 Earlier in 2020, when the world still had a semblance of normalcy, Jake Paul announced the release of his course that guaranteed to help anyone become a successful influencer. To show you how much the world has changed, I noticed that in Curtis' video about Jake, that he actually still had tour dates up just a matter of weeks before we went in full pandemic lockdown. But after Jake's announcement, plenty of YouTubers made videos about how this program is a scam and it's nothing new from Jake. Previously, Curtis' good friend Drew Gooden made a video as well as a follow-up video about Jake Paul's Team 1000 program. But this video essay isn't necessarily about the micro topic of Jake Paul scamming his susceptible audience. I felt that this was an important topic to visit because in current times, many young people want to become influencers. According to research from the social entertainment network Clapit, they found that 1 in 12 young people would completely detach themselves from their family just to become famous and 1 in 4 would quit their current job to become famous. In the UK, a team of researchers studied over 1,016 year olds and more than half had no desire to go into professions that didn't involve being a celebrity. With the rampant amount of young people who want to become celebrities, it's no wonder Jake Paul keeps marketing these types of programs. But in Curtis' video, he said something that was quite impactful. Currently, Curtis Connor has almost 2.5 million subscribers and each video he's had in the last month has topped over 1 million views. So, is there a proven strategy to become a famous YouTuber like Jake Paul says? Or is the primary component luck when it comes to becoming a modern day celebrity? When our future generation has millions, if not billions of young people, hoping to become influencers, it's time to have a serious talk about the balance between hard work, skill, and good old fashioned luck. When I was growing up, this conversation really only happened when discussing becoming a famous musician, a professional athlete, or a traditional TV or movie star. Today, with social media and the possibility of going viral, many more people are dedicating their time to becoming the next influencer. In this video, my goal is to argue that although many influencers have succeeded due to great qualities such as hard work and perseverance, Curtis Connor is correct when he says that luck plays a major role. This isn't just about the realm of influencers either. This is about every life path we can choose. Whether you have your eyes set on a certain college major or a career path, it's of the utmost importance to understand the role of luck. And at the end of this video, I'm going to explain how failing to recognize this truth can destroy your mental and emotional well-being. I first started thinking about the subject when I read Outliers by the bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell. In Outliers, Gladwell dispels the conventional wisdom that every success story involves sheer skill and perseverance. Gladwell argues that stories of success are much more nuanced and random than any of us would like to believe. For example, he starts the book by analyzing how the birthday of a Canadian hockey player is the biggest factor in whether or not they'll go pro. Gladwell explains how 40% of the top players will be born between the months of January and March. Why, you may ask? Because in youth hockey, kids are grouped by birth year. On average, children born at the beginning of the year have almost an entire year's worth of advantage over any child born at the end of the year. These kids have an extra year of practice to hone their skills as well as a major psychological advantage. Another gift that these players receive is known as the Pygmalion effect. This is a psychological phenomenon where high expectations lead to improved performance in a given area. Before we get started, we need to address the elephant in the room. And that's the fact that we hate having this conversation. As people, we're control freaks. We want to believe in meritocracy and the idea that if we work hard, we can achieve what we want. In fact, one of the core arguments of conservative values relies on the idea that you can just quote unquote pull yourself up by your bootstraps and everything will be fine. As someone who personally worked extremely hard to overcome my decade long drug addiction that almost killed me, I definitely know the value of hard work and its relation to outcomes. But if we don't address the randomness and luck involved in success, it can destroy our motivation and wellbeing. When young people in the camp of Jake Paul believe that there's some sort of formula to being famous, they're going to be blindsided by a world of factors completely outside of their control. But for those who follow the philosophy of Curtis Connor, you can learn to better manage your expectations while also producing the best work possible. In this video, you'll learn how the latter leads to a much more fulfilling life. The first thing we're going to look at is how Hollywood is a series of good and bad bets and there is a lot of randomness at play. But if you're new to the rewired soul, be sure to subscribe and ring that notification bell. Here we apply critical thinking and skepticism to various topics to improve our own mental and emotional wellbeing. And you may have noticed this wonderful new artwork and it comes from Codremilk. Go follow her on Instagram. She's an amazing artist and she's always helping out the channel. She just does it because she's a genuinely kind person. So go show her some love, follow her at Codremilk, over on Instagram. I'll link it down in the description. The first thing we need to understand is that there is an abundance of scientific and psychological research when it comes to what makes something or someone popular. Think about it for a second. When we look at the multi-billion dollar industries of music, movies and TV, there's a lot of money to be made in being