Video
Why I Travelled the World This Year
· 9 min · Watch on YouTube
Why I Travelled the World This Year
The last video of 2021 and the last of the backfill: a nine-minute summary of the year in which Harry stopped being someone with an office job and became someone who travels for a living.
It is the only origin story in the bundle, and it explains things the rest of the pages assume. Why the early videos are cinematic and the later ones are daily vlogs. Why Mac is credited so warmly everywhere. Why the channel’s centre of gravity is South and Central Asia. And why a man filming himself in a barbershop in Amman keeps talking about how recently all this was somebody else’s life.
He says at the top that he deliberately did not monetise it — no adverts — because he wanted it to be an experience and to inspire people rather than to earn.
The year, in his account
- He began 2021 in a nine-to-five office job he disliked, feeling unsatisfied and trapped by the prospect of doing it for the rest of his life. He wanted to do something he was proud of and that inspired other people.
- When the UK entered another lockdown in January he booked a one-way ticket to Dubai, hoping to turn videography — until then a hobby he had never earned from — into a living. He knew nobody there. His phrasing: the drive to succeed was greater than the fear of failure.
- It worked. He built a client base in Dubai, and says that being around successful people daily was what opened up the idea that a much larger life was available.
- Then Europe: sunset in Santorini, his brother in Austria, client work in Amsterdam, and back to the UK filming weddings, fitness and music events.
- The summer highlight was Barbados, filming a lifestyle shoot for the England cricketer Jofra Archer, who invited him. He says on camera that he still doesn’t know how it happened.
- Then Jordan, on Mac’s invitation — ten days he calls the best, with Mac and Sofia. His summary of Jordanians: a very good attitude to life, living in the moment and being happy with what they have.
- Then Pakistan — the country that changed the channel. He describes it as absolutely crazy, from the beaches of Karachi to −20°C at the Chinese border, and says the thing he will never forget is the hospitality: more than once, several people competing to pay for their meal.
The moment the channel became a job
Mac talked him into vlogging. Harry had been doing cinematic films; Mac convinced him to add daily vlogs, and coached him through it. In Pakistan the algorithm caught, the videos did well, and — his words — YouTube is now his job.
He closes by asking viewers to subscribe to Mac’s channel before his own, and thanks a list of friends and family for the year.
What he wants people to take from it
Quit the job, follow the passion, and get outside your comfort zone, because that is when genuinely interesting things happen — the same argument he makes on do hard things on purpose, applied here to a career rather than to a cold night or a long climb.
Obs: this is a music-led montage with narration over it. There are no location scenes to describe beyond the ones he names, and the page does not describe footage.