- MrBeast, YouTube's top creator, thrives on a relentless work ethic and extreme challenges.
- In a recent interview, he spoke about the situations he finds particularly difficult.
MrBeast is the world's biggest YouTuber for one main reason: he's a workaholic.
Becoming No. 1 isn't easy, and he's the first to admit it. But, in a recent interview, he said he even enjoys pushing himself to the extreme.
He also said he's not about to take a break anytime soon.
Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast, is the biggest YouTube creator in the world with 262 million subscribers. He is just four million subs behind the channel of T-Series, the Indian music label, and is on track to take over and snatch the top spot in a matter of weeks.
In an interview with journalist and YouTuber Jon Youshaei, posted on May 28, Donaldson spoke about loving pushing himself to the point of misery, his mental health, and how time off is simply not an option.
Youshaei asked Donaldson about his schedule, to which he said every day off "is kind of an L for the content."
"Every day I don't film is the day I could have filmed and made these videos better," he said.
Working to exhaustion has many negative impacts on someone's physical and mental health. Symptoms of burnout from overworking include feeling tired, a lack of enthusiasm, increased negative feelings towards one's job, and worse performance.
For years, YouTube's stars have spoken about feeling burned out due to the ever-changing industry and an unrelenting pressure to post new videos and evolve. Some long-standing creators have also recently thrown in the towel, saying they don't know how to succeed on YouTube like they used to.
Donaldson, however, doesn't seem to have hit that wall.
"I mean, I just work so much," he said when Youshaei asked how his mental health was. "I don't have time to think about it."
Donaldson told Youshaei he doesn't mind pushing himself, such as when he counted from 1 to 100,000 in one sitting, which took around 40 hours.
"Weirdly, I get enjoyment out of going to the point of misery and then pushing through it and finishing," he said.
It's a lot for someone to put themselves through, and Donaldson has been making content and performing increasingly intense challenges for over a decade. However, he said he doesn't see "any world where I'm stopping."
"I mean, what else would I do? I mean, maybe I'll take Sundays off consistently and play Call of Duty or something, but I'm not at that point yet," he said. "I probably have at least another 10 years before I need a break or anything like that."
Donaldson has spoken many times about how much work his videos require. In March, he said it was "painful" to see people quit their jobs or drop out of school to make content full-time before they were ready.
"For every person like me that makes it, thousands don't," he said. "Keep that in mind and be smart plz."
Donaldson makes hundreds of millions of dollars in a year, but he puts everything he earns back into the content. In a recent profile in Time, he said 12,000 hours of footage can go into making a single 15-minute video, so the costs can be massive.
In his interview with Youshaei, Donaldson went through the pain-staking process of choosing thumbnails and sifting through all the footage from hundreds of cameras for some of his videos.
'"Most people can't do that because I think we had petabytes worth of footage," Donaldson said. "It would've taken a single human five lifetimes to watch all the footage we had."
Donaldson also told Youshaei he is "technically the product" of his videos, as well as effectively being the CEO, so "it all falls apart if I don't show up."
"I don't recommend most people do videos like me, it requires you to have a lot of team, a lot of money," he said. "It's a lot of stuff just resting on your shoulders."
Donaldson also spoke about his extreme experimental content, such as spending time in abandoned cities and burying himself alive. These things he has no issue with, he said.
But, he said, he cannot cope with heat, the sun, and bugs.
"If it's an extreme challenge and it doesn't have those three variables, I got it," he said.
But those three things together, such as his video posted in March where he spent seven days on a desert island, was a challenge.
"It was miserable," Donaldson said. "And I was like, I can't do five more days of that, which is good, that's something I've learned about myself."