You've seen it in the news before – YouTubers making millions of dollars per year off their channel. Obviously, all that money is also from partnerships and maybe even a Patreon, but regardless it's still a cushy amount of money. Even smaller YouTube guys like Adam Neely, one of my favorites, makes about $3,900 per month from his Patreon, which is a solid chunk of cash. So it must be pretty damn great to make money off sitting on your ass and doing videos all day, right? Eh, not really, says Periphery's Misha Mansoor.
In an interview with Music Is Win, Mansoor says his experience watching friends with professional YouTube accounts is that the job is "a lot of work and it’s something that you have to commit to." He adds that sure, maybe you'll see a five-minute video from someone, but between the work that went into it and the editing process, that could've taken days upon days of work.
Mansoor elaborates a little more on the work ethic, saying the following.
“Absolutely. That’s one of those things no one prepares you for. And it sounds like first world problems, I know. Like, ‘Oh, I have so much free time! I wish someone would make me do something!’
“You have to learn how to manage your time. And it goes both ways, at least with me. There have been times where I was so stressed out because I was so used to saying ‘Yes’ to everything. Because you’re doing this, you’re hustling, you’re not saying ‘No’ to anything. And before you know it, you’re overworking yourself, you’re stressed out all the time. And then when you sort of cross over then it feels almost dirty to say ‘No.’ It’s like, ‘What are you, a millionaire?’
“But then you’re starting to make this calculation, the opportunity cost, the stress… Like, ‘Is this job I’m gonna do that’s gonna pay this amount of money that realistically won’t really make that much difference in my life worth all the stress that it’s gonna add?’ If the answer is ‘No’ then you have to learn how to say ‘No’ to those things. And that’s one of those things I’ve worked on in the past few years, to try to manage my time better. Because you only learn because you get overworked, and you’re like, ‘I hate my life right now.’
“We actually had to start doing this as a band when we would record. Because we’d burn out. We force ourselves to take the day off. Because in the beginning you’re like, ‘Man, we can just record every day!’ And then by week four or five everybody hates each other because you haven’t had a break. So we take a day off. If we’re feeling ourselves getting burned out we kind of own up to it and we’re like, ‘We need to take a day off.’
“But this is the beauty of a 40-hour work week – you’re forced to take two days off. And those days are important, whether you realize it or not. And when you lose those because you love what you do and you’re just obsessed with working, it feels so counterintuitive. Like, ‘I need to take a break from this.’ But it’s literally healthy.
“So when you make your own schedule you have to budget that time or you will drive yourself crazy.”
If you're looking for a little more financial advice from Mansoor, he also recently talked about how he makes his living. Fun fact – it's not really from being in Periphery for the most part.
[via Ultimate Guitar]
