right now - it's the same adrenaline rush and pursuit of the American dream.
Just wanted to share some fond memories.
is it the same "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" shtick the american dream brainwashed americans with?
if you have that much drive and want to invest so heavily in work - do yourself a favour and do it as a leader where you call the shots and have the equity instead of as a follower.
Everyone seems to think that they have the answers to this question... Family, friends, community, god, volunteering at the local soup kitchen..
All over your own wants? If you are a video creator/ creative and that's what gives you energy and all the feel good chems, why not work your ASS off for THE CREATOR of our generation?
Cause from the way i see it, success and the confidence* it brings, solves all other issues.
*As long as you can avoid the pitfall of arrogance.
I was working at Tesla on the CapEx team, and unless you were doing something "interesting", like going to Tahoe or something, then you were expected to be in the office on Saturday and Sunday.
I worked my ass off, pulling 70 hour weeks, catching naps in a conference room when there was a big push. I learned to be energized by my work, seeing the factory cells come together gave me this giant rush. Eventually, I got the thought you had but i worded it differently. "I will never be Elon, working for Elon".
So when Covid hit, i got put fully remote and started having some conversations with potential clients to launch my own consultancy. After a couple of months, our managers told us to start coming back into office. I had gotten some traction with the consultancy, so i decideded to "do [myself] a favour and do it as a leader where [i] call[ed] the shots and have the equity instead of as a follower."
At first it was great! I was learning an absolute ton, designed my own website from scratch, wrote a bunch of automation code, my sales ration was like 85% because i was just calling on all my old associates and references of references... life was great!
Then after i scaled, I realized I wasn't actually doing anything... I have these meetings, and my schedule is always swamped with evaluating this peice of software/this person, generating "Work" for different people, and i freaking hated it! I stopped learning... I had no peers, only employees. I had "Mentors" but my consultancy was so nitch so outside "Executive mentorship" i had no one to guide me. I tried to focus on growth opportunities within the company, scaling different verticles as different companies and other things to keep my mind working, but i slowly but surely lost interest. I couldn't push myself 70 hours a week because i didn't have anyone pushing me, and i hated "Consulting".
but every chance i got i would be watching drone videos over the Giga Texas progress. I kept up with every SpaceX, Tesla update ever...
And suddenly i realised, i deeply missed working at Tesla... i don't want to be Elon...
But that Elon is building some pretty cool shit, and factories, robots, automation is super cool and fun.
So i sold my consultancy for 1.5X revenues (Pretty shit deal but i wanted out). It didn't give me fuck you money but i could have chilled for a bit...
but now I'm happily working my ass off back at Tesla, fulfilling Elons dream. But i get to "Give up my life" to get to play with robots all day. I'm learning a ton again, i love my team, and i've never met a smarter group of people.
I don't have some One Right Answer to what the best thing to do with your life is, but I'm comfortable having a personal - but strong - opinion on a rough ordering that, for instance, puts family and friends much higher than a life dedicated to "THE CREATOR of our generation". Maybe you think that sounds impressive? I think it just sounds very sad.
It just about makes some sort of sense in the context of something like giving up a professional career in a developed country and moving to a remote African village to do aid work, but giving up your life to make a tonne of money creating viral YouTube videos is an absurd description.
His employees are probably payed well, but obviously don't make as much as he. So I guess asking them to give up their lives for less compensation is to say their lives are or less value...
I agree that doing meaningless work is soul crushing even if well-compensated.
It seems like it ought to be possible to do meaningful work without working 80 hour weeks, but maybe not!
And owning your own business isn't necessarily an easy 40 hours a week and don't think about it when you're not working, but sounds like you did have a lighter schedule? Or actually you didn't mention that! If you traded a 70-hour week as a well-compensated employee doing meaningful work for a 70-hour week being your own boss with possibility of making more money doing meaningless work -- yeah, I would make the same choice between those two! But I'd rather not have a 70 hour week, be reasonably compensated, and do meaningful work, if that were an option...
But we kind of forgot what we're talking about here... pretty sure nobody working for Mr Beast thinks it's meaningful work, and if they do, I'm worried about them.
The problem is that the kind of people who are ambitious enough to think this sounds like a good idea often (maybe usually) get sucked deeply into it.
But yep, I do think it's a reasonable model if you can avoid that outcome and get in and out early in your career.
No one is forced to work there and they are not taken advantage of.
Any of them are free to start their own channel and outcompete him! It's literally how he did it!
I guess to me the crass eyeball-harvesting of MrBeast seems like exploitation of everyone involved with the only meaningfulness involved being profit. But I realize based on stickfigure's response that different people find different things meaningful, fair enough. Which is different than saying "just getting lots of money is meaningful for me" -- that is a different axis than meaning, and I'm unlikely to be swayed otherwise, although some people don't need meaning they just need money. It was hard for to imagine anyone is doing it for anything but the money at MrBeast, but different people are different and some of them are hard for me to imagine, fair!
I read the PDF; profit wasn't on the list of KPIs. In fact there was quite a lot of invective against it; he'll kill expensive projects just because he didn't think the quality was good enough. Of course $$ is related, but the focus really is on the eyeballs.
I worked in porn for a while. I found the work fun and meaningful. Not every mission involves saving the world.