https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KINwPiqJX4

I got home and heard him say the silent stuff aloud.

Say what you will about everyone’s favorite center-left skater boi, but Tim Pool, for all his faults, did not get into the YouTube grind without an overarching objective that ties into everything else: solve problems as best as possible.

Think Spotify and other mainstream outlets are biased in what gets featured and what gets number one? Do an informal grassroots project where even the suckiest indie punk singer ever manages to land a high note at No. 1 or 2.

Want to get a message out to Times Square? He’s got you covered!

What about putting a spotlight on a couple of silly provocateurs? You don’t need an example from me, buddy.

If you’re not into coffee, just have Chicken City in the background. I can see the appeal. I don’t need to devote full attention to it, unlike a video or podcast that’s new, which translates to working around the house undistracted.

A snarky upstart cut from the initial cloth of Vice (which has shuttered itself to “content production” of unknown form), Tim Pool weathered the protracted buffoonery of “Occupy Wall Street” and non-profit organizations, including a homeless shelter, after hauling luggage bags at an airport between silly debates about the nature of ghosts to his many, many flat mates. He is somewhat proud of his mixed heritage of one-quarter goofball and three-quarters workaholic, but he will delegate tasks that might be either beneath him or beyond his comprehension. If you endeavor to embrace media production, you must engineer some kind of infrastructure.

Not to mention tact.

Tim gets tons of negative publicity and not enough positive stuff, so I decided to offer a simple reply for this video in particular: don’t ever assume that he says this in a vacuum. He once did a video about the dropping-in that must happen when on the half-pipe. He understands the psychology of getting into entrepreneurship. However, I temper my grin as he is not the only guy who says this. I hear this a lot out of another gent who has run websites since 2003: Miles Beckler.

While he’s sort of getting up there, Miles Beckler’s time on the net is still pretty short. The net is quite young. At any rate, he found himself in the same position as other entrepreneurs on YouTube such as Tim Pool and even Jessica McCabe: living with his parents at an age where he should have moved out (or have been able to do so). His initial approach was to treat entrepreneurship as the securing of priority one: making money.

Now, this basic objective is rooted in self-interest but, really, that is all it is–self-interest. The issue with Miles is that he could not make headway and his schemes were inspired by a guru-of-the-week who robbed him of money while complicating what is a simple process towards riches (i.e. they prescribe a plan, but signing up to hear more is how they ever earn money, so it’s a self-perpetuating cycle of poverty). The true objective, the actual priority one, is solving problems and helping others. If you worry over cash, treat the acquisition of such as a “zeroth priority” (zero is a neutral, not negative, number in math, while one is positive and negative one is negative). The cash should be seen as an afterthought. If you cannot help others, you cannot be an entrepreneur. Since everyone can help others, there are neither excuses nor limits.

Anyway, it sounds fantastical, but what Tim says in response to the Doomer YouTuber skater punk is thus: whether it’s a nine-to-five or not, treat it as that step on the way to help others solve their problems; a very Beckler-ish thing to say. I listen to both men. They tend to have a certain slacker archetype embedded into their process that I find endearing. Once Miles kicked the dope habit and applied himself in the online business world, helping his wife run a fun little angel-and-gemstone website that still rakes in cash even today, he started up a YouTube channel and teaches the basics for free. Every lesson receives a much-needed and much-obliged dual-punctuation of “Help Others” and “Dodge Gurus”. If you watched one or two, you might have seen them all. If you linger and click the links, you’ll learn the particulars.

That’s how my descent into madness began. I became sickened by not getting headway in creative projects (or getting head in general!) and quit my job in frustration, even after opting to work graveyard shifts. Under worsening mental health, I decided to work for myself, but didn’t know where to start. I heard about affiliate marketing and even optioned the Wealthy Affiliate program for a time. I cannot trace every step, but it led to Miles and it led to me making this site. I kept getting paralyzed by a routine paranoia over whether people, even my niche of isolating hobbyists, would appreciate what I have to say, including the stuff meant to help them out of a jam. Tim Pool has always been something of a minor phenomenon, someone unfettered to bleed into a microphone on stage or in front of his computer but, knowing he cornered those markets already, I decided to document my life while also describing how I try to manage it for good or bad.

And yes, while it’s primarily a personal blog, I try to offer hints on staying organized without tacking on extra steps. Or, if I do, make sure they are not just comprehensible, but replicable. If you’re like me or even if you’re way worse, you’ll still be well skilled to tackle life head-on. And hey, those two are complete doofuses. They somehow succeeded, not with a work ethic, not with connections, but with a desire to help others solve their problems, not for them, per se, but get them in a place where future problems are already squared away now.

If you’re curious about Miles, his YouTube Channel is https://www.youtube.com/@MilesB and his regular site is https://www.milesbeckler.com/

Good hunting.