You Gotta Want It

ME, IN ABOUT 6 SECONDS (MORE OR LESS)

• Hi, my name is Jake Paul. But you probably knew that.

• I make funny videos and post them online. You probably knew that, too.

• I’m nineteen years old.

• I played Lance in YouTube’s first-ever film, Dance Camp, and I now play Dirk on the Disney Channel series Bizaardvark.

• You’ll never see me at the club. You’ll never see me at the late-night house party. You’ll never see me drinking. You’ll never see me smoking. I’m all about a strong work ethic and striving to achieve my goals—all while having fun, of course.

• I like being creative, making funny videos, and hanging out with friends—usually all at the same time.

• People always ask what’s the most embarrassing thing that’s happened to me. My answer? I don’t get embarrassed. But I do laugh at myself a lot—that’s kind of the point, right?

• I’m into cars and trucks. My dream car is a Pagani Zonda. What’s a Zonda? It’s super fast, and super cool.

• There’s a place around the corner from where I live that has killer smoothies. My favorite is peanut butter and jelly. I got one a few minutes ago.

• I am wearing Yeezy shoes right now. Yup, those are Kanye’s.

• My first-ever, waste-your-money splurge? A gold Rolex. I thought it would make me cool in Hollywood. I was wrong.

• Being ourselves makes us cool.

• I’m wearing sweatpants.

• I do not have a girlfriend right now. Do you know anyone?1

• By the time you read this, I will have moved into an awesome house. But right now I live in a two-bedroom apartment in Hollywood, with five or six other people, including my brother, Logan. It’s like an open house: People come in and out all day and night, and it looks like it. Inside, there’s a huge pile of sneakers, a hundred pairs or more. I don’t remember how it began, but it’s grown into a giant art installation. For furniture, we have a bunch of extra-large beanbag chairs. Twenty people could crash comfortably, and sometimes they do. The kitchen is used—constantly. Cleanup is an issue. I’m staring at a bunch of leftover food on the counter. Don’t know what month it’s from. So you get the picture, and understand why I will have moved.

• My brother, Logan, is standing next to me. He says this book should be titled 6 Seconds, and he is telling me it should be all about girls. But I say, No, this book is all about . . .

• That’s a good question. What is this book about?

1. DM me.

SO WHERE TO BEGIN?

When I was in high school I used to dread opening a book. I hated turning to page one. All I thought about was how many more pages I had to read to get to the end and how much time that was going to take. The books were big and the print was small. There weren’t many pictures, either. And they weren’t funny. (Has anyone ever written a funny textbook? I have written many funny things inside textbooks, but that’s not the same thing.)

I was impatient. I wanted to know the important stuff right away. I wished there was a way to ingest all that information quickly. I had other stuff to do, like make videos with my brother, Logan.

You get the point. I wasn’t much of a reader. I’ve read maybe three books in my entire life. You may be different. After all, you are looking at this book right now, and hopefully you plan to read the whole thing. If not, if you only want to read the good parts, I wrote a chapter for you. It’s titled Just the Good Parts. Turn there now if you’re that person. But in the event you are like me and want to know what this is about before you invest time in reading any further, I’ll tell you right now.

The book is about you!

It’s about motivating you to live your dream.

To that end, you’ll find this book is also about me, and how a normal, average jock, bro-type of guy with a creative and goofy side moved to Hollywood from Ohio and created a successful business from something he loved to do. It’s about being a teenager with an idea and turning that idea into a reality, and then working my ass off to grow that reality into something that today seems like a fantasy—except it’s not. It’s real. And by telling my story, I want to convince you that you can have the same success in whatever you love to do.

I know a lot of kids—and maybe you’re one of them—who sit in their bedroom and think, I’m only fifteen or I’m only seventeen years old, and I can’t do this or that, it’s too hard, I’m too young, it’s never going to happen. I want to tell you to stop thinking that way. In fact, that may be the most important sentence I’m going to write. Stop thinking that way!

Whether you want to become Internet famous or create a company, if you want to start a record label or become a doctor, a model in Hollywood, or chase your digital dreams in Silicon Valley, my goal here in this book is to inspire you to go for it. Move with deliberate fearlessness. Defy the odds that are supposedly against success. Ignore the naysayers. Take the word no, flip it around, and say to yourself, "I’m on it."

