Today the Charlie Chaplin “The Lion’s Cage” video featuring my piano score passed 3.7 million views.
The viral video experience continues to be amazing.* For example, I have four newer videos that have all gotten thousands of views thanks to “The Lion’s Cage,” one of them as many as 65k (It’s a second Charlie Chaplin video: you can watch it here.). Also, I now have 13.3k subscribers on my Youtube channel, when for over a decade I had fewer than 100 (sheepish grin).
I find it interesting that the first thing of mine to “blow up” on the Internet is this Youtube video.
Consider:
- Before the “Youtube Breakthrough,” I had pretty much stopped paying attention to my Youtube channel. The only reason I added new videos this year was to share pieces from my new piano album to my mailing list.
- I use Youtube ALL the time as a consumer and I very much enjoy it. In other words, I have familiarity with it and a positive attitude. I associate Youtube with inspiring videos, learning new things, ease of use, and enjoyment 🙂 Even though strictly speaking I use Youtube more for “education” than “entertainment “, my use is not so different from the millions of people enjoying the Charlie Chaplin video 🙂
- I experienced exactly 0 stress while making the Charlie Chaplin video when I put it out (unlike other videos of years past). I had fun, followed my inspired, and enjoyed the result.
- About 80% of my new views have come from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. I have no direct experience with that region, and I spent exactly 0 time in the past worrying about whether I was getting viewers from these places!
They say “a watched pot never boils.” Well, I had pretty much forgotten about this pot! And I certainly wasn’t thinking about the delicious recipe that was created in it!
What I take from this is that having an easy-going attitude is powerful! Apparently not caring is powerful!
Notes from my “Higher Self”:
Yes, Chris, ” not caring” is really not resisting. Not having thoughts that are in resistance to what you want. So you wanted something like this, a viral video, Internet “success,” and a Youtube video of you playing piano to a beloved long-ago entertainer and seen by people from a part of the world you have no direct experience with is no accident. It is a logical result of how the Universe is delivering you something you want: in a way that you can let in!
That makes total sense. With many of my other videos, I had worried plenty about whether people were watching it. I had at times experienced plenty of stress while creating those videos. I can see now that this was the perfect avenue for this to occur.
Sometimes breakthroughs are most likely to occur from an unexpected direction. That is, from a direction where we haven’t blocked them from happening!
*In recent weeks, the pace of the views has slowed down. I have joked with my wife a few times about “only” getting 15,000 views in the past 48 hours (instead of 180,000, which I did at one point).