How to Get Your First Breakout Hit as a Solo Creative

August 4, 2021 — When stuck with average works, pick one, and take it past the point where anyone else would quit.

For the first twenty-nine years of my life, I kept trying to land a breakout hit, but it never happened.

No label ever signed my band, I didn’t get a full-ride to college, and I wasn’t hired by an NYC ad agency.

By 2017, I was working sixteen-hours a day as a freelancer — learning new skills, going the extra mile for clients, and cranking out passion projects.

But still…no hits.

It was like I had a limiter on my life, and it was set one mile per hour below the speed of success.

Hack: Do What They Won’t

My first viral hit came in 2021 when a YouTube video I made about barefoot running got 100,000 views and took me from 0 to 1,000 subscribers in one month.

Initially, I planned to make stop-motion animations, but when I realized I would have to draw, tear out, and photograph a hundred tiny pieces of paper, I thought…

This is nuts. No sane person would put this much work into a five-minute video about barefoot…