One year ago, on the 15th of August 2019,
we posted this video: The Healthy Minimalist
Home Tour.
This is the story about our home, and about
the video that has since gotten over two million views.
In 2014, we applied to purchase our apartment,
public housing in Singapore which typically
came with a 3-4 year waiting period.
Back then, life was very different for us.
Thoughtworthy didn't exist and we each had
our own jobs.
I personally believed that that was how my
life would go, just stick to the path I was
heading on, and things will hum along nicely
for the rest of my life.
It's quite a Singaporean life: sensible, responsible,
future-proofed, placing a lot of value on
prosperity and stability.
Glo, on the other hand, has a penchant for
adventure and has a tendency of straying off
the beaten path.
And perhaps knowing that, he made the suggestion:
Why don't we get the smallest, most affordable
apartment instead?
We'll have just what we need for a start.
That turned out to be a pretty good decision.
Sure enough, shortly after, Glo started Thoughtworthy.
Yes, Thoughtworthy is 5 years old today and
it's been through countless evolutions over
the years.
But that's a story for another time.
Soon after, feeling jaded, unhappy and stressed
out at my job, I was fooled into coming on
this crazy adventure together with him.
The grass is always greener on the other side
after all.
And so, we spent the following years building
Thoughtworthy.
There were many compromises we had to make
and we had to tighten our spending.
The journey was devoid of the prosperity and
stability that I was conditioned to chase
after.
But in their place, I learned the value of
contentment, and I found an abundance of happiness,
much more than when I had a job that was paying
me well.
Our plans kept changing along the way as we
simply followed the work that felt the most
meaningful and fulfilling to us.
Then in the tail-end of 2018, we finally got
the keys to our flat.
As we conceptualized and imagined how we wanted
our space to look like, Glo came up with an
idea that sounded very much like a joke, but
in truth, had a lot of seriousness to it.
The theme of our home would be based on a
Chinese idiom with the meaning of 'having
achieved nothing at all'.
Because that's exactly how we would describe
ourselves and Thoughtworthy.
But his statement wasn't all self-deprecating.
It was also a reminder that despite having
achieved nothing, despite the lack of prosperity
and stability, we learned about the things
that truly mattered to us, the things that
made us happy.
It wasn't easy, but it was a lot of fun, and
there was a lot to learn.
So, we wanted our home to reflect that.
We wanted to keep it simple, there wouldn't
be extravagant, expensive items, we wanted
it to reflect our pursuit of health and happiness.
We were not gonna spend on anything that we
didn't need, even if it meant challenging
the conventional wisdom of how a home is supposed
to look like.
And the result was this: a home that made
the most sense to us, exactly how we want
it to be.
Before moving into our new home, we already
had plans to move Thoughtworthy onto the next
stage of its life cycle: to create content.
And after a few months of settling into our
new place, we set the plan in motion.
At this point of time, our channel had about
a whopping 10 subscribers, give or take.
Just a small group of family and friends...
plus the two of us.
For one of our first videos, we thought it'd
be fun, as happy and excited new homeowners,
to make a short video tour of our home.
It was a project for practice more than anything
else.
We were lazy and sloppy when filming the video,
and on many occasions Glo uttered these words
"No one's gonna watch it anyway."
When the video was first uploaded, well, no
one really watched it.
But at the end of the first month, it had
quietly crept up to about a thousand views.
We were delighted.
"Wow, a thousand views.
There are people actually watching our video."
And then, about two months in, on this very
memorable day, our phones started pinging
non-stop, alerting us of new subscribers and
new comments on the video.
In a day, the video had hit 10,000 views.
The following day, it had racked up another
10,000 views.
Soon, it had exceeded 100,000 views.
And one year later, August 2020, the video
has gotten more than 2 million views, and
our humble little channel has grown to more
than 70,000 wonderful subscribers.
After a year, we still haven't found a good
explanation as to why the video had reached
so many people.
There are many, more gorgeous and well-designed
homes on YouTube.
Yet, for some reason, more than 2 million
people clicked on this sloppily put-together
video, of a home barely furnished with affordable
furniture, and whose theme is "having achieved
nothing at all".
But that's the story of our home, and of the
video that on the surface, had gone viral
overnight, but in reality, was many years
in the making.
It was years of stubbornly building a life
on our own terms, where "success" is much
more closely tied to happiness than prosperity.
We wouldn't go as far as to say that we've
achieved anything yet, but we're happy to
say that at least today, Thoughtworthy is
a little more than nothing.
While our channel is often referred to as
a minimalist channel, with that odd-looking
minimalist home, what we really want is for
Thoughtworthy to be remembered as the channel
about chasing health and happiness.
So what we will do, is continue to share our
stories, and keep creating content that we
hope can help more people build their own
version of a healthy and happy life.
