Trading on Yourself

 24 million views ...

Most of my advice to artists falls on deaf ears, but I'll keep trying.

If you haven't, take some relaxed time to watch Foo the Flowerhorn's channel.  I don't know him, I'm not a "fish guy," I can't imagine taking the time he does to do what he does ... but he makes videos on a subject that fascinates millions of people, producing celebrity music video numbers.  How?

He knows what he's doing.

Of late, I've become increasingly disenchanted with youtube.  It's not the format, not the length of videos or even the subject matter, though millions are out there trying to make a buck plagiarizing content made by other people ... which is more pathetic than anger-making.  No, for the most part, it's the amateurism.  Content creators see someone else making money — lots and lots of money — playing videogames or creating low-budget animated documentaries, and they think to themselves, "I can do that."  But really, they can't.  And it shows.  The "history channel" guy thinks that history is recounting the events in order, without meaningful commentary or discussing the source material.  The social-media pundit uses the word "everyone" to describe who agrees with her, while flashing up a poll that shows 49% of people on her side.  The film studies guy trashes a movie because the actress wore a Nine Inch Nails tee, but there's no NIN music featured in the film.  Woah, you're right — I should never watch that film again!

Oh, of course there's an audience for a lot of this.  The audience isn't much brighter than the creator; it's the joke with the bear again.  The creator doesn't have to be smart; the creator just has to be less stupid than the viewer.

But, this doesn't last.  Like a television show, creators run out of content; they run out of stories to tell and ideas to share.  They run out of nerve, resisting any chance of offending the viewers they do have.  And like a tv show past its 8th season, the creator starts to crack.  Soon it is going through the motions, making money but oh gawd we're tired ... and worse than that, we started doing this as a teenager and now we're moving into our thirties, and we don't have an education.  We don't know if we can get one.  We've been playing video games, day in and day out, for eleven years ...

In some ways, success is worse than failure.  But we can talk about that another day.

People will tell you that if you want success, do something popular.  Do it regularly.  Make a plan.  Don't expect success right away.  Keep it fresh.  There's nothing wrong with this advice — unless you're counting on success right away because you need it to pay your bills; or if you hate everything popular (that's me!); or you haven't time to do it regularly, or you can't because it's sucking you dry; or you have no idea how to make a plan; and that while you have a desire to make money, you're not really, shall we say ... imaginative.

Well ... if you can teach yourself how to edit videotape, you can go through the entire Marvel film library and take a cut of every time Tony Stark says "Pepper" and clip it together.  Then pretend that's a sign of how creative you are.

Or ... you can do what artists have done for millennia.  You can learn how to do something.  Like the fellow at the top of this post.  You can gather together a set of skills that will enable you to do things that ordinary, everyday people cannot do, but which is fascinating enough to watch for a time.  It matters that very few other people can do it — or are willing to do it.  It matters that you're proud of it; that you believe in it; that you know how to do it; and that when you're confronted on it, you can explain yourself.

This requires an education.  Practice.  And if you're at all interested in doing this seven years from now, passion.  Let me assure you that seven years of your life isn't very long.  It seems long, especially when you're young and you've never done anything for as long as seven years — except go to school.  If and when you get on the other side of those seven years; when you're tired and ready to quit; when you don't know how to tell your thousands of followers that you've got to quit ... that's when you realize the whole rest of your life is an unbelievably long time.  And you've just spent seven of it pissing yourself into a shame spiral.

You can't plan if you don't know what you're doing.  And you can "keep it fresh" if you understand very little about what "it" is.  You can make a bunch of money for awhile acting like a clown, for popularity's sake, but money goes away, and the people who think you're wonderful go away and find someone else that's wonderful.  You can be a one-hit-wonder on the internet, just like in real life.  You can be famous for awhile ... and play your hits for awhile ... until one day you find yourself starting a new iteration of yourself.  Failing.  And then a new iteration.  And failing again.  As you hate yourself, you hate what you've become, you hate the fans that have abandoned you and you just hate.  Until you're at some job where you hope, you pray, that no one will recognize you; and you know you never want to tell anyone that once, 15 years ago, you had 1,675,000 followers on youtube.

Being a creator is great.  I'm a creator.  I'm a little fish in a very, very tiny pond — so tiny that many people haven't heard of my pond.  And in my pond, I swim all the time in the enormous shadow of an entity that receives carte blanche, even if it's done nothing to deserve that in 30+ years, while all the creators of the entity are dead now or pathetically trading on name recognition.  The big voices in my pond are celebrities on the template of Adam West ... fabulously nice guy, made an iconic TV show, toured all the game cons until he passed recently; but absolutely not respected among his "peers," that being other actors (not game-con goers), who did not consider him one of their number.

Still, however small that I am, I know what I'm doing.  I can discuss any part of this game with anyone; I can teach anyone how to play better, if they want to play better.  I can produce and create completely new things, even though I've been at this 40 years.  And I love it.  I feel no shame.  No sense of time wasted.  No regret.  I don't wonder what I'm going to be doing for the next 30 years of my life.  I got my education.  I did my practice.  I found my passion.

I went through a rough patch after 2016.  It can happen to anyone.  When it happens to you, believe me, you want your ducks in a row.  You want people you can count on; you want skills you developed early in life that will keep you alive after.  For me, thank the stars I learned to be a good cook in my 20s, as it kept me alive in my 50s.  I had other skills.  I learned to sell myself, and write.  I can change.  Roll with the punch.  None of which things I would have been able to do if I had been handed internet money early in my life, before learning to do something else.

So be careful.  Get on the net, make your channel, sell your stuff.  But don't stop learning.  Don't stop stretching.  Give good content; and make it of use to other people.  Play to the lowest common denominator, play to the groundlings, and you'll find yourself without anything or anyone and a long, long time left in front of you.  Think a long way into the future, because you're going to be here a long time.