Casey Neistat ended his vlog and I’m so glad he did it

After more than one year and half Casey Neistat decided to stop his daily vlog. He himself explains why in the last one and I can’t agree more with him.

The daily vlog started as an experiment more that 500 vlogs ago. His goal was to push his creativity to the limits, forcing himself to produce a video each day. Being one of the most famous and respected video maker — he did videos for Nike and Mercedes, but he did many widely famous and no branded ones as well — his main asset has always been his incredible creativity.

Back in september 2016 he passed the 5 millions subscribers mark of his YouTube channel, the last 1,5 million in a month only. He started to feel too comfortable doing this stuff and what makes him comfortable makes him uncomfortable at the same time, as he explains. Creativity comes from pushing always further and when you make a great living out of a job you basically invented, the risk of just relax and being stuck into your comfort zone becomes too big.

Casey decided again to do what he’s been doing for all his life: to take another risk.

Ending his vlog means a lot: it means cutting the money he’s doing with YouTube, it means stopping a deeply rooted routine that somehow gave a meaning to his days.

But to end his vlog does not mean accepting a failure. He didn’t fail at all. He’d had failed keeping doin’ it and instead he chose to cut it short.

I watched his channel for months but lately I just stopped. Even if I still respect and love him, I realized that I was no more in a comfort zone as a viewer. I just got bored. Each day I got the mail that told me Casey had just uploaded another video and in the end it was like “Uh, another one”. That’s no good: you have to enjoy this stuff, otherwise just move on. And I did it: I stopped watching, at least on a daily basis. Lately it became once a week and then once a month.

I don’t know/remember who said that one golden rule of the show business is to leave the viewer hunger for more. He doesn’t have to be satisfied for what he saw. The artist needs to give his viewer a reason to come back one more time, for the next performance.

Less is better than enough and far better than too much.

Casey explains his decision with the need to grab new opportunities. He talks about the jungle metaphor: to navigate through his career is like swinging from vine to vine in a jungle. Each vine is an opportunity and grabbing a vine and just staying there means that you’re not going forward.

He’s just swinging, ready to grab the next one and I’m happy with that. He became a good friend of mine in the last year or so because I knew every detail or so of his life but in the end I wanted him to be my favourite creator, not my friend.

I just want to watch one of his video one more time and think “Wow Casey, you inspired me once again”

Can’t wait to see what’s next man. I’ll be there when you’re ready.