So I wasn't planning on making this, but yesterday something happened that shook me to my core. As a content creator, we all have nightmares and things in the back of our mind that we think might happen in our absolute worst dreams, but won't actually happen in reality. But yesterday that exact thing happened to me.
In reality, and just wanted to take a chance to share this extremely important life lesson with you guys and share some important lessons going forward, because everything that I've worked for over the past 10 years on YouTube was nearly permanently deleted with one. Silly mistake that I made. So I was doing a spring cleaning project, quote unquote.
I'm a big fan of minimalism. I like to keep my house nice and tidy and I'm the same digitally. I like minimizing stuff, the less clutter. Um, emails, passwords, accounts, files, and so on the better. And one major project I had for the end of this year was I'm going to completely declutter everywhere I can declutter so I can start the new year 2025 with a bang and have less clutter getting in my way.
So one of the projects to do with this was switching over my YouTube account to a brand account because. Back in the day, when I first started my YouTube channel, for some reason, I thought that you need to start a brand new Gmail email, and I started one that I have never ever used. It was just some weird Gmail email.
Anyway, I wanted to change this email. Therefore, I had to change my channel to a brand account. So I did. That was a bit of a process, but I got it done. However, I noticed that under my account, suddenly there were two different accounts. So that was my old channel with currently 197, 000 subscribers. And there was this new channel that YouTube created.
So I thought, you know what? In my pursuit of digital minimalism. I'm going to get rid of this extra account because why have two when you don't have to. So I went through the process, I looked up how to do it, went on a chat GPT. I was pretty confident that I knew what I was doing. So I went into my Google account settings and I followed the prompts and so on.
Um, I made sure I was in the second channel and not the first one. So I was sure that I was about to delete this brand new, um, account. Account with zero subscribers. So I went through the motions. Uh, I clicked ended up clicking. Yes I want to confirm that I want to delete this account and I thought nothing of it as you would and As as you would as well when testing this this whole move because it's obviously a bit high stakes I went on to YouTube to just confirm that that the second account was now gone But what had happened was that?
The worst case happened and it deleted my main YouTube account, which was 10 years of work, hundreds and hundreds of videos, hundreds of thousands of subscribers. 25 million plus views, every single monetization source I have in place is intricately linked within YouTube. And it was gone. I thought it was a mistake.
I tried logging out, logging back in again, and it wasn't. Account not found is what showed up. And can you imagine the terror I went through realizing that this silly, harmless. Um, and I'm going to talk a little bit more about that in just a moment, but, um, decluttering task had now turned into potentially the deletion of the last 10 years of hard work and my business essentially, which is founded on YouTube.
So in absolute terror, I tried my best to stay calm and try and find a way forward. I was going through troubleshooting and. I went on to chat with Google support to try and get my account back up and running. Um, but everything I was finding was saying that my account had been deleted permanently and that there's no way to recover it.
And after being on chat with Google, who kept me on hold for a bit, I was hoping. And praying that they would come up with a solution to just easily back up my account and restore it. They also told me that your account is deleted permanently. At which point I am starting to really freak out. I'm like getting up and walking around the house, trying to stay calm, but with so much anxiety and tension in my body, I'm trying to think through what next.
Whether that's, is there a remote miracle chance of me recovering this, or do I need to start thinking about life post YouTube channel? And I started thinking, do I have to start a new channel from scratch with zero subscribers? Or do I need to just completely restart my career entirely and do something different, like maybe be an Instagrammer, or a TikToker, or something else, start a coffee shop, I don't know.
But, yeah, it was very, very stressful. Long story short, I went through a bunch of forums. And with a little bit of help from chat GPT, I was able to navigate into the settings within my account. And since I had switched this account to a brand account, it had a button called restore, which is only applicable for a very short period after someone deletes a channel.
