The year I wasted

It ended up being the most profitable thing I’ve ever done.

2018. College bedroom, door closed, talking to a camera that nobody was on the other side of.

I’d check the numbers at night like they might have changed since the afternoon. They hadn’t. Double digits. Again. I was making a video every single day teaching what I knew about real estate (my whole credential was $50K from flipping a few houses in college and a few hundred YouTube videos I’d watched), and the internet’s answer, every day, was almost total silence.

The worst part wasn’t the silence. It was who broke it.

My “friends” (quotes intentional) found the videos. They sent them to each other. I was a group chat joke while I was doing the bravest thing I’d ever done, and I knew I was the joke, and I kept posting anyway. If you’ve ever tried something publicly, badly, while people who’ve never tried anything watched from the bleachers, you know the exact taste of that. It doesn’t leave.

That summer I made a decision that changed my entire life, and I want to be precise about how unimpressive it felt at the time:

I decided to post every day for a year no matter what the numbers said.

That’s it. No montage. No sign it would work. A decision made by a kid the evidence said was failing.

Here’s what the year actually looked like, because nobody shows you the middle of these stories.

It took me FIFTY videos before one crossed a thousand views. Fifty. Imagine doing anything fifty times in a row, in public, to near-zero response, while people laugh. Every one of those days the rational move was to quit. Three months in, I finally made money (a couple grand a month selling simple digital products). Rent money. Nobody’s dream.

And at the end of the year? I had posted every single day and had “nothing” to show for it but 10,000 subscribers and a joke reputation. By every scoreboard my hometown believed in, I had just wasted a year of my 20s.

Now watch what the scoreboard couldn’t see.

Every one of those invisible days, I was getting better. Not feeling better. Getting better. Hooks, pacing, titles, what makes a stranger stop scrolling. None of it showed up in views yet. All of it banked. You get better in the dark, and the dark keeps no receipts, so you have to take it on faith (which is exactly why almost nobody stays long enough).

Then judgement day came, the way it eventually comes for everyone: as an opportunity that looked small.

I took everything that “wasted” year taught me and started a new channel: Reddit stories. Three months later it was doing 10 million views a month. It made me more in a single month than most people I grew up with make in a year. The same people who’d been laughing asked me how I got so lucky, so fast.

So fast. I almost couldn’t answer.

Because I knew the real math. It wasn’t 3 months. It was 15. The overnight success was just the first time anyone bothered to look.

Here’s the sentence I’d tattoo on the inside of every 22-year-old’s eyelids if I could:

If I had quit at month ten, I would have missed my whole life.

Sit with that. Month ten, I had every reason to quit and no evidence to stay. The people who quit at month ten aren’t weaker than me or dumber than me. They just didn’t know month thirteen existed. Nobody told them the reps were still counting when the numbers weren’t moving. Nobody told them opportunity doesn’t reward the talented. It rewards whoever’s still standing there, ready, when it happens to walk past.

You catch luck by showing up when there’s no reason to. That’s the whole cheat code, and it’s barely a secret. It’s just a price almost nobody’s willing to pay in the currency it costs: looking stupid for a year.

So fall in love with getting good. Not with the outcome. The outcome will spend years ignoring you and then arrive all at once, and if you’re only in it for the outcome, you’ll be long gone when it shows up. Fall in love with the skill. The reps. The version of you that month fifty builds.

Most people won’t ever get good, because they’re not willing to be bad long enough.

Be bad longer.

Waste a year like I did.

It’ll be the most profitable thing you ever do.