Casey Neistat is a cool dude who lives in New York City. He has been referred to as a “professional fun haver” (Ben Yakas, the Gothamist) and has amassed a gigantic following from his formerly daily vlog on Youtube. He is characterized by an incredible drive and a herculean work ethic, both of which have earned him a fairly high rank in my list of personal role models. This past week Casey’s social media company Beme was absorbed by CNN for a quoted price of $25 million.
This amount of money, to someone like me, is absolutely staggering. I haven’t the slightest idea of what I would do if I acquired a fraction of this fortune. You’d expect the beneficiary of such a sum to retire and live in luxury. That’s not Casey’s plan.
In fact, Casey sees this as a beginning; a platform for more creation. In the face of success, he pushes forward to see how much better he can do. This attitude, I believe, can be found as the causation of all his achievements. His life wasn’t always glamorous, in fact at one point he was just a misfit kid living in a trailer park with his girlfriend and illegitimate son.
If you’ll notice in that video, during his early life he was constantly being bombarded by other people’s expectations of him and was thus never allowed to thrive. In fact, the turning point in his life was when he found his passion. His burning inner desire to make movies, coupled with his knack for storytelling and his unique sense of humor are what have fueled his social media fame. When he started doing what he really loved, something he was able to build a skill and a career around, he started spending a lot less time second guessing and a lot more time moving up in the world. This is actually a very simple formula for success that I think a lot of people fail to achieve. Stay in touch with your passions. They are the key to both economic and existential victories.
As Casey moves forward into this next chapter in his career, he is tasked with revolutionizing news and the mainstream media. His brand will focus on the millennial audience, a group with an incredibly low level of trust for the big media outlets. Through his daily vlog, he was able to develop a uniquely truthful style of storytelling, something that really appealed to folks and earned him his following. This same methodology will be at the center of this new push to deliver news in a way that is captivating and honest.
The way we experience the world is changing so much because of the internet. It is only fitting that media and factual reporting should evolve alongside. I for one eagerly await the development of this new platform. I am very excited to see what Casey comes up with!