able to predict what will and won't be a hit. For decades, Hollywood has been bringing in ideas from the smartest minds in the realms of social psychology, statistical analysis, behavioral economics, and more. If someone could pin down the formula of what would become popular and what could turn a massive profit, they could conduct much better risk analysis and invest their time and money in the right places. Unfortunately, this isn't the case at all. A dozen publishers passed on Harry Potter before the series was picked up, and there's a similar story behind George Lucas' Star Wars franchise. Although publishers, record labels, and movie studios may kick themselves for passing up an opportunity that could've made them rich, let's look at the opposite side of the spectrum. Investing in a film seems like a bigger gamble than buying a lottery ticket. In July of 2020, I saw the news that Netflix was investing $200 million in an original spy movie starring Chris Evans and Ryan Gosling. Based on the star power of these actors, that might be a wise investment, but then again, it might not be. On average, it costs $100 million to make a movie, but many movies with a lot of star power completely fail. For all of the money that Disney has made off of its hits, you'd think that if anyone had the formula for investing in the best movies, it would be Disney. In 2013, Disney invested $275 million into The Lone Ranger, and they also invested $307 million into another movie called John Carter. Disney made great bets on movies like Avatar and Star Wars The Force Awakens, which both made over $2 billion a piece, but the former two movies were massive losses. The Lone Ranger lost roughly $8 million, and John Carter lost over $123 million. So, if arguably one of the most powerful entertainment companies in the world can't predict success, it strengthens Curtis' argument that Jake Paul is full of it, or just doesn't realize the amount of luck involved in creative ventures. So right now, I'm currently reading Dr. Drew's book titled The Mirror Effect, How Celebrity Narcissism Is Seducing America. It's interesting reading it because he wrote this before the boom of platforms like YouTube and TikTok. He discussed how in the early 2000s, reality TV made people famous just for being famous. Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie, and Anna Nicole Smith helped boost reality shows involving celebrities. Also, Brett Michael's Rock of Love and Flava Flav's show Flavor of Love gave normal people the opportunity to become pseudo celebrities. One contestant on Flavor of Love, New York, even ended up getting her own show. Then there are the Kardashians. Today, we can look at everything they've accomplished and the brands they've created, but how they get famous in the first place. What separated them from any other family a film crew might follow? Thankfully, people like Curtis Connor practice some humility and realize they aren't too much different than anyone else. He knows there are an endless amount of comedy and commentary channels on YouTube and he's extremely fortunate to be in the position that he's in. While Curtis puts in a ton of hard work and creates quality content, he knows that there are many unknown creators out there who put in the work, but we have no idea who they are. Now, let's look at Jake Paul. What makes Jake Paul special? This may sound like I'm being facetious, but I really want us to put on our critical thinking hats and ask ourselves what makes him special? And what about his now ex-wife, Tana Mojo? What makes her so special? If you'd like, feel free to pause this video, grab a pen and paper, and write down what you believe makes these millionaire creators so special. Jake Paul is a young blonde white kid who started making goofy content on the internet and blew up. Tana Mojo is a young blonde white girl who started sharing exaggerated stories on her channel, which led to her gain in stardom. But when you think about it, that's not really a formula for success that can be taught or sold. Sure, someone like Tana Mojo tells sexually explicit stories is over the top and loves to party, but is that really unique? We could probably safely argue that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of young attractive girls on YouTube sharing their stories who we have no clue about. So why did it work for Tana and Jake Paul? In one of my new favorite books titled Everything is Obvious, once you know the answer, the sociologist Duncan Watts explains our flawed thinking when it comes to success. Watts explains the irrational circular reasoning that we all use to explain why things get popular. He explains how we see something that succeeded and then work backwards without ever really coming to a conclusion. While trying to sound like we're assessing creators like Tana or Jake by their attributes, we're actually doing the opposite. Since people like Tana, Jake, or the Kardashians are already famous, our minds use flawed logic to try to justify why this is the case. But when we put these situations up to a microscope, we start to realize that pound for pound, aside from their current level of fame and monetary status, nothing really separates them from anyone else. In fact, as you'll see in the next section, what's popular just gets more popular and it has nothing to do with anything us or anyone else can control. Let's all start this section with a quick thought experiment. If you were scrolling through YouTube and saw a video on a topic that you were interested in from a creator that you didn't know, but it only had a couple hundred views, would you click on it? What if that exact same topic was covered by a well-known creator and it had hundreds of thousands of views? Which one would you check? Based on the science, I bet good money that you're more likely to click on the video with a bunch of views, and this is a well-known concept in sociology known as the wisdom of the crowds. Making decisions increases our cognitive load, and there's a chance we could be wrong, so we turn to