MrBeast loves pushing himself to the point of misery — and thinks it will be 10 years before he takes a break

• MrBeast, YouTube’s top creator, thrives on a relentless work ethic and extreme challenges.
• In a recent interview, he spoke about the situations he finds particularly difficult.
• He said he enjoys pushing himself and doesn’t foresee wanting to slow down.

MrBeast is the world’s biggest YouTuber for one main reason: he’s a workaholic.

Becoming No. 1 isn’t easy, and he’s the first to admit it. But, in a recent interview, he said he even enjoys pushing himself to the extreme.

He also said he’s not about to take a break anytime soon.

Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast, is the biggest YouTube creator in the world with 262 million subscribers. He is just four million subs behind the channel of T-Series, the Indian music label, and is on track to take over and snatch the top spot in a matter of weeks.

“Weirdly, I get enjoyment out of going to the point of misery and then pushing through it and finishing,” he said.

“For every person like me that makes it, thousands don’t,” he said. “Keep that in mind and be smart plz.”

Donaldson makes hundreds of millions of dollars in a year, but he puts everything he earns back into the content. In a recent profile in Time, he said 12,000 hours of footage can go into making a single 15-minute video, so the costs can be massive.

In his interview with Youshaei, Donaldson went through the pain-staking process of choosing thumbnails and sifting through all the footage from hundreds of cameras for some of his videos.

‘”Most people can’t do that because I think we had petabytes worth of footage,” Donaldson said. “It would’ve taken a single human five lifetimes to watch all the footage we had.”

Donaldson also told Youshaei he is “technically the product” of his videos, as well as effectively being the CEO, so “it all falls apart if I don’t show up.”

“I don’t recommend most people do videos like me, it requires you to have a lot of team, a lot of money,” he said. “It’s a lot of stuff just resting on your shoulders.”

Donaldson also spoke about his extreme experimental content, such as spending time in abandoned cities and burying himself alive. These things he has no issue with, he said.

But, he said, he cannot cope with heat, the sun, and bugs.

“If it’s an extreme challenge and it doesn’t have those three variables, I got it,” he said.

But those three things together, such as his video posted in March where he spent seven days on a desert island, was a challenge.

“It was miserable,” Donaldson said. “And I was like, I can’t do five more days of that, which is good, that’s something I’ve learned about myself.”