Struggling to build your dream life?

I’ve been there. 

I’ve had 12 jobs.

I spent 5 years getting a Bachelor’s degree in Petroleum Engineering, an industry which was booming when I started… Only to graduate in 2016 when oil prices hit $0.

I had pages of business ideas… but couldn’t get any of them going.

I’m Joel, and this is a story of how I overcame failure to build Motiversity into the world’s largest motivational media company.

10 years ago I was a struggling Engineering student with a well below average GPA.

I thought I wasn’t smart enough and I considered giving up.

Instead, I discovered something. 

That something was motivational speeches on YouTube. 

Speeches on the topic of believing in yourself from Les Brown and speeches on work ethic and persistence from Eric Thomas helped push me through the days I was struggling and wasn’t feeling my best. 

From the speeches I realized three things:

• Being smart is a learned skill, not something you are born with. 

• Anything is possible IF you believe in yourself.

• You have put everything you have into it.

That change in mindset opened a world of possibilities.

I started working twice as hard – while others worked 8 hours a day, I worked 12-16 hours a day – and my GPA went from a 2.6 (below average) to 3.7 (nearly top in the class) by the time I graduated. 

After graduation, I couldn’t find a job as I had specialized in Oil and Gas Engineering and the industry was in a major recession. It was 2016, and oil prices had hit rock bottom at $0 per barrel.

At the time everyone was saying it was too late to get started on YouTube. 

I looked at it differently. 

I looked at all the YouTubers, some of which were making millions of dollars a year doing things that looked fun, and I said this is no different than any other challenge I’ve faced in my life.

I realized if I work hard enough, and smart enough, I can make it happen too.

I started sharing the videos that had helped me the most on a new channel called Motivational Minute (now called Motiversity). I also started three other YouTube channels at the time, including a channel called Expectations vs Reality, a pranks channel, and a video essay channel. None of these three worked out.

One of the first motivational videos I posted started going viral and received one million views in the first month. 

While reading the comments, I noticed how these speeches were helping many others in similar situations as myself. But what surprised me even more was how they were also making a difference for people in all sorts of different situations. Some people were simply looking for a boost for their work outs or their confidence, others were going through a hard time in life such as depression or battling cancer, while others were looking to find their purpose in life or make a healthy change.

Long story short, I started Motiversity as a hobby, to make a side income, but transformed it into something much greater – a media company and the first record label for upcoming motivational speakers to share their stories of hope and inspiration with the world. 

Only a few months after starting Motiversity, we realized we could target a different audience than we were attracting on Motiversity. Thus we started Motivation2Study, to help students struggling with motivation and confidence. Today this is our biggest channel and is one of the top 100 most subscribed YouTube channels in Canada.

With the help of two fantastic business partners, we soon launched Mindset, the #1 app for motivational speeches and personal development audios. Mindset also has a digital rights management division where we manage and license the rights to some of the top speakers and influencers to creators to use in their videos.

Six years later we have collaborated with amazing speakers and thought leaders, licensed world class content and created motivational videos that today, almost 1 billion people from around the world have seen. We now have a team of thirty people running twelve YouTube channels that have over twelve millions subscribers. 

We are changing lives one video and one story at a time.

 – Joel Huculak