Chamber 🏰 of Tech Secrets #47
Lessons from Beasts
The Chamber 🏰 of Tech Secrets is open.
Today I’ll share some of my insights from reading an internal memo from Beast Productions (production company of YouTuber Mr. Beast) that are immediately relevant and applicable to anyone looking to succeed in the business world, including in enterprise technology.
3 Lessons from the Mr. Beast Memo
Mr. Beast sends a memo to all his new employees since he doesn’t always get to spend significant time with them personally. Believe it or not, there are a lot of fantastic lessons for enterprise technology professionals within! I suggest reading the entire thing, but if that’s too much (it’s 36 pages, but some are pictures), you’ll at least get to digest a few of my takeaways here.
“What is your goal here?”
What is your goal here? Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. That’s the number one goal of this production company. It’s not to make the best produced videos. Not to make the funniest videos. Not to make the best looking videos. Not the highest quality videos.. It’s to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. Everything we want will come if we strive for that. Sounds obvious but after 6 months in the weeds a lot of people tend to forget what we are actually trying to achieve here.
Can you state what your team does this simply? Sometimes I struggle to do this. This reminds me how important it is to leave nothing open to interpretation when it comes to a team’s goal (or better, purpose). You are here to __________.
The most successful members of the team are obsessed with achieving the team’s purpose. If the purpose is clear, you make it possible for each individual to channel their passion into the right actions, and the team will move together. If the purpose is unclear or askew, the passion of each person will pull the team in different directions, and it will likely struggle or fail. Or the purpose will be confusing and won’t resonate, and individual passion will diminish.
As a leader, your responsibility is making the purpose of the team crystal clear. As a member of a team, it’s your job to make sure you understand the team’s purpose and bring your passion to it. Any failures here other than the individual bringing their passion to a clear purpose are the leader’s fault.
“Watch our videos”
If you’re going to be working for the Beast brand you should be a fan of the Beast brand. A lot of very valuable knowledge comes with watching vast amounts of our videos. I feel silly for having to write this but all the time I talk to 32 new people that have at most seen like 5 or 6 of our videos and it’s mind blowing that they don’t see a problem with that lol. As I said earlier I’d love for you to watch all the channels but especially the main channel seeing how you’re working on it. To get 60% up to speed I'd watch our last 50ish videos, if you’re a monster and really want to understand the history of the company and the innovations we’ve been through, I'd recommend you watch every video back until you hit the 10 million subscriber special. (anything before that is a waste of time in my opinion) If you’ve seen every video we’ve made since 10 mil then you will have a lot of context and information others don’t and it will make you that much much much more valuable.
Context. Context. Context.
If you know where we came from and how we got to where we are, you will be far better positioned to figure out which problems to solve in your work and then do them in a way that is aligned… and that will co-create a future we all want.
Context makes you valuable. Of course you must apply it.
What we have produced shows a lot about who we are.
How do people get context about our systems legacy (not to be confused with our legacy systems, though there is overlap)? Where is the “10 million subscriber special” in our history so that we can point people to the things worth knowing and understanding?
I have been thinking about this for my Enterprise Architecture team and have decided to add a “history lesson” segment to our monthly meetings so that we can have someone share about something we did in the past or currently have so that our team can be more equipped to apply those things (usually tools, platforms, applications) or understand why people who have been around a long time might be thinking a certain way. We probably won’t go back and spend a lot of time talking about the days where everything we did was built on top of an Oracle ERP (cause it doesn’t matter), but our last 5-7 years matter quite a bit (and much of our team is newer to our company than that). We’ll also work on expanding our shared understanding of the existing systems and integration landscape.
What we have made is a reflection of who we are… and if we want to help shape that in the future, we must first understand it.
Acting on Feedback
He will give you a list of things that you need to improve to become what we need and if you actually listen and master those things, we will give you a shot at the role [you want]. (only problem is most people think they are better than they really are and don’t take seriously when we give them things to improve and then wonder why they never move up).
Most people think they are better than they are and don’t take feedback seriously.
This reminds me of an Instagram post from Chadd Wright (former Navy Seal, ultrarunner, all-around beast)…
You are in one of three categories.
1. You are as good as you think you are.
2. You are better than you think you are.
3. You are not as good as you think you are.
Most people spend their entire life in category 3. The first 2 categories must be constantly proven…. Open competition is the litmus test. Make a commitment, train, show up, go hard and see where the chips fall. If you’re like me, you usually learn you’re not as good as you thought you were. That is what drives progress. It never ends. It’s painful. It’s humbling. It’s rare. It’s what sets true winners apart.
Ask for feedback from your boss. Ask your friends. Test yourself with challenges and give yourself feedback. Do after-action reports on your work, your workouts, or whatever else you do. It takes courage. Focus on what you can do to get into buckets 1 and 2.
Don’t get trapped ignoring or discounting feedback though. That is a sure way to end up in bucket 3. People in bucket 3 have a cap on their personal and career growth.
Bonus Takeaways
A few more from my notes…
Use the right level of communication for the thing you are trying to communicate. You didn’t communicate if you didn’t confirm they read it.
Nothing comes before your priorities! If you didn’t get your priorities completed, there is nobody to blame but yourself.
Don’t just stop because one person told you no, stop when all conceivable options are exhausted.
Consume things on a daily basis that help you get better at what you do – in his case its stupid media stuff to be clever and funny… in our case its things that help us understand tech, whats happening, and help us influence people better.
I hope you enjoyed these takeaways. Write something down and act on it. Go read the entire Mr. Beast memo and let me know what jumps out to you. See ya next week!
That Chadd Wright post is a kick in the pants. Along all of these lines, two content pieces (one a mere tweet) and another substack article — both are good kicks too and have stuck with me for days now.
https://x.com/nickcammarata/status/1876749765951562209
"if i had 10x the agency i have what would i do"
https://arealsociety.substack.com/p/the-dead-planet-theory