Let me tell you a quick story. One night not too long ago, my brother and I decided to drive to Las Vegas. We took his car, a purple Dodge Challenger SRT8. It was two in the morning, and I was behind the wheel. We had the music blasting, the warm air was rushing in, and we were on a completely deserted road. I turned to Logan and said, Let’s see how fast we can go.

Do it, he said.

I stepped on the gas pedal. The Challenger’s massive engine growled. Instantly, Logan and I were pushed back into our seats as the car blasted forward. The speedometer soared past 170. I glanced around. There was no traffic anywhere near us and no cops in sight. I said, I’m going to gun it like this the whole way. My brother nodded. I stared straight ahead. In front of me, for as far as I could see, there was nothing but open road, and I was going for it.

Which is my approach to everything. It should be yours, too.

Anything you can dream of is possible. I know what I’m talking about—because it happened to me. . . .

ZOOSH

If you’re in or around my generation and have grown up 100 percent digital, your life is pretty much documented on your phone. Mine is. I have thousands of photos on my 6. I also have exactly 1,900 videos. That’s a big, round, intimidating number. But there should be 1,901. I’m missing one particular video, and I’m pissed about it.

It’s a video of me jumping off the plane the day I arrived in Los Angeles. Literally. I was seventeen years old, the plane had landed and taxied to the gate, and as I got to the door I whipped out my phone, pressed record, and began narrating the start of my adventure to the tune of a Miley Cyrus song. I hopped off the plane at LAX with a dream . . . Then I literally hopped off the plane, timed perfectly to the lyric, and continued to serve up my own commentary.

And no one’s going to stop me from conquering my dream. I don’t know what it is I’m going to do, but I’m going to work hard and do it.

In light of all I’ve achieved since then, that video means a lot to me. It captured the exact moment when I planted my flag and vowed with total seriousness to myself that I would succeed. It was intense. I remember every moment perfectly, which is why I’m so bummed I can’t find that video. I can still feel the determination I had as I stepped off that plane. If I were a rapper, I’d be flowing off that day forever. I listen to a lot of rap. I relate to it. I know rappers exaggerate to make their songs more street, but when I decipher the lyrics, they’re mostly about stuff that’s happened, or is happening, to those guys as they fight their way to the top. Nothing’s going to stop ’em, they say—and I know exactly what they mean.

I don’t think anything’s random. If something’s meant to happen, it’ll happen. If you’re meant for it and want it bad enough, it’ll happen. My brother and I got lucky, but we were also prepared to take advantage of the opportunities that came our way—and then kick it to the next level. I didn’t realize until much later that we actually started preparing for Internet fame long before either of us moved to Hollywood, and certainly long before my first day in the City of Angels.

As far as I’m concerned, our journey began the day my dad gave my brother and me a little handheld Sony video camera. It was Christmas 2007. I was ten years old, and Logan was twelve. We were stoked. My dad bought the camera to record our football games, so we could replay the games later. We wanted to study the plays and our technique, and learn and grow from our victories—and our mistakes.

Immediately, Logan and I started messing around with the camera. I’m pretty sure we began making videos the day we got it and took it from there. We had fun. We pointed the camera at each other while goofing around. Those earliest videos were of me riding around on our four-wheeler and my brother doing backflips on the trampoline. Logan uploaded the footage on his computer and edited it into short videos. They made us laugh, but that was it. At the time, they were meaningless.

Then we started watching YouTube and discovered a channel called Smosh. At the time, it was the biggest channel on YouTube, and we found this guy whose videos made us laugh. His name was Ryan Higa, but he went by the name Nigahiga. He was a dude from Hawaii, not too much older than us, and into sports and being stupid funny. He lip-synched. He made fart jokes. It was simple comedy—setup and punch line—kind of like the videos Logan and I made, except he was putting his videos on YouTube—and tons of people were watching them.