others to see what we should do. Imagine you just moved to a new city and you're hungry. You're on a street with dozens of options, but you don't know which place to eat at. Due to the wisdom of the crowds, there's a good chance you choose the restaurant that has a bunch of people inside rather than the one that's empty. Without even thinking about it, your unconscious is saying, that place must be empty because it's not that good, and this other place must be good because that's where everyone is. Believe it or not, this has been duplicated in more studies than you can count. In a groundbreaking study, researchers wanted to see if they could find music that was objectively better than others within the genre, so they crafted an interesting experiment. In one group, they had participants sit down at a computer with unknown artists listed and had the participants rank the songs. With the only information being the unknown artists and song titles, no matter how many times they did the experiment in this condition, the results were pretty random. One song might be someone's least favorite, but it might be someone else's most favorite. In another condition, the researchers were consistently able to predict which songs would be ranked as the best, and all they did was give the participants one more piece of information. Now, based on what you know about the wisdom of the crowds, what additional information do you think the participants had that made them consistently rank a song as their favorite? Was it maybe a picture of the band? Was it some sort of music video? No. It was actually just the number of downloads. In this group, not only did the participants see the name of the band and the song, but they also saw how many people were downloading the song. In different variations of the study, the researchers would make one song have the most downloads and consistently people would rank it as the best song. Then the researchers would swap the numbers for the most and least downloaded, and it'd be the exact opposite. While we love to believe that we have great taste, the reality is that we typically just follow the crowd, and this leads to what's known as the Matthew Effect. The Matthew Effect is a common term used in sociology, and it discusses how what's popular just gets more popular. The Matthew Effect received its name from the parable Matthew 2529, which says the following. For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them. We see this play out every day in the economy as the rich continue to get richer, while the wealth gap continues to grow. So when it comes to influencers like Jake Paul, we must consider that the famous just get more famous. Once you have the numbers, more people are going to click on your videos because other people have clicked. This then increases the amount of people who can share your content with someone else. Fortunately, there are grounded creators like Curtis Connor who understand this and don't take all of the credit. Something Curtis experienced is something that many creators experienced, which is a snowball of growth once they hit certain milestones. And it's all thanks to the Matthew Effect. Curtis started his YouTube channel in 2014, and it took him five years to get to 1 million subscribers. After hitting 1 million subscribers in May of 2019, he was able to double that to nearly 2.5 million within just the next year. And the same thing happened to his partners in crime, Danny Gonzalez and Drew Gooden. After hitting a million subscribers in 2018, Drew doubled it in the next year. Meanwhile, Danny has experienced the Matthew Effect even more. Danny broke 1 million subscribers in 2018 and now he's about to break 4 million subscribers. What I admire about creators like Curtis, Danny and Drew is that they're truly grateful for the success and managed to stay humble. But even though luck played a role, should someone like Curtis take a bit more credit for his success, that's exactly what we're going to discuss in this last section. If you're like me, learning about this stuff can make you extremely cynical. This is actually an extremely relevant topic right now as BLM protests continue to rage on and we hear more about the struggles of people of color. Aside from having no control over your race, you have no control over your gender and women have been mistreated since the dawn of time as well. And even if you're fortunate enough to be born with a slew of advantages, you might be held back due to something like a slow metabolism that makes people unfairly judge you for your weight. This means that some of us, no matter how much money we throw at Jake Paul, you'll never become an influencer. But on the other hand, when we watch someone like Curtis, we can get inspired and become hopeful. When I first got sober eight years ago, I saw so many people in a better position than I was in. In 2012, I destroyed my life and had absolutely nothing. No money, no friends, no family, and I wasn't even allowed to see my own son. Getting sober was going to be the biggest challenge of my life because I didn't have resources. Meanwhile, I saw other people getting sober who were handed everything. Their families would buy them a car, pay for their apartment, and get them a job, and then these people would relapse. I couldn't believe that someone would squander the opportunity they were given, and it actually made me appreciate my struggle a little bit more. In one of my all-time favorite high school movies, Can't Hardly Wait, when the main character Preston is having an awful night and comes across an angel stripper, she drops some truth on him. In this scene, she says, there is such a thing as fate, but it only takes you so far. Then it's up to you to make it happen. And this is what we can all learn from someone like Curtis Connor. Curtis sees his opportunity to become an influencer by putting in the hard work and honing his skills. Aside from being hilarious, nobody can match Curtis' green screen skills. Curtis spends a lot of time learning new editing tricks to make