Breaking down my most viral video

What I’m Reading

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius is easily the book I’ve reread the most. Every time I do, I glean a new nugget and it helps me realign.

Resource of the week

A video from Jeremy Ethier going through a 5 minute mobility routine. Very few people prioritise mobility, even among gym goers but it can make a big difference in the long term. Especially if you have lower back pain, stiff shoulders, hips etc I recommend watching. Jeremy’s mobility and exercise tutorials basically got rid of my lower back pain. I only really feel it now when I do a marathon session on the rowing machine, as opposed to even sitting down too long sometimes.

Quote

“The soul becomes dyed with the colour of its thoughts.”

Marcus Aurelius

News and trends

In a rare move, multiple councils from East England have launched the Safe Suffolk Renter’s Initiative which will consult with PRS landlords. Not sure whether anything will come of it, but it’s a welcome change in approach.
UK house prices fall for sixth consecutive month. To be fair it sounds a lot worse than the reality: on an annual basis house prices are down 4.7%. I would class this as a correction, not anywhere near a crash, especially following the crazy growth we’ve seen since coming out of lockdowns.
On the flip side, for yet another week, mortgage products have come down. So affordability is still improving.
TikTok is testing an ad-free subscription tier. As a relatively new platform, a big complaint creators often make is the atrocious monetisation with TikTok. Could this be their strategy to address this? As a side note, from a personal standpoint, I signed up for their Creativity Program which was meant to improve monetisation but still nothing of significance. For ref, my video which generated 1.2 million views made an estimated £122.

Thoughts

So I had my first viral video since being a content creator. To be fair I have made a couple of videos that generated a lot of views, but in my mind, I feel that you can’t call anything viral nowadays under a million views so that’s the metric I use.

Annoyingly it has nothing to do with the usual videos I make about finance, or property, or economics, or any of the videos I spend more time on. I didn’t even script this one out. It was essentially me ranting for 5 minutes. A video that a lot of commenters pointed out, is the epitome of first-world problems: ‘This dude who sounds like Harry Potter is bitching about his $1,000 pen not laying down ink the way he wants it to’.

So why would people want to watch that?

Well, the internet loves a story, especially, a controversial one.

The point of the story isn’t about pens at all. It’s a story about principles, being wronged, being bullied and standing up for yourself.

To be completely fair, it did get blown proportion, but also people love an underdog story. The underlying theme is one of standing your ground when you think you are right and not letting up.

We can all relate to that, everyone can recall a time of feeling powerless.

To be honest, from my standpoint. The main driving force was how I was spoken to by the initial sales rep and the patronising tone. My reaction was I don’t even care if this goes nowhere, I just want to do something and not just accept it. I felt a lot better once I had submitted the claim I didn’t even particularly care about the result.

This video also confirmed a suspicion I had about one strategy of doing well on social media in general and that is the ability to tell stories. I feel like if you are able to tell good stories, people will listen to you talk about any topic. A bit like how Old Top Gear was such a successful TV show internationally with mainstream audiences despite it consisting of 3 middle-aged men talking about cars which most people don’t care about, but they made it entertaining by telling good stories with a narrative.

There is also just something very human about telling stories which goes way back to when we used to gather around fireplaces and make art on cave walls. As someone who's very introverted it doesn't come naturally to be but it's something I will work on going forwards. As a side note, I attended a public speaking workshop years ago and I was told that everyone becomes a great speaker when it's something they are angry about. And it did help in my case.

So the message this week, is if you want people to be interested in what you have to say, think about telling good stories whether it’s in your love life, business, or just in general. Secondly, when something isn’t right, you owe it to yourself to not let people push you around.

Hans