“The Great Pacific garbage patch is big, but in 10 years, with the right funding, we can remove that out of the ocean. “Some of the challenges we face won't be solved in our lifetime, but this is one that we can solve,” Rober said. Beast raised over $23M for #TeamTrees Mark Rober And they’re so much more likely to share the video.” “When you can buy into the character,” Rober says, “It just resonates with people so much more. Rober gave each of the four squirrels a name and backstory so we can relate to them more: Rick, Marty, Frank, and Phat Gus. In one of his most popular videos, Rober created a “ squirrel obstacle course” and presented the four squirrels who come to get the walnuts as “contenders.” It feels almost like a game-show.
“But none of them named the squirrels like that.” There are a lot of people who made videos about squirrels in their backyard before me,” Mark Rober told me. And I just put all my effort into that.” Clearly, it pays off.Ĥ) Create Characters To Tell More Powerful Stories Rober says, “I just frickin’ laser-focus on my monthly videos, and I swing for the fences every month. “I've been very protective of my treadmill speed and I've just kept it at a jogging pace,” Rober told me, completing his analogy. And each time we were learning more and more.” Mark Rober’s videos take a lot of work, but the end result pays off for it. He spends months setting up his projects, going through iterations (for his elephant’s toothpaste video, he told me, “we scaled up from a desktop version to a 4-foot version to a 10-foot version so that we could do the 20-foot version.
Rober works his rear end off making jaw-dropping, quality content. But here’s the thing: slow doesn’t mean lazy. “But what inevitably happens is that dopamine hit wears off, and you're still sprinting on this treadmill.” “You could go at a sprinting pace – do the book, do the podcast, launch the merch line, go on tour,” he said. Many people preach the old adage “life is a marathon, not a sprint” but few actually follow it. if I split an idea into four videos that each gets a million views, or if I just put that in one video, that gets 20 million views? I just have these concentrated nuggets of coolness that I try to put out every month.” “I think there's something that comes from just laser-focusing on a thing,” Rober explained. For his “liquid sand” hot tub video, Rober searched hundreds of patent drawings and made 25 prototypes to find a way to make the video. For his squirrel obstacle course video, he had to condense a year’s worth of footage down to 15 minutes. I have to make it engaging the whole time.” But with YouTube, you're on your devices. I try and state everything as succinctly and directly as possible,” Rober said. “I will spend a half an hour getting five sentences down to like four and a quarter sentences. During our interview, I was stunned to hear how long he spends scripting every second of his videos. Let's figure it out.”Ģ) Create “Concreted Nuggets of Coolness”įor Rober, less is more. When I don't, what can I learn from it? Boom. He told me, “I’'ll try to stack the dice in my favor, but at the end of the day, it doesn't mean I always hit the ball out of the park. This is how Rober views his career as a YouTuber. But you don't do that for a video game,” Rober continued. And we immediately tell ourselves, ‘We're not good enough. Rather, we take the loss as a way of learning so we get closer to completing the level.” Rober calls this “The Super Mario Effect.'' He explained that “We don’t let losing at video games, like Super Mario, discourage us from playing again. Namely, 16% more of the non-penalized group successfully completed the game – simply because there was no real “loss” associated with losing. Nonetheless, there was a shocking difference between the two groups.