How I Brainwashed Myself Into Believing Anything Is Possible
How I Brainwashed Myself Into Believing Anything Is Possible
ELI5/TLDR
A college-age guy who was homeless in Chicago, failed at every business he tried, and slept on frozen staircases and carpet floors eventually built a massive TikTok following by posting 14 philosophy videos a day from his basement. His core argument is that self-belief is not something you find — it is something you manufacture through sheer volume of attempts until enough of them land that you can no longer deny the evidence. It took him 1,600 videos to hit 1,000 Instagram followers. The next month he gained 100,000.
The Full Story
The Resume of Failures
Jett Franzen opens with a timeline that reads like a worst-case scenario generator. Late 2024, early 2025: homeless in Chicago after quitting an insurance cold-calling job he hated. Before that, a parade of failed ventures — e-commerce, door-to-door sales, dropshipping, modeling. He slept on a frozen outdoor staircase for two weeks, shielded from the wind by a single wall. He was still enrolled in college online.
He moved back in with his parents, got a job at an Xfinity retail store, and started plotting his next move. He had always wanted to be a content creator but had no idea what he would even talk about. He felt like “just a regular guy.”
The Streaming Arc
His first serious attempt was streaming. He taught himself to build a PC, camped overnight at Micro Center for a new GPU, and moved in with a friend in Iowa City for the summer. The plan: sleep on the carpet, stream 6-8 hours a day, every day, and post clips everywhere.
The result was nothing. Zero traction. His friend got discouraged and quit. Jett was sleeping on carpet in a room where the AC did not work, watching documentaries about successful streamers every night before bed, wondering when his “lucky break” would arrive.
“Oh man, I’m just never going to get that lucky break.”
Summer ended. He had given it everything and had nothing to show for it.
The Belief Paradox
He moved to Colorado with his family. His parents told him to get a real job, build a resume, do what everyone else does. He refused. But he was stuck in what he describes as a paradox: he had pattern-recognized from studying successful people that everything comes down to belief. If you believe, you can do it. If you do not believe, you cannot. But knowing this terrified him, because it put the entire weight of success or failure on his own psychology.
“That power in and of itself scared me and created doubt for me.”
He read books about self-belief. None of them solved it. He could not figure out how to just… believe.
The Pivot
Around October 2025, with his senior year underway and the specter of a corporate job looming, he made a change. He switched from streaming clips to talking-head videos — just him, speaking directly to camera about philosophy and psychology. Three things happened: they were more fun, easier to make, and actually got views.
He suspected his old accounts were shadowbanned, so he created new ones. His first video on the new TikTok account hit a million views.
The Compounding
This is where the math started working. His average views crept from 500 to 1,000. He describes this modest increase as the moment he “just knew” he was going to make it — not because the numbers were impressive, but because any growth at all meant the process was replicable. He could iterate.
“If I don’t give up for 1,000 days, I’ll have 1,000 followers. And then if I have 1,000 followers, I’m taking this to the moon.”
He was posting 14 videos a day. He treated it like a factory — show up, record, post, do not look at the results, repeat tomorrow. He calls this “doing so much volume that it would be unreasonable for you not to win.”
The followers went from one a day to two, then three, then 40 after a viral Instagram post. The hate comments started rolling in, which he interpreted as proof he was finally making an impact. He expanded from philosophy into psychology and societal commentary.
In one week in November 2025, he gained 112,000 TikTok followers.
The Isolation Strategy
Jett describes a deliberate choice to cut himself off socially. He had connected with bigger creators in Colorado and noticed something: belief transfers between people. If you are around people who do not believe in themselves, you absorb that. His solution was to be around nobody at all.
“I’m so focused on myself and what I’m doing right now and trying to be the best version of myself and figure out who I am that I don’t want anybody else to get in the way of that.”
He frames this as temporary — not a permanent lifestyle, but a season of self-absorption in service of building something.
The Core Framework
His thesis, stripped to its bones: belief and doubt are not opposites you choose between. They coexist permanently. The goal is not to eliminate doubt but to make belief heavier. And the only way to build belief is through reps. You try, you fail, you try again, and eventually enough attempts land that you have empirical proof it can work. At that point, belief is not faith anymore. It is data.
“It’s idiots all the way up. Everyone else is just like you. All the people that you look up to are just a version of you that was consistent.”
Claude’s Take
There is a genuinely useful insight buried in here, and it is not the one Jett probably thinks he is making. The interesting part is not “believe in yourself and work hard” — that is a bumper sticker. The interesting part is his accidental discovery that belief is a lagging indicator, not a leading one. He spent months trying to will himself into confidence through books and positive thinking and it never worked. What actually worked was accumulating enough small wins — even tiny ones, like going from 500 to 1,000 average views — that his brain could no longer argue the evidence. He reverse-engineered belief through volume.
That said, this is a sample size of one, and it comes with some survivorship bias baked in. He posted 14 videos a day. That is not a strategy most people can execute — not because of work ethic, but because most people have jobs, dependents, or obligations that do not evaporate over summer break. He was able to do this because he was a college student with minimal fixed costs, willing to sleep on carpet. That is a real structural advantage he somewhat glosses over.
The isolation advice is the part that deserves the most scrutiny. There is a thin line between “protecting your focus” and “rationalizing loneliness as strategy.” He acknowledges this briefly but does not really interrogate it. For a 22-year-old who already spent high school isolated and reading in his room, voluntarily cutting off all social contact to grind content is a choice that could look very different in retrospect depending on how the next few years go.
The video is also about 80% longer than it needs to be. The core insight — reps build proof, proof builds belief, belief sustains more reps — could be delivered in three minutes. But then, the guy posts 14 videos a day. Efficiency of expression is not really the point.