“There's a five-year point where I was relentlessly obsessed with studying virality and the YouTube algorithm. I would just sit on my computer all day studying.”
— Jimmy Donaldson
Said reflecting on years of zero results before breaking through on YouTube. Spent five years in near-total isolation studying what makes videos viral, not for fun but with obsessive precision.
2012 to 2017, nobody watched my videos. Maybe a hundred subscribers after years. Every day I studied other creators, broke down thumbnails, hooks, pacing. People called it unhealthy. I called it necessary. If you want something badly enough, you don't dabble, you obsess. The gap between where you are and where you want to be is the hours you haven't put in.