A Bloodbath In The Arena
MKBHD risks it all for the sake of a $50-a-year wallpaper app
Theodore Roosevelt once famously said,
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.”
In other words, people who naysay or criticise from the side (wait, that’s me) are nothing compared to those who actually roll up their sleeves and give it a shot, no matter the outcome. The concept does have some merit. Without doers, nothing gets done. But this way of thinking has also given birth to the idea that you can get a free pass to do whatever you want, to “fake it till they make it,” to follow the dream no matter who it harms or who you fuck over in the process, as long as it’s in pursuit of doing. It’s this exact thinking that’s brought us such entrepreneurial prodigies like Elizabeth Holmes, Sam Bankman-Fried and Adam Neumann, among many others.
Marques Brownlee, known by the moniker MKBHD, has been one of those critics that Roosevelt would have called out. His schtick is product reviews, and he’s been wildly successful at it, amassing an audience of nearly 20 million on YouTube alone. With a loyal following of that magnitude, his opinions have immense sway. He…
