A friend of mine has started a YouTube Channel expecting to be a famous YouTube star and make millions of dollars in the future. It’s been two months since he started his channel and he has only 5,000 views so far. He is now worried that his dream to take over the world is fading.
He came to me for advice. Many people come to me for advice not because I am an expert but I am known in my neighborhood for having experience in many things. I am more of a ‘jack of all trades, master of none’ kind of guy. So, I told him my story and hoped he would get something out of it.
When I was 16, I began teaching the usual computer package stuff to people at a computer institute in my neighborhood. Well, I had taken the so-called diploma in computer studies package right after my SLC. We didn’t have word and excel then. It was more about WordPerfect, Lotus and dBase. Yes, the ‘old school’ people, stand up and put your hands in the air! If you knew the MS-DOS commands back then, you were as smart as Bill Gates. A lot of people thought I would be as rich as Bill Gates in the future.
Well, here I am now and I just checked my bank account and I really don’t have all that much money. I don’t own any software company either. But one guy whom I taught the basic package is a rich man now and he owns a number of IT companies. He still calls me ‘sir’ and when we meet at parties, the folks around him think I must be some kind of a IT guru if this guy is giving me all the respect. Little do they know that the courses I taught like basic word processing software don’t even exist any more.
Age of YouTube!
When I was 19, I started my own newspaper. Yes, registering your newspaper at the CDO office then was very easy. Just write down an application and that’s about it. The newspaper was published for two issues and folded. I didn’t realize then that you need advertising revenue to sustain a newspaper. Well, I did get a few advertisements from friends and their uncles but that was about it.
When I was 23, I decided to open a greeting card company and after ordering ten thousand greeting cards with a USA flag printed on it, I found out that my ‘Nepali paper’ greeting card could not compete with the ones made in China. When I was 33, I decided to be a farmer and invested some money in an organic farm and we had pigs, chicken, ducks, and lots of vegetables. After a year, my partners and I realized that we were not making any money because our staff was busy having BBQ parties every night and even making local wine at the farm and selling it to folks around the farm.
After listening to my life stories, my friend asked me why I was telling him all my failed attempts to do something successful in life. Well, the moral of the story was that you needed to have a plan to succeed in anything you wanted to do in life. If you just want to go along with the flow then your show will not last long and you have to pack up and try something else.
Although I did study management information systems in college, I did not start my own IT company or did anything IT-related. A friend of mine who started his IT company struggled for years but now makes a lot of money with work from foreign companies. You have to be patient and come up with a roadmap of where you want to go. Have a five-year, ten-year plan instead of a six-month plan and then get bored with it.
I did not think of how I would sustain my newspaper business without advertisements before I started my newspaper, mostly on a whim. When it came to the farm, I did not realize that you also need good employees to take care of your business and just paying them good salary and benefits and hoping that things will work out well was not the right way to go.
My friend had so far posted twenty videos of stray dogs, bumpy roads, and planes taking off. I told him that we all have our neighborhood dogs, airports, and bumpy roads. Show the world something else. It’s all about ‘viral’ stuff these days. We don’t know what will click but you have to try something.
My friend is good at whining and bitching about everything. He spent an hour with me and was complaining about the prices of vegetables and how no one seemed to care about how expensive everything was in Kathmandu. He was complaining about the candidates who had stood up for elections in his area. All of them seem to have business background and were involved in shady deals. Well then how about a daily vlog where you go on a rant about something in the country, I suggested.
Yes, if you are good at talking for hours about anything then you have the skills to be a daily vlogger. You don’t need to go around shooting people walking on streets or dogs pissing on cars or planes taking off from our airport. Just stay home and ask someone to turn on the camera and then tell the world how you feel today. I hope my friend becomes a YouTube star and make his millions.
The writer is a house husband who believes in changing, if not the world, the community he lives in one person at a time. Reach him at kalumaila99@gmail.com
