#116: How Casey Neistat Gets Away With Murder

What is the ultimate quantification of success? For me, it's not how much time you spend doing what you love; it's how much time you spend or how little time you spend doing what you hate.

You can always work harder than the next guy. And if you're willing to work harder than the next guy, you will succeed ... I know what hard work can yield, and I know just how meaningful working hard can be.

I believe in the religion of work and working hard. And I think that's something that people resist ... The more I find myself sort of preaching the values and the virtues of that, the more resistant people are. But I just believe that anything can be achieved through hard work.

I have a rule, which is always listen to everyone, and then reject everything you don't like. But the truth is... So many people love shilling knowledge... And the truth is no one knows anything. Life is this malleable, mushy piece of clay that's only up to you to shape, and when you look too much to other people to help you shape that piece of clay that is your life, you end up with a compromised lifestyle, something that's not your own.

YouTube, unlike filmmaking, is not a one-way street; it's this reciprocal, symbiotic, relationship that your content has with a very specific audience and then that audience has with your content. So, to succeed within there is very challenging, and I think the only way to do it is to find your own path. The only way to find that path is to act, is to start going.

The only advice I ever give is don't think—consideration will not yield success on YouTube. I think it's purely based around action. Some other things I push are quantity matters. It's not just the quality of the work, but it's also the quantity of the work. People look to YouTube not to find great, well-made films; they look there for relationships.

I think people are so quick to be judgmental and be negative. And the truth is, if you give other people the benefit of the doubt and you have a positive approach to everything in life, that you end up being happier and it's better for them. It's like that absolutely quantifiable mathematical equation, which is: What's best for you and me is better for me than just what's better for me.

It is so cheap, it is so inexpensive, it is so easy to be cynical, to be negative. To be someone who brings other people down and brings yourself down is really easy to do. Being nice, being positive, is really hard work, but you feel so much better at the end of the day.

The biggest waste of energy and resources on YouTube is you see YouTube creators trying to copy and be exactly like someone else, and the only thing that succeeds on YouTube are people that are thinking outside the box doing new things.

I think that what YouTube uniquely possesses in its audience over any other distribution outlet is that the audience is so fine-tuned to bullshit. Their bullshit detectors are so highly refined that even the slightest amount of bullshit will set off their alarm, and then you'll be rejected.

Don't blame it on the gear, don't blame it on a lack of resources. Because it's never the resources that determine your success; it's how you use what you have.

You make a decision and you move on that decision. And it's better to, later in life, figure out that that was the wrong decision than it is to sit around and have never had made a decision in the first place.

I don't know what the exact number is. I think it's 1.1 billion different channels on YouTube, and there are 400 hours of content uploaded every minute of every day to YouTube ... The vastness, the depth that is the ocean of YouTube is this huge abyss. It's very hard to stand out.

I've never, ever been a fan of sleep. I hate sleep. Sleeping and eating are like my two least favorite things to do. And I'm frustrated every day when I get tired, and I'm frustrated when I get hungry.

I definitely see people as people at face value. And I think that, you know, what you contribute and what you do is incredibly meaningful and important, but at the end of the day, we are all people.

With technology, almost anything is achievable.

There's a real trouble with gifting books, which is that, if you're gifting someone a book, it means you think that they're going to actually read it. And I would say, more often than not, most books that are gifted are more a gesture by the person who gifted them to you than they are you receiving them.