 Good morning, John! It's my last Pizzamas video! I can't believe it went so fast, though it was a very long couple of weeks. It had happy times and sad times and reunion videos and charity gollas. And now I'm in New Hampshire, visiting family, and I want to be clear that this is an unusual level of weird. However, I would be lying if I said that my life hasn't gotten really weird and really cool and really wonderful and really complicated over the last eight or nine years of us making vlogbrothers videos. My life is not normal. I don't think any lives are normal, but my life is clearly not normal. And I am a number of things that I was not back in 2006. I am professionally respected, I am fairly well known, and thus one might say that I am a success. Ever since people have started to say this to me, that like, what's it like to be successful, or congratulations on your success, I have felt really weird about it, like, troubled by it. And I was having a hard time figuring out exactly why I was feeling this way. Like, is it modesty? Is it false modesty? Maybe a bit of both of those. But after thinking about this for a while, here's what it actually is. I feel like when someone says, congratulations on your success, they're putting you into a category of people that is extremely difficult to achieve, not only a very small percentage of humans on the planet could ever achieve, and then saying that that is a thing that all people should strive for. Despite the fact that the only way that something like this can happen to you is even happen to stumble across a great big pile of steaming luck and then fall into it and get it stuck all over your body. And just like, I can't get this luck off of me. Like, there isn't enough space in human brains for everyone to be known by a large number of people. And that's what fame is. Weirdly, it's just the ability to have your face recognized by a larger than average number of people. Yeah. Look, I'm very happy. I'm a happy person. But I was happy before I was successful. Like, I was happy in 2006. I had great friends and great family, and I was working on interesting projects, and I had learned a lot of things, and I was excited to learn more. And I don't think that most people would even argue that success is a necessary part of happiness. But I think we do conflate those two things. And whenever I'm told that I'm successful, I worry about what that word means to the person saying it and what it means to society. Like, does it mean achieving the things you want to achieve, which is the good definition? Like, I want to do things, and then I did do those things, and thus I am a success. I have succeeded. Or is it achieving something that most people implicitly cannot achieve? It is impossible for most people to have, because it's based on the scarcity of resources. It's based on the fact that not everyone can be famous. It's based on the fact that not everyone can be in the top 20% of income. Is being successful being richer or more powerful or more well-known than most people? That kind of societally recognized implicit success is something that I think we all crave, and it's something that I have to some extent. But I don't think it's something that I need to feel valued and valuable, and it's definitely not something I need to feel happy. I think that it is very societally important that we figure out ways to value ourselves and value each other that don't have anything to do with scarcity. You know, the scarcity of money, the scarcity of fame, the scarcity of power even. I would much rather be and much rather associate myself with the kind of people who want to have positive impacts on a small number of people than to collect a great deal of wealth and power even at the expense of other people. So John, as I finish off my final Pizzamas video of 2015, I don't know what success is. I still don't. I know what successes are, individual things, but the acquisition of success and being a success, I think that's kind of a made-up thing. But I am very grateful. What I'm grateful for is having great friends and great family and a great community who make me feel valued, who make me question myself and question my beliefs and challenge me to do interesting and difficult things and to become a better person. John, I'll see you on Tuesday. Or no, Friday. I'll see you tomorrow. Which means, yes, we only have one day left of Pizzamas, one day left for to get the shirts and the other products at dftba.com. And thank you to everybody for a really great Pizzamas.