Love the Process, Not Just the Prize

Passion Combined with Persistence (and Luck) is the Key to Entrepreneurial Success

Entrepreneurship is hard.

I don’t mean “hard” in the way school might have been hard when you forgot to study for a physics exam or had to pull an all-nighter to finish a term paper. I mean “hard” in the sense that it’s mostly thankless, often lonely, and usually unpaid for years. It’s the kind of thing that weeds people out not because they aren’t capable, but because they don’t want it badly enough.

This is why your why matters. If you’re doing it for the money, status, or recognition, you probably won’t push through the inevitable obstacles: rejection, failure, and long stretches of time when it feels like no one cares about what you’re doing. You’ll burn out. You’ll quit. And you’ll probably be better off for it because, frankly, if you don’t love the thing you’re building so much that you’d do it for free, you’re not going to survive the grind of getting it off the ground.

The best entrepreneurs aren’t the ones chasing cash or clout. They’re the ones who can’t imagine doing anything else. They’re the ones who would keep going even if no one noticed, because they’re obsessed with the work itself.

MrBeast’s Story

Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast, is the most-watched YouTuber in the world. His videos routinely rack up tens of millions of views, and his channel has become a juggernaut with hundreds of millions of subscribers. He’s built an empire by giving away millions of dollars, staging elaborate stunts, and creating a level of spectacle that feels like a mix of Willy Wonka and Elon Musk.

But the MrBeast you see today—the shiny, wildly successful version—didn’t just show up one day and take over YouTube. His journey was messy, slow, and deeply unglamorous.

In the foreword of the book The YouTube Formula, MrBeast wrote:

“When I was a kid, I watched YouTube all the time. It was always my dream job. I didn’t want to be an astronaut or a doctor—I couldn’t envision a world where I wasn’t a YouTuber.”

He started his channel in 2012. In his first year, he got exactly 40 subscribers. Not 40,000. Not 4,000. Forty. By the end of his second year, after posting over 100 videos, he’d grown that number to a whopping 350 subscribers.

If you’d posted 100 YouTube videos and only gotten 350 subscribers in two years, would you keep going? Most people wouldn’t. Most people would quit.

But MrBeast didn’t quit because he wasn’t doing it for the status. He was doing it because he loved making videos. He was obsessed with it. He didn’t care that few were watching; he just wanted to keep improving.

MrBeast’s advice to aspiring YouTubers:

“If you are just getting started on YouTube, do not expect to pull any type of viewership in your first year. If this isn't something you can accept, don't start. But if you can, then you need to do this: make 100 videos. It doesn't matter what they are because they will be terrible, but do something you like doing. Your first 10 videos will be garbage. Then make 10 more. These will also be garbage, and so will the next 10. But eventually, things will start to improve. You'll get better little by little. The best way to improve your content is to make content and see what people like.”

Source: FW3

As his subscriber graph since 2012 shows, it took MrBeast five years of consistently posting videos to see any real progress with YouTube. Five years of making videos for hundreds or thousands of viewers at most. Five years of experimenting, learning, and failing.

Now, of course, he’s the biggest YouTuber in the world. But that success didn’t come from chasing views or money. It came from loving the process so much that he was willing to endure years of obscurity just to get better at it.

The Trap of School for Smart People

Here’s the thing about smart people: they’re good at school.

They learn early on that if they apply themselves, they can get good results. Study hard, do the homework, ace the test, and you’ll be rewarded with an A (and maybe a gold star, if your teacher is particularly generous).

The problem is that school trains you to persist even when you have no passion. It teaches you that success is about grinding through things you don’t care about to get to the reward at the end.

In the real world, that strategy doesn’t work.

Unlike school, success in life doesn’t come in a semester or even a year. It takes years—sometimes a decade—of consistent effort. Think about MrBeast. It took him five years to get any traction on YouTube. Five years of grinding with no guarantee of success.

If you don’t genuinely love what you’re doing, that kind of timeline is unbearable. You’ll burn out. You’ll quit. And honestly, you should, because why would you spend years of your life grinding away at something you don’t enjoy?

This is why chasing hot trends or doing things just for the money is a losing strategy. If you’re only in it for the potential payout, you’ll bail the second things get hard (and they will get hard). But if you’re doing something you love—something you’d do for free—you’ll keep going even when the rewards seem impossibly far away.

The best test of whether or not you truly enjoy something is this: if you had $1 million in the bank and 10 years left to live, would you still do it? If the answer is no, you’re probably in the wrong field.

The (Lack of) Alternatives

One of the reasons MrBeast was able to stick with YouTube for so long without success is that he felt like he didn’t have a better alternative.