So I clicked this button and a miracle happened. My channel got restored because I, and at this point. I was convinced that my channel was gone forever, uh, because I actually went onto Google and YouTube on my laptop, just to make sure it wasn't something that was an issue on my desktop. I went onto Google and YouTube and typed in my name and I didn't even appear.
Not one trace of me in my channel, not a trace of my videos. I was gone instantly with the click of a button entirely. This is like my whole body of work was gone. So this was, I'm going to say that this was the most difficult moment of my professional life to date in terms of the intense anxiety and stress of everything being.
Threatened to be deleted in a second from my own stupid mistake. I messed up. I get that. I really just couldn't believe that this happened. So thankfully I was able to restore it just, but if I didn't act quickly. I wouldn't have been able to, and it would have been back to square one. So, all right, so that's the story I got it back.
And to be fair, like this only happened over about a half hour period. So it wasn't that big of a, an event didn't go on for weeks or months, but the impact it had on me was far greater than that than just the 30 minutes would. Suggest. Um, it really got me thinking about a lot of things. Maybe I'll share those things with you.
The first lesson I've learned from this experience is don't take any high risks that are unnecessary while it's important to take risks that are safe and educated risks, like for example, starting a YouTube channel to begin with and being consistent with it. That is a risk you're. Using your time, um, in a way that isn't guaranteed to give you anything back.
That's a risk, but it's a safe risk. But when you put your accounts at jeopardy, um, in terms of chances of them actually like not existing anymore, that is a risk that is just, is not worth it. Even for the sake of digital minimalism, not worth it. Don't do it. And I would not have been giving this advice 24 hours ago, because this happened literally 24 hours from the time that I'm recording this.
Um, but going forward, I would never ever take such an unnecessary risk like the one I took. Of trying to delete a secondary account. Um, so yes, keep your risks low and keep your accounts as safe and secure as possible. A few people have said to me like, Oh yeah, but you could have just backed up your channel somehow using some website.
And the thing, the issue with that is like, it's not the videos that were at threat because I've got the videos on my hard drive, but it's more the account was at threat with all the views and subscribers and history and monetization set up that it would be like game over basically, um, if it was gone.
So don't ever put yourself at any level of high risk for any sake, if you don't have to. The second major, major lesson I learned is that it is super important to diversify your following. Do not put all your eggs in one basket, whether that's YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook. I would suggest at the bare minimum, having at least two sources of public outreach, of a following, a follower base.
Have at least two. Fortunately for me, I did. And my main one actually was my email list. To me, that is my most diehard fans. If they want to hear from me, they'll join my email list. And I've still got that. I've got a bit of a Facebook following, a bit of an Instagram following, not much of a Tik Tok following.
So I kind of followed that principle. However, I've not been active on those platforms much lately. Um, and therefore if my YouTube account was deleted permanently, I would more or less be starting from a very low level on those other platforms. So my advice to you would be if you are doing one thing, whether it's YouTube or Instagram, Or email marketing, just add one more.
Don't overwhelm yourself and think that you need to be on every single platform posting daily, cause that's going to be impossible and completely burn you out, but try to have two, even if it's just Facebook or I think the best one really is email because that again is your most diehard following. And it's really hard to have your email list.
Removed or disappear off the face of the earth without you deliberately doing that. I mean, of course, innocent mistakes can happen as I learned. I was dumb and I, I acknowledge that. Um, but you might want to think about growing an email list because that is a really quality source of followers. Um, but the bare minimum go for two.
Um, and Oh, and make sure that those two things aren't tied to each other. Um, for example, like Facebook. And Instagram are under meta. Like what if meta were to suddenly die tomorrow or go offline? Of course, a lot of people would be in crisis if that happened, but what if at the same time, what if you accidentally deleted your key meta account and then suddenly your Facebook and Instagram were taken offline?
So make sure these two things, these two platforms are not tied to one another directly. The next lesson I learned from this traumatizing experience, at least as a content creator, um, is that it's important to stay calm in crisis. Whenever things go wrong and the worst case scenario happens, the best chance you stand of getting out of it is when you are in a state of calm and logical thinking, because you need to activate your problem solving your best problem solving in the.
