It’s one thing to realize what you want to do for the rest of your life. It’s another thing altogether to actually do it.

Now, sure, there are those rare stories where someone just gets plucked out of obscurity and thrown into the best job ever for the rest of their lives. For example, Harrison Ford was a carpenter when he got the part of Han Solo in a little movie called Star Wars. And Mark Zuckerberg just so happened to start a little website in his college dorm room that launched him from ramen-eating college student to tech billionaire. But if we’re being honest, you didn’t invent Facebook, and you’re not going to be Han Solo (because he died; I know there’s a new young Han Solo movie coming out but he’ll still be dead to me. #Spoiler). For the most part, doing what makes you happy requires a ton of steps to actually get there. And every job is different; therefore, so are the steps to get there. So instead of trying to list all of them, I’m going to boil them down to one step that has made every successful person successful. That step is work harder.

Working harder is not to be confused with working hard. A lot of people work hard. But really successful people work harder. Like if you and five other interns are working at a company and four are working hard but only one is working harder, that person is going to end up being the other five people’s boss.

When I decided that I wanted to be a host and I realized that, unfortunately for me, there was no one wandering the streets looking for a lanky teenage version of Ryan Seacrest, I knew I was going to have to work harder. A lot harder. And when I was seventeen, my mom gave me my first opportunity to do that.

As an accountant, my mom handles people’s money. So when a production company owed her money, she told them that wouldn’t take them to court, as long as they put her son (me) on their next production as an intern. And in fear of my mom financially ruining them, they hired me!

I was fresh out of high school, and it was my first time ever being on a REAL TV SET! Well, not really a set. And not really TV. And not even really real. They had hired me on a low-budget web series that was shooting at a public park in Inglewood, California. The workdays were at a minimum eighteen hours long for seven days straight, and I’m not kidding when I say someone was murdered at that park a few nights before we started. After full days of standing and running and standing again, my feet felt like they were on fire, I got yelled at relentlessly for getting coffee orders wrong, and honestly, I loved every second of it!

For some reason, I actually loved working harder than I ever had before. And as an intern, you inevitably work much harder than anyone else on set because you’re at the bottom of the chain. But after every four-hour night of sleep, I again woke up excited to mess up people’s coffee orders!

I made as many contacts as I could that week, which led to job after job in the industry as a production assistant, office runner, grip, gaff, assistant camera operator, everything! I was obsessed with working harder because I was finally doing something I loved way more than my job at Starbucks … which, ironically, still revolved around making people’s coffee, but that’s beside the point.

This was all happening while I was struggling through community college and starting my own YouTube channel. I had made videos for school projects, most of which I pray you never see, but I was finally ready to start producing videos for the world. So like everyone else, I started with a vlog, which I deleted. Then I put together a video about dating cougars, which I privated … because it was a video about me dating cougars. The next video I uploaded and deleted was shot with my friend Sam during the Stuff Girls Say trend that happened in 2010. Being from the Valley, I impersonated a Valley girl in our version, and it ended up being my first viral video. Then the best thing in the world happened: girls started recognizing me as the “Valley Girl.” In hindsight it sounds weird that I was recognized for how I looked in a wig and bikini, but at the time it was incredible. There was also one more person who noticed the video, and it landed me the best job ever.

Sam’s older brother Josh had seen our simple video online and thought I would make for a perfect addition to the start-up where he had just begun working. He explained to me that the company was small, and very new, but they were focusing on YouTube and paying people to make videos.

This is perfect, I thought. A place that paid people to make YouTube videos? That video I did about Valley girls got over a hundred thousand views and I made exactly zero dollars from it. But this place would’ve paid me! I thought, They need me. I have one semi-viral video and two hundred subscribers. I’m basically the next Tyler Oakley.

So I planned out this fifteen-thousand-dollar travel show where me and a few friends would go from one of end of the country to the other … and then go back. I was going to get those suckers to pay for me to have fun. I printed out multiple copies of the budget and one sheet, put them in my bag, and went to my first interview. After a thirty-minute conversation, they hired me as an unpaid intern. No budget or one-sheet needed.

Okay, so not exactly a cross-country payday, but at least I was working in the field I was interested in! My mom agreed to support me financially for two months of the internship before I’d have to get a real job, and that is how I started at AwesomenessTV.

This was not the same AwesomenessTV you know and love today. When I started, AwesomenessTV was just figuring out what they needed to do to reach a younger audience, and I thought I was the perfect man for the job. On my second day there, I went to the first ever shoot of a makeover show called Make Me Over, and the small but up-and-coming YouTuber hosting it was a lady by the name of Bethany Mota.

In the early morning I prepared for my day of coffee fetching and paperwork organizing, but quickly wanted to ask my supervisor something.

Hunter: Scotty, does anyone shoot behind the scenes of this?

Scotty: No, but the bosses have talked about doing it one day.

Hunter: Well, I brought all my camera gear, I can shoot it if you’d like …

Scotty: … Okay, but you still have to get me coffee.

Did I totally plan that conversation and moment out the night before the shoot? Maybe.

Either way, I shot the piece, edited it together, and delivered it to Scotty before the end of the week. He watched it with the normal kind of annoyed look he always has on his face, then said he needed to show someone else. So he walked up to the FOUNDERS OF THE COMPANY and had me hold the computer out for them to watch. I was freaking out. It was five minutes of emotional pain, and like two minutes of my arms being pretty tired from holding the computer. After it finished, they asked me who I was, and I told them I was an intern.

They said, not anymore. And right then and there I became an employee of AwesomenessTV. My mom had given me two months to get a job; well, I did it in less than one week because I worked harder. All that time I had spent on set learning from high-budget crews, and the time I had spent producing my own low-budget videos, made me the perfect puzzle piece for AwesomenessTV. I accomplished my first goal, but my next would prove to be a little harder. I wanted to become the face of the company.

I knew the bosses were watching, so I would make sure to be the first one in the door every day, 7:45 a.m., and the last one out, 8:30 p.m. I also made sure to sit in a place the bosses could see when they walked in an hour after me. The hours spent in the office, plus my one-hour commute to and from work each way, took up every ounce of my time, and they noticed.

After producing and writing projects for Tiffany Alvord, JennXPenn, Andrea Russett, Lia Marie Johnson, and more, I started to get a little antsy. Don’t get me wrong, I loved what I was doing and the people I was filming, but I wanted desperately to be on the other side of that camera. So after months of producing videos, I straight-up told my bosses that they were wasting their money with me if they weren’t going to put me in front of the camera … which, looking back, was an incredibly risky thing to do, but it actually paid off.

They put me in charge of writing, shooting, editing, and most important, hosting a daily Hollywood news show. That show ended up being the Daily Report, and I’ve now hosted over one thousand episodes of it.

From there I went on to host a number of other Awesomeness shows, including IMO, #DearHunter, Third Wheel, Do It for the Dough, and a huge daily show called Top Five Live. It’s led to me interviewing big stars on every red carpet known to man. It’s granted me the opportunity to work with some of the biggest producers in the industry. But most important, it’s made me happy, and it’s all because I worked harder.