Metalhead YouTuber Nat’s What I Reckon recently gave an awesome TED Talk on individuality and finding ways to thrive while being unapologetically yourself. The do-it-yourself viral chef opened up on supposed failures in his life but explained how they all brought him to personal fulfillment.

Nat’s videos exploded during the COVID-19 lockdown thanks to his disdain for store-bought pasta sauce. The heavily tattooed, foul-mouthed legend proudly states “Death to Jar Sauce” while teaching his viewers how to make their own pasta sauce from scratch — a priceless skill for countless hours trapped in the house.

In his new TED Talk entitled Don’t Dress for Success, Nat says, “I ended up repeating a year at school. Eventually left school at the end of Year 10, went to music uni. I gave that a crack, I went and studied music and guess what? Buggered that up as well.”

Nat continues, “I worked all these shitty jobs. I worked jobs, jobs that tell you, like, ‘Dye your hair back from green to brown, take your piercings out and try and sell that person over there as much popcorn as humanly possible and we won’t fire you. Well, I still managed to get fired from the cinema… and a lot of jobs.”

“I just filmed videos and it seemed to be the only success I could find. We had a show offering here, I was able to host a show that was gonna tour around Australia. I met an agent, they’re like, ‘You should book a tour.’ We sold them out really quickly and I was fuckin’ stoked … and then COVID hit and I fuckin’ lost it, I lost all of it like that, like a lot of us lost their jobs. So I sat in my car with my girlfriend and I just fuckin’ cried. That’s it, I’ve lost it. Dead shit again. I’m just gonna have to go and bust my ass and get fired somewhere else.”

Dressed in black denim and covered in metal band patches, Nat shared how he turned lockdown into viral success through one simple idea. “I seen on the news that all these people had been buying all the toilet roll and all the jar sauce and I’m like, ‘The fuck’s going on here? Why are you buying all this pasta sauce in jars? You’ve got heaps of time, just make it yourself. Maybe I’ll make a video about that … Well, holy shit, the first video got millions of views within a couple of weeks.”

“I suppose what I’m here to say is, this success rhythm and this normalcy that’s presented to you … maybe that’s not your success. Maybe you having green hair and piercings and swearing a little too much isn’t really the problem. Maybe they’re the problem. Maybe you’re seeming under-qualified makes you qualified for your success.”

Don’t dress for success | Nat’s What I Reckon | TEDxSydney

Check out Nat’s TED Talk above and check out his YouTube channel here.

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