Hank Green on his vlog is so great at taking a relatively esoteric topic and making it something so meaningful and deep that I think about it for days and weeks. This time around, Hank shares a long, rambly musing about the Mola mola (aka the Sunfish) and why it has thrived in the wild for millenia despite seeming like the most ridiculous animal in the ocean.
It’s worth watching all of it. But here’s the choice bit that hit me so hard.
When you see something that is very weird and yet thriving, it’s easy to have your brain go, oh, that thing’s so dumb. But that’s the wrong thought. The correct thought is, I must be dumb. I must be missing something.
If it’s weird, it’s not weird because it’s bad. It’s weird because that’s working. There’s something there and we haven’t figured it out yet.
Mola are way too weird to fail….
I have to make a shirt about this is because this is how I feel about myself sometimes. In my life and career I will have felt like I am succeeding but other people around me are incapable of seeing it.
As the most obvious example when I was first a YouTuber a lot of people around me were expecting me to try to leverage that into becoming a TV host or a writer or an actor. and a lot of other YouTubers I knew were trying to do those things.
But I knew that I wasn’t any of those things and I didn’t want any of those things. I was well suited to being a YouTuber, even if back in 2010 no one thought that that was like a worthwhile career. But I thought it was worthwhile.
It was weird and there wasn’t much status, but if I stayed focused on what I was actually doing, I could feel myself thriving in a way that a lot of other people couldn’t see.
I knew that it looked very weird to a lot of people on the outside and they couldn’t understand why I was doing what I was doing, but that was not my problem. That was their problem.
The mola mola doesn’t look like it’s winning. It just is winning.
Every moment I spend trying to make myself look like a shark or a tuna or some other shape of fish that people agree is easy to understand is cool that is time that I’m wasting not being what I actually am. Not doing what I’m actually good at. Not winning at the game I’m already winning.
As I say fairly frequently, whatever is wrong with me, it’s working. Like the mola, it’s too weird to fail. And I know that this is in part about aesthetics because I have watched as YouTuber went from being something that nobody wanted to be, to something that everybody wants to be.
It’s a high status job that lots of people want to have. But I was doing it back when everybody thought it could be nothing more than a step toward your actual career. And I know it’s the same thing for the mola…
Sidenote: I love that Hank Green made a shirt about this idea. I kind of need it?
