Simone Giertz on creativity, making shitty robots, and surviving brain surgery

Executive overview

Burnout, guilt, and self-imposed formats quietly erode creative work. Giving yourself permission to do what comes easily — and to step away from what proved successful — is harder than it sounds but more sustainable.

Simone Giertz built a YouTube career on shitty robots, then nearly lost it to a brain tumour. Surgery forced a reset: drop the format, diversify income, and stop treating ease as a flaw.

The core insight: the things that feel easy and fun are usually what you're best at — the guilt around them is learned, not rational.

Building a sustainable creative career

• Refusing a fixed upload schedule kept the work enjoyable and the calendar flexible.
• Treating YouTube as a journal of personal interest — not a topic channel — means subjects never run out.
• Over-reliance on one platform is brittle; build multiple legs: talks, product design, brand.
• The shitty-robot format was a self-protective joke — if you only try to build shitty things, nobody can mock you for failing.
• Shipping a real product (Yetch calendar) required dropping that self-deprecation and standing behind something she thought was genuinely good.

The Yetch calendar and product design

• The product tracks a single daily habit with a lit-up tile for each day of the year — a physical gold-star system.
• Built initially to support a personal meditation practice after early burnout.
• Hardest design challenge: merging a "shitty robot" brand with a high-end, earnest lifestyle product.
• Simone acted as creative lead and campaign designer; manufacturing and logistics handled by a team.
• Product side turned out less stressful than social media — content felt more like a Tamagotchi needing constant feeding.

Brain tumour, surgery, and returning to work

• Diagnosed with a brain tumour; surgery was May 30, 2018.
• Chose to share publicly almost immediately — not to monetise the pain, but because keeping it secret felt unbearable.
• Sharing gave her narrative control over something otherwise completely out of her control.
• Online community provided practical support (food, clothes) and peer knowledge that doctors couldn't — other survivors who could answer "is this normal?"
• Went back to work too quickly; health issues are the primary ongoing constraint.
• Surgery became the permission slip to drop the shitty-robot format and try anything.

Guilt, discipline, and how to get unstuck

• Guilt is the main creative blocker — the feeling that enjoyable work isn't "real" work.
• Society conditions people to distrust things that come easily; that conditioning is the problem, not the ease.
• Being bored is a productive creative state; constant content consumption eliminates it.
• Personal discipline is focused on body maintenance: sleep, food, exercise, meditation — everything else flows from that.
• No fixed start time; prioritise what needs doing, let the team hold structure.
• To escape a funk: reason your way out of the guilt, give yourself permission to play with something low-stakes.

Advice and Q&A highlights

• Imposter syndrome: everyone has it; talk to other people about it.
• Best creative process: being bored — overwhelm kills ideas, downtime generates them.
• Wish you'd known earlier: be kinder to yourself; guilt-driven work is unsustainable.
• YouTube guilt trap: you could work 24 hours and still not satisfy the algorithm — so you might as well work 8 hours and have a life.
• On virality: the toothbrush helmet video was 7 seconds — essentially a GIF uploaded to YouTube; longer build videos followed by audience request, not master plan.
• On mortality: facing it directly is healthy — it forces an honest audit of how you spend time and who you show up for.