YouTube megastar MrBeast has shared the one book he required his staff to read — all to understand a single word.
A series called 45 Days With MrBeast follows creator and journalist Jon Youshaei as he spends more than a month alongside the YouTuber. In a chapter titled Inside MrBeast’s YouTube Machine, the pair looked through MrBeast’s leaked employee handbook, which outlines what it takes to do well inside his operation.
“I’ve met so many people that have said their boss made them read this,” the YouTuber said.
One standout requirement he’s spoken about is having employees read The Goal.
MrBeast — whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson — explained that he asked his first 250 employees to finish the book before they officially began. The reason, he said, was to make sure everyone understands exactly what he means when he uses the term “bottleneck.”
“I say bottleneck I use the word bottleneck quite a bit especially when filming,” he said. I want people when I use that word to understand what it means, and the magnitude
“If I tell you you’re the bottleneck to the production to me that’s a very very serious sentence,” he said. “To people who might not have read The Goal, they’d be like, ‘okay’”.
If that sounds unclear, the idea is simpler than it first appears.
In The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt, a bottleneck “is any resource whose capacity is equal to or less than the demand placed upon it. And a non-bottleneck is any resource whose capacity is greater than the demand placed on it.”
In other words, it’s the point in a process that slows everything else down because it can’t keep up with demand.
This same theme shows up in the handbook. In Chapter 2 of the guidebook ‘Creating Content’ he reportedly emphasizes that staff should ‘Avoid corporate bottlenecks at all costs’.
“Employees need to take sole ownership of getting tasks done in general. Avoid corporate bottlenecks at all costs,” he wrote.
Within that section, it adds: “Take ownership and don’t give your project a chance to fail. Dumping your bottleneck on someone and then just walking away until it’s done is lazy and it gives room for error and I want you to have a mindset that God himself couldn’t stop you from making this video on time.”
Put simply, the expectation is that people don’t offload the slowest, most critical part of a job and then disappear — they’re meant to remove obstacles and keep momentum until the work is finished.
So, if you want to fit into MrBeast’s way of working, the message is clear: don’t become the thing that holds the whole team up.
In another part of the handbook, the creator — who is nearing 500 million subscribers — also urged employees to contribute across ‘multiple videos’ each day.
“Please do not come in and only work on one video during a workday,” the paper read. “That’s how you fall behind on future videos and create a nasty cycle I’m trying to stop.”
Based on the growth of his channel and output, it’s hard to argue the system hasn’t delivered results.