Is You Okay? (19 page)

The biggest thing in my kitchen without any holes in it was a four-ounce ladle. Ladles and cinnamon must be a match made in heaven, because guess what size jar of cinnamon they had at Target: 4.1 ounces. Ladle it is.

Remember that old playground rhyme that starts, “First is the worst, second is the best?” That might as well describe my first two challenge videos, because Diet Coke and Mentos (which featured in my second challenge video) are fizzy and delicious, but a ladle full of cinnamon nearly killed me.

I'm not kidding. When the saliva in my mouth made contact with all that cinnamon, it caked up into a paste that clogged my throat and nearly choked me to death. SK was there and acted quickly, so I was okay, but my voice has never been the same since. You know how when I cough it sounds like a frog doing a pig impression? That's from the Cinnamon Challenge.

What little of the cinnamon didn't cement my throat shut managed to explode out of my mouth, much like the video did out onto the Internet. Within days, it had millions of views and was shared all over the place. I was getting interview requests, and websites were writing about me. Sure, ground cinnamon nearly put me in the ground, but it also set me on a new path with challenge videos over the next couple years
and officially launched me as a YouTube “star” (however you want to define that). Google even reached out to talk to me about how I could get paid for doing these videos. At 3:03 in length, with 47 million views, that's more than 140,000,000 minutes of viewing time, which is more than 270
years
. That's longer than the United States has been a country. I should be able to get at least a hundred bucks out of that!
Cha-ching.

I'm still amazed when I think back to those days. Hundreds of people had done the Cinnamon Challenge before me; how was I the one to break out because of it? Well, I think the answer is pretty obvious at this point: it's because I did something different, and I stood out as a result. Just like Adele went smaller and simpler and it worked for her, I went bigger and crazier, and it worked for me.

Going forward I applied the same principle to pretty much every challenge video, song parody, and collab I did. When I took photos with fans or celebrities, I took a page out of Jay Leno's book from back in the day and posed with my mouth open—except I took it to the extreme. My philosophy was “go big or stay home.”

When I did the Salt & Ice Challenge—where you sprinkle salt on your skin, set ice cubes on top of it, and see how long
you can hold it there before it gets too painful—I dumped half a canister of table salt the length of my arm and covered it in ice cubes. I didn't last very long and it nearly gave me frostbite, but I got fourteen million views (as well as a few cute skin burns) out of it.

When I did the Saltine Challenge—the one where you try to eat six saltine crackers in a minute—I felt like that was too easy, so I put peanut butter on them and then handcuffed my hands behind my back.

When I did any challenge involving hot things—peppers, sauce, wasabi—the question was never whether I could handle it, it was always whether I could fit
all of it
in my mouth at once. (FYI, the answer was usually no.)

Google has something called the “10x philosophy.” They don't want to do things ten
percent
better than the competition, they want to do it ten
times
better, because that's how you become wildly successful.

So it was with me. If I was going to make that paper like Google promised I could, I needed to keep standing out, and going big was going to be my strategy. It was how I would differentiate myself from other video creators who were doing similar things competing for the attention of a lot of the same audiences (there are only so many eyeballs and so many hours in the day, after all). My YouTube friends were
all young, sparkly little beauties doing their own thing, so I needed to have a thing of my own.

Mark Twain—the author of
Tom Sawyer
and
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
—wrote something great about how to live a good, unique life: “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect.” My philosophy is similar:
When everyone else is doing it one way, do it the other. Do you, not them.

What's funny about that is while it took me several years to figure out the importance of standing out and doing
you,
it took me even longer to realize that I had actually been doing it the entire time I'd been in Los Angeles.

As a stand-up comedian, I was 100 percent clean, while nearly everyone around me was dirty. My jokes were family-friendly, their jokes were like an episode of
Empire
. I brought in a whole new crowd to the comedy clubs where I performed, while the other comics served the same audience everywhere they went. Ultimately, I decided that stand-up comedy wasn't for me. But here's the thing: I made that decision
after
three years of doing stand-up, performing at every famous club in Los Angeles and a few in New York City. And don't forget—I'd started in my thirties, when everyone told me I was too
late. I succeeded not because I was better than all the other comics (I wasn't). I made a living because I stood out. I did something different.

When I moved along to
The Tonight Show,
I
literally
stood out. As in, I stood outside every day and talked to people. Plenty of folks who looked like me have come and gone from
Tonight Show
audiences over the years without ever being noticed. Not me. I was doing something different. It wasn't bigger and crazier like my challenge videos would be, but it was
more
and . . . okay . . . maybe crazier. I went every day, all day. That's what caught the attention of the pages, who suggested I start a blog. Overnight I went from an audience
in line,
to an audience
online
.