Depths of your brain need to come out at that moment. And they can't be, if you're freaking out, um, freaking out never helps. So always stay calm in crisis. You can always freak out later, but it's important that you problem solve first. So you can give yourself every chance possible of fixing the problem and not having to freak out.
So I would just say delay freaking out. If you're ever in a crisis like this one. The next lesson I learned, it's maybe a little bit unrelated, but also extremely related. And that lesson is like, you just got to go for it with your social media. Like having this experience happen where everything was deleted.
While 99 percent of me was really sad and angry that this could have happened. Again, my fault. There was 1 percent of me that thought, you know what? I could just start a new channel, but this time I will make it more focused on this new direction that I'm wanting to go. It's no secret. I've been pivoting over the last year from covering purely 360 cameras to now.
Covering YouTube and how to make fantastic videos. And part of me deep down was very reluctant to embrace that thinking that people are going to be angry with me, leave mean comments and so on. And I was very reluctant to kind of pursue this change fully and. Having this, this happen where you, you're being faced with a serious reality of having to start from scratch.
Part of me actually didn't mind that because it meant I could have started in the direction I really, truly wanted to go in from scratch, even though it would. The, uh, big build from there and a lot of work, there was a part of me that was holding back from doing that. And I feel like now, even though it didn't happen, I'm going to use it as a reason or even an excuse to just do what I want to do.
Life's too short. You can't make everyone else happy if you don't make yourself happy. So, even though it's not fully related, I feel like you just need to go for it. If you've been holding back, reluctant to make content, or reluctant to maybe pivot your channel a little bit in a direction that you enjoy more, just go for it.
Don't let this happen. To be the point of no return to the point that you actually do give up or have to start from scratch. Just keep going with what you're doing. Don't have to have this threat of having your channel deleted permanently. Be the reason that you finally pursue what you want to pursue.
So I'm going to try my best to take that advice. I can't promise I'm going to, but I'm going to try my best. I honestly feel so, this, this is weird to say, I know I'm being way overdramatic. I feel shaken up. Like it was legitimately traumatizing. It's like, imagine if your job was just taken away from you and all your money, not all your money, but if your monetization source was taken away from you and everything you'd built, like a business you'd built over 10 years was just deleted instantly and no record of it was online.
For me, that was that experience that I had yesterday. And I still feel a bit shaken by it. I haven't slept. And, like, my heart's just been going all night and been repeating the whole thing in my head, even though it was very anticlimactic when it happened. Um, yeah, it was the most difficult and stressful thing, I'd say, that I've probably ever been through.
Maybe there's been some other close things, but that would be easily in the top two of all time. So anyway, again, I'm, I know I'm sounding way overdramatic, but I just wanted to use this as a learning opportunity for both myself and anyone out there that might be listening who has a channel, maybe you're a new content creator just starting out.
And you kind of want a bit of long term perspective from someone who's been in the game for 10 years and nearly had it all ripped away by a stupid, stupid, accidental deletion of his own channel that I was thankfully able to restore. Touch wood. Anyway, on that note, that's my little story. Hope you enjoyed it.
I certainly did not. And yeah, if you want to hear more of this kind of content. Um, let me know, I have a podcast, it's called the creator's journey. You can subscribe to it. I'll link it below. And if you're listening to this on my podcast and you haven't subscribed yet, please do so because my mission for the podcast is to help you, a new up and coming creator succeed and help you turn your small channel into a big channel that you can monetize and.
Help live your dream life by making very smart decisions and getting through those murky waters that inevitably come as a content creator. All right. That's it for me. I'm done. I've got a, I made this joke on my Instagram story yesterday. I don't, I don't drink, but I've got to go take a drink now because wow, that was crazy.
Anyway, have a good one. Peace out. And Hey, don't forget you just one video away.