"At thirteen, Jimmy Donaldson started uploading videos to YouTube “pretty religiously”. When he had just over 8,000 subscribers he made a video that he scheduled to go live five years later, in 2020, as a message to his future self:"

"“If I don’t have a million subscribers when you see this video, my entire life has been a failure.”"

"The way he liked to learn, he says on another podcast, with Lex Fridman, was by treating his mind as if it was a neural net, an algorithm that learns to solve tasks by simply consuming a gargantuan amount of data."

"Considering how rapidly MrBeast, now 24, has mastered new skills over the last few years, growing his channel to 221 million subscribers, scaling a team to a few hundred members, building a 50,000 square foot studio, starting a hamburger brand, negotiating deals with Walmart, scaling the logistics needed to ship chocolate bars to 10,000s of stores, etc, I thought it’d be interesting to look in more detail at what it means to learn this way."

"He is skeptical of extracted knowledge — knowledge that has been extracted from its context and turned into advice or frameworks or theory."

"The domains he wanted to master are too complex to be summarized in a lecture. Whatever could be communicated that way was so simplified as to hurt more than it helped."

"Not because he’s not generous — he is known to have mentored a large number of successful YouTubers, sharing his insights — but, he says, he does not know Lex and his audience well enough, and there are no good rules that apply across the board, apart from, well, just make good videos."

"But even in chess one of the best predictors of future excellence is how much time a novice spends on studying actual games, trying to predict the next move, training their minds “like a neural net”."

"You can’t just feed your brain information if you want to learn effectively; you also need a serious project."

"Stop sitting there and thinking for months and months on end, and just get to work and start uploading. Like, all you need to do — this applies to people who have not uploaded videos, but have dreams of being a YouTuber — is make 100 videos and improve something every time. Do that."

"You will see the patterns you need to navigate to become skilled."

"Envision a world where you're trying to be great at something and it’s just you learning and fucking up"

"But if you have four other people who are also messing up, and when they learn from their mistakes they teach you what they learn. Hypothetically . . . two years down the road you have learned like five times more."

"they get to learn from each other’s mistakes, and they can share know-how at a very high resolution."

"The answer, these days, is: by working in public. Which is what he had been doing."

"Work posted online is a search query to find fascinating people. When you work in public, when you share your insights on Twitter or a blog, or by uploading your videos, your code, your art — people find you"

"MrBeast: I somehow found these other four lunatics. Three of us were college dropouts."

"And we basically talked every day for a thousand days in a row and did nothing but hyper-study what makes a good video. [. . .] Some days I'd get on Skype at 7 am and I’d be in the call until 10 pm and then I’d go to bed. I wake up and I do it again."

"There was, in other words, little luck involved. They collectively extracted the know-how needed to consistently do what they wanted to do, which was to go viral."

"I just got back from a mastermind where I got ten of the smartest people I know, and we locked ourselves in a cabin and taught each other stuff."

"Now I’m studying how to build a content company so I can actually produce the crazy ideas I want to produce."

"He needs editors who understand how to edit YouTube videos with the same stupid sophistication he has; he needs managers that can make the same decision he would have made when he’s not around; he needs people that can come up with ideas for videos that are as good as his."

"For the core team, this took the form of “cloning”."

"Like James, the guy who’s basically my right-hand man right now, two years he lived with me. And we probably talked on average those two years, seven hours a day."

"Anytime I had a phone call, I’d throw it on speaker and I’d let him listen. Anything I was reading, any content I was consuming — like really training his brain to think like me."

"It is a feedback loop that lets you grow beyond what seems reasonable to you"

"Here is the basic story of growing up. You observe the environment and the people around you"

"You meet new people; you can now learn from them. And so, you climb the ladder of skill and status."

"He made his team contact all successful YouTubers, asking for their private data, so he had more data to train his mind on."

"Whenever you see someone who manages to achieve more in a month than you do in a lifetime, you can trust that this type of feedback loop is working in the background."

"They seek access to even more data. They find even better mentors and more obsessed peers. Repeat, repeat, repeat."