Before going any further, though, I want to give you more insight into my family. Logan and I are the only two children of Greg Paul and Pamela Stepnick. My brother will have to tell you about his arrival into this world, because I don’t know the details. As for me, I was three weeks early. I couldn’t wait, which is typical of me. According to my mom, I was colicky and had a predilection for projectile vomiting, but otherwise was a good eater and a great sleeper, and as both a baby and a little kid I always smiled.

In fact, I just called my mom to ask what kind of baby I was. You know what she said? Awesome.

Thanks, Mom!

My parents divorced when I was in kindergarten. I was too young to be affected by their split, and I don’t know any of the details. By the time I was old enough to figure things out, my mom was remarried and my dad was into the ladies, and I didn’t feel the need to ask them questions. My mom was cool, funny, and hands-on—literally, as she often helped us shoot our videos when we needed someone to work the camera; and as for my dad, I have to describe him as the legend Greg Paul rather than just my dad. He’s that kind of guy.2

Even divorced, my parents were totally cool with each other—and they still are. Their priority was always clear: being good parents to Logan and me. We were always well cared for and made to feel loved. We knew it, and the confidence that gave us no doubt explains our outgoing, positive personalities. I knew I could push the boundaries with my mom and still get a hug at the end of the day. She’s saved the cards and letters I’ve written her over the years for birthdays, Mother’s Day, and holidays, and almost all of them begin with me saying a variation of the same thing: Thanks for putting up with me and taking care of me. I appreciate everything you do.

We lived in Westlake, a suburb about ten miles outside of downtown Cleveland. My parents lived three miles from each other, which made splitting time between the two of them pretty easy. My dad’s house was out in the woods with a super-long driveway and outdoor space that Logan and I definitely took advantage of. We rode our four-wheelers, ran sprints down the driveway, and spent all our time outside in the summers when we weren’t watching videos or screwing around in front of the camera making our own.

My mom’s house was in a more traditional, well-tended neighborhood. She remarried a doctor, and they lived in a modern-style house with a backyard that had enough room for shooting hoops. Logan and I shot a ton of our early videos there, too. If you can’t tell by now, the two of us had a great relationship, totally bro-to-bro. I don’t have memories of myself as a kid that don’t include Logan, and given our interests, most of those memories have something to do with playing or watching sports.

Logan and I were always competitive. He was two years older, so we didn’t play against each other in organized leagues—only in the backyard. He was a star athlete in every sport he played, which gave me a target to aim for as I came up the ranks. By the time I was his age, I tried to beat his accomplishments. For example, when he was in sixth grade, he scored twenty-something touchdowns in a single season of football. That’s an incredible number; as I said, he was a superstar. But when I was in sixth grade, I knew I had to beat his record, and so I worked to pass his target and scored thirty-something touchdowns.

That friendly but competitive vibe pretty much permeated everything we did, and we loved it. We were each other’s biggest fans. I think that’s why we worked together so well when we got into making videos. It was easy. We laughed at the same things, and basically tried to make each other laugh even harder than the previous time. And so, once we got our hands on that camera, it was game on. We worked together to be funnier than the guys who were making it on YouTube.

A few months after we got the camera, my brother got a MacBook. It was the computer equivalent to getting a sports car. We’d been working on a clunky desktop computer, but like you, we grew up digital, and we wanted the newest and fastest devices. To us, that MacBook was the best—and it was our YouTube autobahn. I spent hours watching videos. I never really watched TV, at least not the way my parents and almost anyone else older than me did. Like you, I’m from a different generation. I have always chosen what I want to watch. I just type in a bunch of search words and laugh my ass off. It’s much more satisfying.

I looked up to the YouTube entertainers who made me laugh. They were a new breed of star. I related to them, and wondered what they were like away from the camera, in real life. The people Logan and I watched on YouTube were eighteen and nineteen years old, older than us but still in their teens. I never thought I could become one of them, but that didn’t stop us from creating our videos.

In those earliest days, Logan and I rarely planned out our videos. I picked up the camera, pointed it at my brother, and asked, Hey, what are you doing? He said, Uhhhhhhh, acted totally dumb and spazzy, and we improvised from there. If we cracked ourselves up, we were good. If not, we clicked delete and tried again. We were best at lip-synching pop songs and pranking strangers in public places.