The Tube

I spent years chasing what I thought would make me successful - only to find myself stuck, suffocated, and creatively drained. 

Checking my YouTube channel, you’d think that I had started just a couple years ago doing product reviews but I started making videos a long time ago. Really bad videos, but videos nonetheless. 

I can’t find the channel anymore but if memory serves, one of my very first videos was of an aquarium that I had put together that I was proud of. 

The next set of videos were videos from me and one of my best friends in high school launching off model rockets. I have approximately 0 desire to cringe at my younger self and watch those videos but you are more than welcome to track them down and give me a hard time. 

I’m honestly surprised, a couple of them had around 500 views and no dislikes somehow. 

My desire to get back on YouTube was fueled by a desire to share my experience with products and to help people not waste their money on products that aren’t worth their hard-earned cash. 

It was also selfishly fueled by the desire to get free products from companies so I could make more and more product reviews and not have to buy the products. 

My goal was to review mid to high-tier products and get to the point where the channel began sustaining itself with the free products that I was getting. 

I’ll tell ya, it’s hard being this selfless all the time. 

The more content I created, the more I began to feel trapped. Confined to a small corner of my wide-spanning interests. The more I posted, the more I suffocated and felt that I was locking myself into this niche that I wasn’t prepared to sign my life away to. 

Being 6’9”, I have always feared getting trapped in the bend of a water slide because I am outside of the standard deviation that they accommodate for when designing them - resulting in my inevitable drowning via water slide clog - and here I am stuck in one of the water slides of the water park that makes up my personality.

I could feel my shoulders getting progressively jammed against the sides of the slide hearing more and more advice about niching down being imperative to channel growth. Doing this ramps up your subscriber count by creating predictability in your content.

I do not do well with others controlling my life AT ALL. This stifling of my personality and interests caused it to finally happen. I got stuck in the bend of the slide when I reached 300 subscribers. 

Paralyzed knowing that the harder that I committed to my niche, the less likely I was to ever explore any of my other interests.  

Getting stuck stunted my desire to record and stifled my creativity. I would record videos and sit on them. Never editing them so they couldn’t be published for fear that I would further solidify my tragic fate. 

Weeks turned to months. Months to over a year. 

While I knew I needed to post, I couldn’t bring myself to so I turned my attention in another direction. Content consumption as a form of procrastination. 

There’s no better way to feel like you are being productive than consuming hours and hours of content to help you produce the content that you aren’t producing when you are watching hours and hours of videos. 

But something changed. The YouTube algorithm gods smiled upon my pattern of consumption and sent a massive wave of water down the slide. 

I discovered Dan Koe. 

Finally, a breath of fresh air. Sunlight. An original idea that I can resonate with. One that enables me to be me. Not just part of me but my whole self.

He shared this concept of personal brand which I talk to my employees about all the time and hadn’t thought of creating publicly. 

The deeper I went down this rabbit hole, the more it resonated. My desire to post, sharing myself and sharing value to others increased. 

I started to learn how to code using AI, postponed my goal of being a giant white guy walking into an Izakaya speaking fluent Japanese, and turned my focus to larger goals. 

Gaining more control over my life and impacting as many people as I possibly could along the way. 

Better yet, Dan showed me that I could post content that I want to talk about and share my life in a way that resonates with me. Instead of niching down, he proposed the idea of becoming the niche. 

I’ve spent years chasing what I thought was the ‘right’ path — only to realize the right path was the one I carved for myself. Don’t let someone else’s idea of success box you in. Share what excites you. Explore what interests you. Be yourself — fully and unapologetically. And trust that the right people will find you when you do.

Not everybody will resonate with you or what you are doing, and that’s okay. 

If you are yourself, you will naturally attract people. The right people. They may not resonate with everything you do but if you can share one part of your life, your lifestyle, or your thought process that positively impacts them, it’s all worth doing. 

It has taken most of my life for me to find a goal that I deeply want to pursue and YouTube has managed to be with me along that journey. Supporting me and pushing the right people my way to create the right direction for me to pursue this meaning. 

I know that I am not the only one that has had this experience and I won’t be the last. But if I can become the niche, sharing my experience and my life with you, maybe - just maybe - I can help you avoid some of my mistakes and help you find your purpose faster than I found my own.