A Quote by Tyler Oakley

When I first thought about leaving the traditional route of a 9-to-5 career to pursue full-time YouTube, it was terrifying - not many people were doing it. The thought was I have to have money saved up, because this very likely might fail. From the start, I had to give it my all for it to work.
I had an acting career for a little while back in the '90s. I had gotten into that because I was interested in acting, but I was not really as centered as I needed to be to fully pursue that career, and I was doing some films I thought were not of the best quality.
I always believed in the YouTube community and myself. I saw something there. The most difficult thing was others not believing in me. I had a lot of friends in Los Angeles who really thought I was crazy for leaving a steady acting job to start on YouTube.
I lived in a bubble: my whole entire military career where I thought that everything was perfect. And I thought that every time we went overseas and we fought for this country, we were doing it because we were trying to get other people a sliver of the greatness that we have here in the United States of America.
I had real concerns about the relationship between nature and culture and places I wanted to write about... I thought, well, maybe I should try prose. It was a real struggle to begin because, first of all, there were so many words on the page - it was terrifying... Beginning was awful.
I kinda came into my manhood, or what I thought was my adulthood, early. I had to show up, and I had to make sure I had gas money, food money, rent money, clothes money - everything was on me, startin' at that age, so that's what led me to start hustlin', that's what led me to start to try to find ways to fend for myself. And once I did that, I was full-time, bein' in the street, and, bein' in the street, it's cold. It's the way the streets operate, and you have to adapt to that.
I was so scared because I was thought I had to work, work, work, because I thought I might only be around for five years. I thought I wasn't good enough to last.
I had begun what I thought might be a career in social work. I was married and deeply involved in the anti-war movement. I thought I'd go about saving the world one person at a time. I worked with kids, teenagers mostly, in neighborhood centers, on the streets, and eventually in a drop-in center.
Underground and alternative comics existed in a vacuum for years, where money really wasn't an issue. No one would get into doing a black-and-white comic because they thought it might be a route to riches.
Dropping of the atomic bomb was the main subject of conversation for many years and so people had very strong feelings about it on both sides and people who thought it was the greatest thing they'd ever done and people who thought it was just an unpleasant job and people who thought they should have never done it at all, so there were opinions of all kinds.
I was a young feminist in the '70s. Feminism saved my life. It gave me a life. But I saw how so much of what people were saying was not matching up with what they were doing. For example, we were talking about sister solidarity, and women were putting each other down. We were talking about standing up for our rights, and women weren't leaving abusive relationships with men. There were just so many disconnects.
My mom being raised in England, her father always wanted to pursue the arts and wanted to have a stage career in England. According to her, he never had the courage to actually pursue it full-time. I think that my grandfather's parents thought that it wasn't a formidable job to have.
I always thought, I can't waste time, I have to do work. I also thought that I was slower than other people, that I had to concentrate more. I always thought, I'm not brilliant, I have to work. That was something I embedded in myself very early: I have to go home and write. But did I get any more work done than people like Frank O'Hara, who were always going to parties? Probably not.
My whole thing in life is I just want freedom. I thought that money would give me that freedom. I was wrong. It bound me more than it freed me, because now I had more things to worry about, more people asking for money, I thought I had to buy a house and nice cars and different things that people with money are supposed to do.
Making YouTube videos while I was in school, I was fortunate enough not to really have any negative repercussions from it. I had a lot of positive feedback from my friends, who thought they were great and thought they were funny and that what I was doing was really cool.
I thought there might be a career in acting because I had other friends doing it.
In climbing, being first-rate is part of the whole enterprise. The important climbers want to be the first man up the mountain, the one who put up the first route. You're usually only remembered if you put up the first route on a very important climb. The route might even be named after you. That's a kind of glory.
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