CHAPTER 20 You Only Regret the Things You Don’t Do

My friend Casey Neistat was born in New London, Connecticut, to a lower-income family. Like me, he was a troublemaker when he was young. At age fifteen, he got his girlfriend pregnant. By the time he was sixteen, he was already a dad. He dropped out of high school in order to work, and got a dead-end job washing dishes at a local diner. He lived in a trailer park with his son and his son’s mother. He was on welfare to make ends meet.

That could easily have been the end of his story right there—going nowhere fast.

But that’s not what Casey wanted from life. He had drive. His older brother Van had graduated from college, moved to New York City, and found a job as a studio assistant for an artist named Tom Sachs. When Casey heard about what Van was doing, he thought, “I can do that.” So he drove to New York City, lied to Tom Sachs about his experience, and got a job as an office assistant—cleaning, organizing, and making more than he’d been making as a dishwasher. He was now surrounded by really interesting people who inspired him; meanwhile, he was also committed to helping raise his son, and went back to Connecticut every weekend to spend time with him. It was hard, but he found a way.

In not much time at all, Casey and Van had saved up enough money to buy an early iMac—the first computer you could edit video on. They maxed out their credit cards, bought a video camera, and started making short films. The first film they made was a rant about the iPod—one of their favorite toys—and how the battery was irreplaceable (when you called Apple to complain about the short battery life, they simply told you to buy a new one). Casey and Van put their film online, and it became (arguably) the first viral video ever, with millions of views.

Soon, Apple was changing its battery exchange policy. And the phenomenon of the Neistat brothers was born. As a team, they posted more short films online—sixty-seven at last count. HBO gave them a TV series. They produced two feature-length films.

Nothing Casey did with his life was conventional. He followed none of the predetermined paths toward success in commercial filmmaking. Instead, he blazed a new path with nothing more than willpower. He wasn’t born with any advantages. He’s not a typically good-looking guy (he’ll be the first to tell you that), but he’s very attractive to women because he’s creative and confident. He believes in himself. He’s committed to trying new things. And he is fucking fearless.

Casey’s life is a perfect example of one of my favorite maxims: You don’t regret the things you do—only the things you don’t do.

Real life is scary. It’s hard. Knowing what you want—and taking those first steps to get it—requires guts, perseverance, and patience. It takes courage to face real life, because with every triumph (like Casey’s) there are also failures. Every high has a low. Every peak comes with a valley. You get the point.

We tend to want to avoid those disappointments. Understandably! Who wants to try and fail? So we don’t bother taking those first steps at all. We distract ourselves. We follow the easier path, the path of least resistance—spending more and more time on the Internet. Online, we can do everything that feels like living life—make “friends,” explore culture, join a community—without ever having to look anyone in the eye.

But when we do that, we end up missing out on the potential of our lives.

I’m not saying that the Internet won’t help you succeed. After all, it enabled Casey’s success; he used it as a platform for his creativity. It worked. But not because he was using it as a consumer. Instead, he was a creator.

A consumer is someone who merely “likes” and shares things that other people make and post on social media sites; a creator, on the other hand, is someone who is generating that original material, whether they are a comedian tweeting jokes or a blogger uploading their own videos. Creators have an original voice, and the Internet is merely the outlet for that voice.

Casey was a perfect example of the latter. He was doing things offline, and then sharing them online. He had something real to contribute and promote—and that’s the perfect use of the Internet. It’s one of the reasons social media is great: It allows people like Casey to be heard in a way that they otherwise wouldn’t. In the days before the Internet, Casey might never have been discovered or found a like-minded community of fans. Social media worked for him. It gave him a voice.

But, if you’ve read this far in the book (and hey, high five!), you know what I’m going to say next: As great as social media can be, it can also be a big, fat waste of time. Sure, the stuff we find online can be fascinating and inspiring, but every second that we spend on social media actually reduces the likelihood that we’re going to do something ourselves. Surfing the Web and consuming other people’s content in order to feel more connected and involved actually lowers our chances of making any kind of significant achievement of our own.

The truth is that the majority of people online aren’t creators—although often we think that we are, because we are “involved.” We get a false sense of fulfillment when we go online because we are participating in a community, but it’s a one-sided exchange. By “liking” and reposting and commenting, we’re not contributing in a significant way. There’s an imbalance between input and outtake that teeters dangerously close to passivity.

Using the Internet is the simplest thing you can possibly do. Going online requires almost no energy. You can do it from your bed. In your underwear. Unshowered. It requires no commitment—after all, you can log out at any moment. It has no expectations of you, comes with zero accountability, and (in many cases) carries no repercussions for your actions when you use it.

There’s no “failure” online, in the real-world sense—but there’s no achievement, either. The things that seem like “success” online—gaining more friends; having people “like” your pictures, repost your comments, read your Twitter feed—are, for the most part, ephemeral. These social media achievements are merely a kind of popularity contest. And being popular online doesn’t get us any closer to the things we want to achieve in real life. (I know there are exceptions—but they are not the norm.)

Think about someone you admire, someone you follow online who you really like. Then ask the question—why? Why is it that you like that person? I think you’ll quickly realize that it’s because they are actively creating something in the real world.

Personally, the two people I admire most online are Matthew Segal and Jarrett Moreno, the founders of OurTime.org, a nonprofit that is trying to give young people a political voice. They created the organization while they were at Kenyon College, after they observed their friends feeling disenfranchised during the 2004 elections—thanks to voting lines that were too long and convoluted registration laws, so many couldn’t even vote. Matthew and Jarrett started a petition, then founded an organization, and now use social media and online organizing to help empower young people to understand political issues and act on them. They want to advocate on behalf of young Americans and effect real changes to benefit our collective future.

Matthew and Jarrett are heavily involved in social media—they tweet, post on Facebook, run a blog—but none of it is empty noise. They share meaningful information and relevant, current content, trying to help other people improve themselves. Social media is just another outlet for the things they are doing out there in the physical world.

Twitter provides us with a wonderful platform to discuss/confront societal problems. We trend Justin Bieber instead.

—Lauren Leto, comedian

The most popular things that people share online are the true-life, incredible experiences that only happen in the real world. Wouldn’t you like to be the person having those experiences and mindfully sharing them, rather than simply capturing the low-hanging fruit and meaningless barrage of content that constantly comes at you?

So if, like me, you want to be more like Matthew, Jarrett, or Casey, start by making a list of your goals in life. Write down the things you’d really like to do—the dreams. How many of them are things you can accomplish simply by being online?

Life is filled with amazing and inspiring encounters. Instead of passively documenting them for the people you (barely) know online, I want to challenge you to absorb these moments and do something with them—become a writer, an artist, a dancer, a thinker. Learn skills that you’ll have for the rest of your life. Travel. Explore. Grow. Advocate a political issue. Write a book. Take up a new hobby. Pursue that relationship. Try to do something new, and hard, and interesting.

You may fail—and yes, that will suck—but at least you will have tried. And who knows—instead of being a failure, you may be one of the successes. The only thing I can guarantee is that you won’t be either if you don’t give it a shot.