Many decades ago Hollywood screenwriter, William Goldman said “Nobody knows anything.” Now the longer quote is in Hollywood. Nobody knows anything he was talking specifically about what movie; what entertainment property would be successful. It is all kind of a guess you can make educated guesses but until a movie is released to the world. You never know what is going to be successful. It could be what you think is the worst possible thing and it is a huge hit. It could be something you think is a surefire Oscar winner and total bomb. It was true that it is true now but it is true – much larger sense about anything that you create. Any creative product, anything you speak about.
Now this lesson really came home to me within the last week major front page profile in the New York Times of a woman Bethany Gaskin. She is a YouTube star. She speaks on YouTube now that might not surprise you but her specialty is something called Mobbing where people simply watch you eat food most. I am not making this up when I read the story I had to check it out. I did not believe it but this is a perfect example of something that most people certainly I would have said “This is a horrible idea to devote time and energy creating content for a show that just features your features you are speaking for a minute or two about what you are eating and then eating food in front of people. I would have said “Horrible idea! Never work, no one would watch this and I would have been 100% wrong,” so when Goldman says him nobody knows anything. He is talking about me. I know nothing. Guess what! You know nothing too – about what is really going to work. That is why I do think it is critical to constantly being experimenting, constantly put out new ideas out there. Try different venues for speaking, presenting your ideas, packaging your ideas. Now I will link in the description below to this woman Bethany Gaskins YouTube channel. You can check it out for yourself.
Now here is what is amazing. She is made millions of dollars from this and if you put together all of her views for a couple of channels she is on her way to about a half a billion views of people watching her speak and eat on YouTube. When you think about it she is probably one of the most successful speakers in a sense in the world today, based on how many people watch her speak and how many people she makes from all this, absolutely is done.
Here is the thing you could take the top 1000 public speaking experts, media training experts who put out content and have their own channels on YouTube. I doubt all those views combined would add up to the views this one woman is getting. No I am not trying to convert you to her channel. I have seen it. I do not think I could ever watch it again. It is not something I think I would watch even if you paid me – other than the initial interest of what is it. But let’s give this woman credit. She took the initiative of trying something, trying something new putting her face on camera which is something that most people in the world even if and he have fancy degrees and all sorts of credentials are too afraid to do. They are too self-conscious to do. This woman said I do not care if I do not look like a typical TV newscaster or university professor. I might not be as polished as other YouTube celebrities. I am just going to do it and she did it and you can see it is it is definitely not what you would see on typical network fare.
Her audience is astounding, astoundingly large and she is making money and in a sense I do not know her personally and she is not a client of mine but she is living the 21st century dream. She is making a lot of money, has no boss, has no clients, works from home gets to put out her vision of creativity creative output has lots of fans, has control over her schedule as intellectual and creative control over a product that she is creating and seemingly has an idea. Again I would not want to make a YouTube channel of people watching me eat which is not what interest to me. Probably does not interest you but I want us to go deeper and look at what we can learn from someone like Bethany. She was not afraid to try something new. She was not afraid to get on camera. She was not afraid to experiment and she was not afraid to stick it out.
I guarantee you she did not have a million views the first day she put up a video or even the first week are probably the first month. It took time she honed her craft, she increased the production values she got even more comfortable speaking on camera and now she is got a little mini Empire that I think my awful lot of people in the world would die for.
So that is why I think it is important to look at other creators around there who are speaking and that is the starting point when she comes on with our video the starting point is her speaking talking about what she is going to eat aspects of her life and then look it sounds ridiculous you still might not believe me check the link below. If nothing else for a couple seconds, the bulk of the content is her eating. This is not your role model as far as content but this is your role model. I think as far as someone willing to experiment do new things, reach out to new audiences and then really deliver something audiences care about and to make a meaningful business out of it and in some ways a meaningful life too. So check it out I am TJ Walker if you are looking for more tips on how to be a better speaker, check out all the other videos on this site. If you want even more check out the links to the online training. If you want to get deeper in your skills and the best of all possible worlds is call me up and schedule a one-on-one or group live training session. Thanks!