Already in 2006, there were millions of blogs out there. Why did mine find a readership, while so many other bloggers struggled to even get their friends to read their stuff? I think it's because I was doing something nobody had ever done before on the Internet: I was providing a behind-the-scenes look at what it's like to go watch a taping of a late-night talk show that has been broadcast into every home in America for more than sixty years.

When I switched over to YouTube in 2008, the site was still very young. Nobody had really figured out what potential it held for entertainers, yet I quickly built a following there, and
one of the big reasons was that I was obsessed with posting videos. I posted every day, sometimes multiple times per day. More often than not the videos weren't very interesting or they were poor quality, but it wasn't the quality that people were judging at that point, it was the consistency. I didn't mean to be, but I kind of became one of the first daily vloggers. Very few people were doing things like that, so naturally my channel stood out.

My very first meet and greet was in a frozen yogurt store across the street from my apartment in Studio City. I know what you're thinking:
That's a weird place to have a meet and greet.
EXACTLY! Casey Neistat once did one at a Dollar Pizza shop in New York. It wouldn't make any sense if
I'd
done one there, but it made perfect sense to him and his YouTube fans.

One summer, SK and I wanted to get out of L.A. for a while, so we packed up our car and decided to drive cross-country to Florida to visit our families. Along the way I figured, why not turn this trip into an impromptu tour? So every town we pulled into for gas, or for lunch or to stay the night, I would announce where I was, pick a place that had a decent amount of space and was free to get into, and within an hour a bunch of fans would show up. You want to know some of the places I held these events? Subway; Golden Corral; Target (I loved Targets, they're
huge
); a Flying J's truck stop. It was amazing. The appearances cost nothing to put on, everybody had a
great time, I got to meet some spectacular, die-hard fans, and we all walked away with memories that will last forever. Not to mention free food at some places. I mean, who would ever forget meeting a perfect stranger on a whim at a truck stop outside of Lake Charles, Louisiana, where you also got a free churro? I know I haven't.

I even chose my green lipstick specifically to stand out, though probably not in the way you think.

I started wearing the green lipstick when I was out in public because I was getting recognized more and more, but by kids who weren't sure it was actually me. They'd stare at me from a distance, or circle me at the mall, or follow me down the aisles of the grocery store. Some of them I'm sure were just shy, but others I could tell were with parents who were worried their kid might seem racist for going up to a random black woman assuming she must be someone famous.
For the last time, girl, I am NOT Beyoncé!
I wanted to make it easier on them, and make them feel comfortable coming up to say hi, so I wore the green lipstick as a signal. Green means Go Ahead.

It turns out I didn't need to find my own thing, I had it the entire time. I just needed to recognize it and lean into it. The
Cinnamon Challenge video was the first time I really did that. It was the first video where I was conscious of standing out and differentiating myself. I think what gave me the confidence to go out on a limb like that was the long track record of standing out that I had unwittingly established almost from the minute I pulled into Los Angeles in 2003. When I was learning to play the piano, my mom always said that practice makes perfect. I guess that idea is not just limited to playing an instrument, or participating in a sport, because it seems like the more I practiced at standing out, the better I got at it, until finally the willingness to stand out led to the ability to break out.

If you're a young person reading this, I want you to know that I understand if you feel like the idea of standing out is really scary and difficult. When you're young and you feel different, the last thing you ever want to do is stand out. You want to fit in with your classmates and friends and neighborhood kids. I know I did, and that's okay. Don't worry about standing out just yet. You focus your courage on understanding what makes you different, why that difference is okay, and then accepting your true self for who she or he is.

Your time to shine will come soon enough.

Just know that as you get older, the value of blending in will decrease, and the importance of standing out will increase.
That doesn't mean you should try to change who you are. If you are a Plain Jane or an Average Joe, that's great, you should embrace it. It's not
who
or
what
you are that is the difference, after all, it's what you
do
. It's not necessarily the talent or the message itself, it's how you put it out into the world, and how you present yourself to the people you want to reach.

When my mom made those crazy church crowns for GloZell Fest in 2014, the idea itself was a reflection of how different she is from your average mom. What made the hats stand out was their spectacular construction and her decision not just to put them on a table by the side of the stage, but to have them modeled in an impromptu fashion show by my YouTuber friends and fans. In that moment, none of them could believe it was happening. And as a result, when someone says, “I can't believe this is happening right now!,” what they're really saying is, “I'm never going to forget this.” That's why they still ask about those hats. Of all the things we've done together, those hats are one of the things that most stand out.