Shut down or double down

Hey, it’s Bog.

I recently had a weird realization.

Turns out I was completely wrong about YouTube the entire time.

Back when I first started making videos, I had this idea that growth on social media is exponential.

(And it is. But not in the way I thought.)

I always thought it was this nice, smooth exponential curve:

Where you can expect to see no results week 1, week 2, month 1, month 2, month 3, month 10, or year 1, but somewhere around year 2 and 3 is when the fun begins.

But actually it looks something more like this:

A bunch of S curves stacked on top of each other.

And while the end result is the same, the experience of getting there is very different.

Let’s zoom in and look at one of these S curves.

This is what you usually see as it’s happening in the moment.

And seeing this doesn’t feel good (whether it’s YouTube views, your chess knowledge, workout progress, or your road to a higher rank in a game).

After a massive jump in progress, now it’s just flat. Whatever you do, it no longer goes up. All the effort you keep putting in seems to be for nothing.

There are no results to keep you motivated.

And so you want to quit.

Same for me.

No bueno.

If I quit, then there’s a 100% chance I won’t see the results I wanted.

And ideally, I’d like there to be less than 100% chance of me failing.

So how do you break through the flat parts that suck?

Going through this kind of progress over the last 3 years of making YouTube videos taught me a few valuable lessons that I wish I knew way sooner.

These lessons would have helped me stack the S curves on top of each other much faster.

And most importantly, avoid getting stuck in the flat parts (the ones that suck).

1. Shut down or double down

The in-between never works.

Whenever I think, “Huh.. this thing that I’m trying hasn’t really worked out, but I didn’t really give it my all,” the best course of action is usually to:

Commit to it fully and give it a fair shot.

Or completely bury the idea and move on to something else.

If I don’t (1) commit fully or (2) give up fully, then that thing ends up constantly eating away at my mental space.

Which stops me from being able to fully focus elsewhere.

2. Subtract instead of adding

Most people think, “What can I add to this to make it work?”

I found that adding things is rarely the way to go.

Removing things is what usually makes stuff better.

“What could I remove from this video to make it more entertaining?”

“What could I remove from my environment to help me focus more?”

“What could I remove from this newsletter to make it better?”

You have a pile of crap, and you keep removing the crap until you end up with a slightly less bad pile of crap. You keep removing the slightly less bad crap until you end up with a semi-decent pile of crap…

Let’s take making YouTube videos, for instance.

At the beginning I thought that the fancier stuff (aka crap) I added into my videos, the more people would want to watch.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

When I decided to start removing stuff (like music, fancy edits and fancy stock footage, even simplifying the way I speak) and focusing on only the few core things that actually matter, that’s when a lot more people started wanting to watch my videos.

What helped me make the most progress was thinking, “What else can I remove?” instead of “What else can I add?”

(P.S. If you want to learn the 3-step system that I use to get 3+ million long-form views/mo on YouTube, check out my yt course - The 1 Hour YouTuber. You’ll learn how to apply the exact same system I use to your channel.)

3. 10/10 on one thing instead of 1/10 on ten things

Scenario:

I decide to start a YouTube channel, and after some time I think to myself → “Ohh yeah, I should probably make Shorts as well” → “Uuuu, I should start a newsletter” → “Mmmhh yes yes yes, let’s make a course” → “Boooya why not another course?” → “Screw it 5 more mini-courses” → “What if I made a second channel, yeah that could be good” → “I should also create a Twitter account, you know, to see what’s going on there” → “You know what would be cool? An entirely new business idea unrelated to YouTube, oh yeah baby let’s go…”.

I did most of these things, and they probably slowed down my growth by a metric ton of… growth units.

If you spread your energy across 10 things, you’ll make tiny progress across 10 things.

But if you do NOTHING ELSE but focus on 1 thing, you’ll get really damn good at that one thing.

And guess what.

Being a 0 or a 1 in those other nine things still makes you bad at them.

But being the best at one thing gets you asymmetric rewards.

The problem is that it’s a lot easier to be 1/10 invested in 10 things than to be 10/10 invested in one thing.

Putting all of your attention into one thing is really, REALLY hard.

That’s good and bad news.

Bad because it’s hard.

But good because it’s also hard for others. Most people won’t put in more than 4-7 points of effort into one thing.

Which means that if you manage to do it, you’ll completely stomp everyone else.

Imagine going up against someone who spends 100% of their energy laser-focused on just one thing that you’re trying to compete against.

Also, putting in 10/10 effort into one thing usually doesn’t look like 2 weeks of 12 hours per day of work.

It looks more like 5 years working on one thing 3 hours per day. Or 1 hour per day. It’s the slow, sustained effort that matters.

Thanks for reading 👋!

❤️ My Favorite Things

🖥️ OLED Monitor:

I’ve been really enjoying my new (too expensive) monitor that I got around a month ago. I didn’t expect it to be THAT different compared to my old monitor (which had a 1440p resolution and an LCD screen), but looking at an OLED screen is just surreal. It’s miles better. Or kilometers. And the screen recordings look CRISP at 4K resolution. Yeah, I’ve been really happy with it so far. After a month, it still gets me excited to look at it and do work.

✍️ Quote of the Month:

One of the best ways to make better quality work is to lower the stakes. How can you gamify it. Where if you die you can just respawn and try again. - Not sure who but I found it in my quotes list.

​🧪 The 3-step system I use to get 3,707,149 views per month on YouTube.