his videos stand out and improve his skills. Without trying to improve, Curtis may not have the success he's currently experiencing. Many of us experience the same luck as everyone else, but we don't take action. And that's what separates the winners from the losers. Although there's so much that we don't have control over, what we do have control over is the effort that we put in. Personally, I've seen more people die from addiction or relapse than I can count, and I'm extremely fortunate to be sober today. But it's because I work on my mental health daily. I meditate, I'm in therapy, I talk to my support group, I write in my journal, and I educate myself about living with my mental illnesses. How many of us have the resources to go to therapy, but we don't take advantage of it? How many of us would rather spend our time binge watching Netflix rather than improve a skill that makes us happy? And before we end this video, I'll leave you with this and I'll get a little bit vulnerable. For most of the month of May, I was extremely depressed. Although I'd taken an antidepressant and the pandemic is affecting all of us, that downward spiral made me even more depressed about this very channel. I felt like I was putting in all this work and going absolutely nowhere, but then I started reading all of these books about why things get popular, and I learned about all of the randomness. This was crucial because my old solution was to work harder, which led to burnout and more depression. Rather than making me even more cynical and depressed, it was like a thousand pounds were lifted off of my shoulders. And after taking a few weeks off to self reflect, I finally had some clarity. I think too many of us beat ourselves up because we blame ourselves if we don't succeed. Personally, I'm my harshest critic and I'm harder on myself than anyone. I think that if I'm not getting results, it's all my fault. But the reality is, I don't have nearly as much control as I think I do. The only thing I can control is my own work ethic. And that has to be good enough. Now, these last couple months, I've been in a perpetual good mood. I've gone from being a workaholic to someone who knows how to take breaks. I spend more time with my beautiful girlfriend Tristan and my son while also working two jobs and creating content for this channel. Today, I'm happier than ever with my content because I take my time and I'm focused on what I can control. Regardless of how many views I do or don't get on each video, I can sit back and be proud of myself for the work I've put in. And that's all any of us can hope for. All right. So thank you once again for making it all the way through this video essay. And I wanted to chat for a second. Let me tell you why I felt compelled to make this video. It absolutely breaks my heart thinking about how many people put in all this effort and they work hard and they don't get the results that they're looking for and they blame themselves for it. Like, I think this is such an important topic to discuss. There are so many things outside of our control, especially when it comes to something like trying to become an influencer or whatever it is. But I think about people filling out college essays and trying to get into a school. Maybe the person who read your essay had a bad day. Maybe you have the same name as their ex-boyfriend or girlfriend and it triggered them. You know what I mean? So I don't want you to take things so personally. None of us can. All we can do, like I said many times, is put in as much effort as we can and then just hope for the best. Like I'm the father of a son who's 11 years old. He's about to go to middle school and high school and all that other stuff. And like I'm trying to teach him to value the effort and the hard work that he puts in because we have little to no control over the results. And like I mentioned in this video, right now we're talking about Black Lives Matter and hopefully we'll talk about more forms of prejudice and everything like that. Like there's, you know, misogyny. There's issues that the LGBTQ community has to deal with. There's so many biases. So I don't want you to think that your hard work was for nothing. Maybe it was just trying to work with the wrong person or you were taking the wrong path, right? So in no way am I saying like, oh, everything's random. Don't even try. No, work hard, do your best, hope for the best. All right? Like statistically, the harder you work, the more you try, the more you learn and try to hone your skills and the happier you are, the better off you're going to be and you're going to have more opportunities. All right? I can go on about this forever, but it's already been a long video, so I'm going to zip my lip. But anyways, if you're struggling with this stuff, if you're beating yourself up, if you're down on yourself, if you have poor self-esteem, whatever it is, like trust me, I get it. And like I said, like even though I don't have control over my, you know, diagnosed mental illnesses, like my anxiety or my depression or anything like that, like I work on it daily. All right? So if you would like, personally, I use the online platform BetterHelp for therapy. If you would like to try it, it is always linked down in the description or in the pinned comment. And yes, it is an affiliate link. So all that means that you get affordable online therapy and a little bit comes back, supports the channel, all the work that I do here. So if you're beating yourself up and you need help letting go and realizing what you can and can't control, give therapy a try. All right? But anyways, I'm going to go now. Thank you so much for watching. If you like this video, make sure you give it a thumbs up. If you're new, make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell. And if you're not yet, go over to Instagram and follow Calgary Milk. I hope you guys enjoyed that art that she did. I love it. I love this new editing style and all that. So go follow her over on Instagram. It'll be down in the description. See you later.