Success at any endeavor is inversely correlated with the quality of your best alternative. If you have a cushy job waiting for you or a fallback plan that’s easier and more lucrative than your current grind, it’s going to be hard to resist jumping ship when things get tough.

MrBeast didn’t have that. YouTube wasn’t just his Plan A; it was his only plan. He couldn’t envision a world where he wasn’t a YouTuber. That gave him the kind of singular focus most people never achieve.

This is a hard truth about entrepreneurship: in the beginning, it’s usually unpaid, and often it’s actively costing you money. If you don’t love the work for its own sake, you’re going to quit the second something better comes along.

This is why passion matters. It’s not just a feel-good cliché; it’s a survival mechanism. If you’re not obsessed with what you’re building, you won’t make it through the lean years.

Luck: The Invisible Hand of Success

It would be misleading to say that passion and persistence alone were enough for success. Luck matters too.

Take MrBeast, for example. Yes, he worked obsessively for years, churned out hundreds of videos, and improved his craft relentlessly. But he also happened to start his YouTube journey in the mid-2010s, a moment in time that was uniquely favorable for what he was trying to do.

Back then, YouTube was a different place. It wasn’t yet the hyper-saturated, hyper-competitive platform it is today. People weren’t dropping out of college to start YouTube channels en masse, and being a “content creator” wasn’t yet a mainstream career aspiration. The ecosystem was smaller, the stakes were lower, and the barrier to entry was higher—not because it was harder to create videos, but because fewer people were even trying.

And here’s the kicker: back in those days, if someone subscribed to your channel, they’d actually watch your videos. Shocking, I know. You’d post a video, and your subscribers would, for the most part, see it in their feeds and click on it. Today, that dynamic has shifted. YouTube has become so saturated with creators that the competition for viewer attention is ferocious. People are much more reluctant to subscribe to a channel now, and even if they do, the odds that they’ll watch your next video are significantly lower.

If MrBeast started his channel today with the exact same strategy he used back then, would he still succeed? Probably. He’s clearly brilliant at what he does, and his obsessive focus on improvement would likely carry him far. But would he dominate YouTube to the same extent that he has? Almost certainly not. The landscape has changed.

There Are Always Opportunities

But don’t let the importance of luck in success demoralize you. There are always opportunities in our global free market economy to apply human ingenuity.

"Within every bad idea is a kernel of a good idea waiting to come out."
- Eric Ries, The Lean Startup

PayPal started out as a way to send money between Palm Pilots (Confinity), like Venmo today.

Microsoft started out building computers to process traffic data (Traf-O-Data).

YouTube started as a dating site.

Instagram started out as a mobile check-in app, like Foursquare.

The list goes on.

Inevitably, in the process of working on your idea, you come across promising ideas that allow you to apply your passion and persistence but offer you greater returns and a higher likelihood of success. But if you’d never gotten started, you never would’ve come across this better idea in the first place.

Or as they say, the harder you work, the luckier you get.

The Meaning of Life

“Death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it.” - Steve Jobs

It’s a grim truth, but it’s also freeing. If the end is the same for all of us, what really matters in the time we have?

From where I sit—and I’m borrowing heavily from Greek philosophers here—there are really only two things that matter:

1. How much you enjoyed your life and became the best version of yourself. The Greeks called this eudaimonia. It roughly translates to happiness, but that doesn’t quite capture the full meaning. It’s more about flourishing—living a life that feels deeply fulfilling and authentic.

2. The positive impact you had on others. Did you leave the world a little better than you found it? Did you create something meaningful? Did you help people?

The journey is the reward. If you’re slogging through something you hate just to reach some mythical finish line where everything will suddenly be perfect, you’re doing it wrong.

MrBeast didn’t start his YouTube channel because he thought it would make him rich or famous. He started it because he loved making videos. That love carried him through years of obscurity, and it’s what continues to drive him today. Even now, with all his success, he reinvests almost everything he makes back into his videos. He’s not chasing profits; he’s chasing the thrill of creating something amazing.

So, Would You Keep Going?

If you’d posted 100 YouTube videos and only gotten 350 subscribers in two years, would you keep going, the way MrBeast did?

If the answer is no, that’s fine. It’s better to know that now than to waste years of your life on something you don’t truly care about. But if the answer is yes—if you’d keep going even if few cared—then maybe you’ve found your thing.

The best way to be successful is to do something you’d do for free. Not because money and status don’t matter (they do), but because the people who love the work are the ones who stick with it long enough to get good at it.

That’s the secret. It’s not just about talent, luck, and timing. It’s about showing up every day and doing the work because you can’t imagine doing anything else.

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Inverteum is a proprietary trading firm that specializes in long-short algorithmic strategies to generate returns in both bull and bear markets. We strategically short sell and opportunistically deploy leverage with the aim of consistently beating the S&P 500.