You are building an empire, and you should know that empires are not built overnight and they do not fall easily. They should be built on a strong foundation so that they withstand the test of time and are resilient when threatened. Empires are not built upon a single pillar and, similarly, your career should not be built on a single success. One success is a terrific building block, but it’s not the only thing supporting you. If you land a promotion at work, your empire isn’t resting on this one promotion. Your previous work experience, school degree, and great technical skills all act as pillars that hold you up. Similarly, one pillar crumbling away does not destroy an entire empire; therefore, one failure should not destroy everything you’ve built.
In other words, if one opportunity will make or break your success, then your idea of success isn’t solid enough to begin with. Even if you get the job, ace the test, or kill the sales pitch, you can’t bank your entire success on one achievement.
But I get it. When you’re faced with a great opportunity, your mind can get a bit carried away and dramatic. Throughout my career I’ve received many opportunities to collaborate on videos with some pretty cool people, including Selena Gomez, Priyanka Chopra, Shay Mitchell, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Every time I’m presented with one of these opportunities, I struggle to come up with a video idea, which is strange since I normally pump out two creative videos a week. But I end up convincing myself that no idea is good enough for this once-in-a-lifetime collaboration. After all, this collaboration is with someone epic and it needs to be better than anything else I’ve ever done! What if 1 million new people who’ve never heard of me watch this video? What if my entire future on YouTube depends on this one collaboration? I rack my brain trying to think of something spectacular, and if all goes well, I finally write a creative I feel confident about. I shoot the video, edit it, and upload it, expecting it to alter the trajectory of my entire career. I patiently sit in my office chair waiting for the president to call me and offer me some sort of award. Perhaps they’ll let me walk on the moon. Better yet, someone will give me the key to the moon! Well, first they’ll build a door on the moon and then they’ll give me the key. Either way, I’m getting a key!
“YOU CAN’T BANK YOUR ENTIRE SUCCESS ON ONE ACHIEVEMENT. YOUR SUCCESS SHOULDN’T WALK ON STILTS.
But then nothing happens. Sure, the video will garner some buzz and maybe even receive a few more views than usual. But after a day or two, things go back to normal. In fact, many of my solo videos have done better than some of my biggest collaborations. After waiting for the key to the moon several times, I’ve learned that a super-cool collaboration isn’t ever going to be the thing that “makes” my career. Instead, my career is the sum of everything I do.
Other times I’ve made videos that weren’t received well. While scrolling through the negative comments I’d think, “This is the end. My career is over.” But it never is. Next week I post two more videos and the previous one is forgotten. I wouldn’t have much of a YouTube channel if one bad video caused the entire thing to collapse. That’s the position I want to be in, one that allows for mistakes and growth in equal measure.
I enter auditions with this same mentality. Of course I want to do my absolute best in an audition room, but before I enter I say to myself, “This isn’t going to make or break you.” This puts my nerves at ease and allows me to stay calm. If I nail the audition and get the role, that’s amazing, but my career still won’t be defined by that one role. My empire is made up of my YouTube channel, my book, my collaborations, my social campaigns, and my partnerships.
Having said all this, I’m not suggesting you should approach important opportunities with nonchalance. You should always give 110 percent of your energy and effort. But at the same time you want to be in a position where you cannot be impacted so easily. You can be the ruler of a strong empire but still have the mentality of a hungry hustler.
So if you find yourself stressing over one opportunity or one failure, perhaps the real problem is the foundation you’ve built. A Bawse cannot walk the walk if the ground is crumbling beneath them. You need to strengthen your empire.
You are not a teetering tower. Your career is not standing on one leg getting a Breathalyzer test on the side of the road. Your success is not a game of Jenga. You cannot be made or broken so easily.
Build Your Empire
List all the pillars that make up your success and that will NOT allow you to be made or broken with ease.
SOCIAL MEDIA has made everyone insecure. Don’t get me wrong—if I could, I would marry YouTube, and I’m completely in love with Twitter because it provides me with endless entertainment and information (and memes—lots and lots of wonderful, glorious memes). But social media also exposes us to what everyone else is doing. And let’s be real: according to Facebook, everyone we know is happy, always dressed to impress, at the gym, politically correct, eating right, and constantly cuddling a cute puppy. When you’re going through a rough patch and doubting your very existence, seeing Kelly from your social studies class on the beach with a martini and a hot boyfriend isn’t very helpful. That’s because we compare other people’s highlight reels to our blooper reel and accept that illusion as reality.
We all do it. There have been so many times when I’ve had a day full of rejection and failure and then I sign on to Facebook only to see that two of my high school friends just got married. I’m sitting there, single, trying to make it in Hollywood, alone in my apartment, eating burnt popcorn for dinner, and just staring at this wedding reception album thinking, “What the hell am I doing with my life? Am I completely delusional? Should I be getting married? I don’t even remember the last time I was in a relationship! I AM LITERALLY NOT DOING LIFE CORRECTLY.”
Then a few weeks later I’ll connect with one of my newly married friends and they will tell me how they got into a fight with their wife and then signed on to Facebook only to see a picture of me with Michelle Obama at the White House. They began to think, “What the hell am I doing in my life? Here I am getting married, spending time on floral arrangements instead of my career! What if I fail at my job? What if I never make it to the White House? I AM LITERALLY NOT DOING LIFE CORRECTLY.”
Here’s the thing, though. There is no correct way of living life. Similarly, there’s no one path that leads to success. A Bawse knows that there are many different pathways to every destination in life, and just because you’ve only been given one set of directions, that doesn’t mean ten other roads don’t all lead to the same place.
Throughout my life I believed that the only way to make it in Hollywood was to audition over and over again for movie roles. That’s all I was ever exposed to in films and through stories people told me. You have to move to L.A., struggle a lot, have a side job, and audition many times until one day you finally land a role. After moving to L.A., I realized that auditioning over and over again was only one way to achieve success in Hollywood. My career on YouTube was actually paving a new pathway to the same end goal. You see, the audition process is very grueling and competitive. There can be ten people who are all great for a role and yet someone is chosen over the others for reasons no one will ever really understand. Looks, height, weight, accent, ethnicity—all of these characteristics can factor into the decision. My success on YouTube gives me something special, and that is a following. When I walk into an audition, the casting agent knows that I bring a very large online audience with me and that my audience is ready to support me in my future projects.