While Marques Brownlee is well-known for his influence in technology now, his first YouTube video wasn’t even about tech. It was a video of his golf swing, and a request for analysis.

Marques eventually started filming tech tutorials though, and he saw a lightbulb moment a dozen videos in, when a video of him installing Safari for Windows gained thousands of views. (He talks more about that moment here.)

By the time he made 100 videos on YouTube, he had committed to the tech angle. Even though he only had 74 subscribers, the lightbulb moment gave him conviction that he could make an impact with YouTube.

Sometimes, people get lucky and experience this lightbulb moment even earlier. Mr. Beast’s first video was of a game called Battle Pirates, and he got 20,000 views on it. He calls it, “The best thing that could have ever happened,” acknowledging that it takes hundreds of videos for many other people to get a decent number of views. But from the momentum of his first video, Mr. Beast was hooked.

Many people—maybe most!—don’t find this breakthrough moment because they stop searching before they find it. Mix your approach up, but don’t give up. For example, Dickie Bush wrote a weekly newsletter for nine months and barely got 100 subscribers, so he decided to add something to his process—he would write something on Twitter every day for 30 days, and he saw his lightbulb moment on day 28. (Dickie still writes his newsletter here, but Twitter was where he found his lightbulb moment.)

Oh, and 1,550 videos later, Marques Brownlee has nearly 19 million subscribers.

I’ve seen a handful of my own lightbulb moments; at this blog, an early one happened when I turned a blog post into a thread, and when a post really took off at Hacker News. 

The key with the lightbulb moment is to not give up when reality sets in and doesn’t meet your expectations; you need to be able to keep going in spite of experiencing disappointment.