Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…So my theory is that somebody’s gotta be successful, so why can’t it be you? That was my… When I started my channel, I mean, I didn’t start it to… It started by accident with the Dylan video. And really, so many people reached out to me. I started it six months after that viral video. So many people wrote to me, “Can you teach me this?” Pro musicians, well-known ones who you’d know. “Can you teach me this?” I can’t teach you what Dylan did, but I can teach you relative pitch, develop your ear that way. But then I had conservatories writing to me about this stuff from all over the world. “How did you teach Dylan this?” ‘Cause we made about four different videos, and they got more and more sophisticated. And so I thought, “Okay, I’ll make some YouTube videos and explain this stuff.” This is, that’s really why I started, so I didn’t have to keep… I couldn’t answer the emails. There were so many of them, so I just started making videos on how to train your ear and music theory. And that’s really how I started my channel, and my wife was like, “What are you doing?” I said, “I’m making YouTube videos.” “Why?” So I don’t have to keep telling people how I did this stuff. And then all of a sudden, you know, I had 4,000 subscribers the first month, another 4,000 then. Hit 100,000 after a year, and then six months later, 200,000, then three months later, 300,000. So- I think there’s one thing that should be said, that in modern culture for young people, a lot of them will see YouTube and TikTok and Instagram, and they kinda wanna be famous. They wanna get the clicks and the views and so on, and that’s the thing they chase and optimize. I think the thing that you’re leaving unstated perhaps is that you spent many years pursuing the mastery of a craft. And there’s a lot of value to getting good at something. Absolutely.…

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