(#027) The Pat Kay Incident 2.0

Last Monday, I spent an entire day running an airtight background research operation.

My target: a YouTuber who has no idea I exist — and likely never will.

Date of birth, education, personal interests, travels, employment history, side hustles, businesses, accomplishments, projected future — I dug it all up, laid it all down, and charted it left and right and center on my trusted journal.

I combed through his content archive, analyzed the performance of his videos cross-referenced by subject and timeline, and mapped a trajectory through the life domains that define success: health, self-fulfillment, financial independence, social capital, and so on.

I read the fine print on his YouTube channels (he has two), LinkedIn profile, and every interview or passing mention I could find online.

If I weren’t convinced to my core that I’d found someone who truly figured something out about life, I’d probably be deeply unsettled by how far I went.

But I am convinced. This guy got something very right.

His name is Pat Kay — this one: patkay.com.

I call that Monday episode my “Pat Kay Incident 2.0.”

The first one — “Pat Kay Incident 1.0” — happened on August 13th last year. It rippled through the rest of 2024 and even led me to switch back from black & white photography to color.

This time, though, the jolt wasn’t about photography. It was about how gracefully (though not effortlessly) he seems to have navigated that high-wire act: being artistically free and financially successful. He turned passion into income, worked through burnout and creative droughts, tried many more things than he succeeded at but chose a few right ones, and managed to keep personal expression and financial momentum flowing in tandem.

Considering how much friction I still feel trying to build an audience around Jam Nation — a project that was born from passion and deliberate design — I’m especially attuned to the energy of someone who seems continually regenerated by his work.

In short, this time, I wasn’t envious of a photo.

I was envious of a life strategy.

So I dove deeper.

What exactly would I want to emulate — and what’s instead particular to him, but irrelevant to me?

Pat is very successful. But that alone wouldn’t have stirred me so deeply.

What struck me wasn’t how much success he has — it was the quality of it that felt itchy. Unsettling.

He built a system around something he genuinely enjoys — photography — without getting locked into the principal-agent grind. He created digital assets that generate passive income, freeing him from becoming a slave to his own craft. He walked the delicate line between personal passion (to stay creatively alive) and audience demand (to stay relevant), and he did so with elegance.

But many other creators — and many other people, including myself — have tried to do those things and failed.

Sure, the quality of his work is high. But not to the point of handing him a universal passepartout for every other gate along the way.

Then it clicked: when he started, among everything else he started with, he started by building an audience.

An audience that opted in for his work. That follows him, engages with him, supports him, buys from him. An audience that gives feedback, that keeps him aligned, that motivates him. It’s not just a number — it’s the engine behind his creative freedom, financial autonomy, and cultural relevance.

A small audience at first, but which he kept attending to and engaging with for the better part of a decade.

Without that audience, it’s hard to see how the rest of the structure would hold together.

That’s when I realized the question I needed to ask myself wasn’t:

“Do I want a career in photography?”
(I don’t.)

“Do I want to sell online courses to strangers?”
(Not particularly.)

“Do I want to move to Tokyo like he did?”
(Yeaaah, I do.)

These are all interesting questions, but — the real question is this:

What would I feel energized, excited, and motivated to build an audience around? What would I want to post about, talk about, show up for — over and over again?

Because when you’re choosing what to do with your time and energy, it’s not just about what you’re good at. And it’s not just about what you’re passionate about. Those matter — but they can also lead you into false positives.

The deeper test is this: Would you want to speak to people about it — publicly, repeatedly, honestly?

Because that is where social resonance — and every other element of commercial traction — comes from.

And that is when showing up won’t feel painful.

L.F