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If you're familiar with Jenna Marbles, it's quite possible you think “wisdom” and “Jenna Marbles” don't go together in the same sentence. But wisdom from unlikely places? Well, that's the best kind! πŸ™‚

And if you're not familiar with her, I give a little intro + why, from a business perspective, you should at least be aware of her (or at least of her “genre”). You'll find it just below the Top 11 Quotes On Being Yourself.

Jenna's video entitled “Thoughts on Being Yourself” is one of my favorites. There really is a lot of honesty + wisdom in the video, delivered in Jenna's typical awkward-cute-quirky-completely-irreverent style.

The Top 11 Bits o' Wisdom on Being Yourself from Jenna Marbles

11. You are constantly changing & evolving through your experiences, how you interpret your experiences, and how you choose to do things in the future based on those experiences.

10. As weird and awful and terrible as it may seem to be yourself sometimes, it will always reward you.

09. When I'm feeling sad, or lonely, and I don't know what I'm doing and I don't know where I'm going, I imagine the Cool Awesome Future Version of Myself just telling my present self, “It's okay. You just gotta grab that giraffe by the ears and ride it on out.”

08. If you want to be like someone, there's nothing stopping you from modeling yourself after someone else. You don't have to BE them–that's not your job in life. Your job in life is not to be someone else. You just want to be as good at being you as that person is at being them.

07. In order to find out who you are, you will, at some point, have to feel really isolated, left out, different.

06. You become yourself, every single day of your life, through your choices and how you think.

05. One of the benefits of being you is: You know that the people who love you, love you for you. They don't love you for who they think you are or who you're pretending to be.

04. You are the most rare & majestic you there ever was and ever will be.

03. You can always care [about what others think]. You probably always will care. But don't let it dictate your choices and what you want and what you want to accomplish and who you want to be. Don't let anyone get in the way of that. That's being yourself.

02. The single greatest gift you could ever give the world is to be exactly who you are.

And my number one favorite Jenna Marbles quote on being yourself…

01. Don't ever, ever, ever give up, because you're here for a reason, even if it's just to laugh at cats on the internet.

You can watch the full video below. (There is NSFW language… don't say you weren't warned, all ye of tender ears!)

So wait, who is this Jenna Marbles person?

By way of introduction, I defer to the well-written recent New York Times article about Jenna, entitled “The Woman With 1 Billion Clicks” (emphasis mine):

While few people older than 30 probably know who Jenna Marbles is, her popularity is unquestioned among teenage girls who live on the Internet. She has more Facebook fans than Jennifer Lawrence, more Twitter followers than Fox News and more Instagram friends than Oprah. Her weekly videos on topics as quotidian as β€œWhat Girls Do in the Bathroom in the Morning,” β€œMy Favorite Dance Moves” and β€œI Hate Being a Grown Up,” place her in an elite club of more than one billion YouTube views, with more than eight million subscribers and growing.

β€œMy perspective is to think, β€˜I just have a lot of Internet friends,’ ” said Jenna Marbles, 26, whose real name is Jenna Mourey (Marbles is the name of her Chihuahua). She acknowledges it is an odd kind of celebrity. She is a D.I.Y. digital entertainer who conceives of, stars in, shoots, edits and uploads her own videos β€” often in a single day.

Her videos are a highly shareable cocktail of comedy, sex appeal, puppies and social commentary, laced with profanity. She skillfully juggles Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube to build a deeply loyal connection with fans who find her eminently easy to relate to.

The result is more than a million views every single day and more money than she had ever seen before in her life. She may be unique, but she is no viral-video fluke. To a younger generation who spends more time on YouTube than TV, Jenna Marbles already embodies the future of celebrity.

The full article is worth reading. You can find it here.

Why you should know about Jenna Marbles + her genre, from a business perspective

I understand the temptation to dismiss Jenna as just a young'n uploading quirkily funny videos to Youtube. I did too, initially. But part of what I find fascinating about her is that she represents a real and emerging business model: the online video celebrity. She makes her living primarily through the ad revenue her Youtube videos generate.

So while she may not be your personal cup of tea, I'd caution you not to dismiss her as irrelevant–she's a great example of the fact that the opportunities for building an online community, generating a liveable income online, and branding yourself in unique ways, only continue to proliferate. To dismiss what we don't understand is to overlook possibility.

For other young'ns turning quirkily funny videos on Youtube into a business model & platform for a certain brand of celebrity, also check out Justine Ezarik, Ryan Higa, and Grace Helbig.

If you find yourself fangirl-ing over Jenna (hey, I do–ain't no shame!), check out a few of my favorite Jenna Marbles videos for some bonus laughs.
Caveat: Jenna loves using NSFW language. Even though none of her quotes I used above have any, her videos I link to absolutely DO. So if that's not your thing, just read this post and don't watch the videos and your world will remain a happy place. πŸ™‚

Go forth and be your rare + majestic self with gusto, my friends!

Marissa