The walk to the event was unbearable. As I trudged through the streets of London, I agonized over how I'd tell my YouTube story. Leftover McDonald's milkshake cups, gum wrappers, and cigarette buts tumbled through the streets, wind smelling like car exhaust and curry.

The city was as scatterbrained as I felt.

I was going to a gathering for The Part Time YouTuber Academy, a live cohort course on how to supercharge your YouTube Channel. The event would be full of thirty, forty, and fifty year olds all deep in their careers. I was 19. Nineteen.

So, I thought I'd make up for it with a particularly impressive YouTube story. Something that showed I was a rising star. Maybe it would even impress the course host, Ali Abdaal. I'd watched practically every single one of his YouTube videos. He was my hero. What the hell was I going to say to him?

Walking into the event room I nervously took a seat. There was tea and biscuits in the back--but unfortunately the host had put people there as well, and that was too much to deal with. So I sat down and pretended to text someone on my phone. Thankfully, it didn't take long before Ali Abdaal opened the event with a speech. I couldn’t wait to hear his big wins, his best lessons for making great videos, just like I was planning to.

He did the exact opposite.

We heard about his ambivalences to becoming a YouTuber. When he was a kid, he always thought he would be a doctor. He followed this path for years, going to Cambridge and acing his exams. Things seemed great at first. He was helping patients, making his parents proud, and making lots of money.

One day, he found some struggling Med Schools students on an online form confused about how to study for the MCAT. On a whim, Ali began making videos about studying for the MCAT.

The more videos he made, the more he felt something he hadn’t felt in medicine: autonomy, creativity, joy. But also—terror. “How do you tell your immigrant parents,” he said with a wry smile, “that you want to leave a prestigious, stable job to become… a YouTuber?”

He might as well have told them he was becoming homeless. And yet, he made the leap. And even now, standing in front of a room full of admiring strangers, he said: “I’m still not sure it was the right call. But I feel more alive now than I ever did before.”

I'd heard the story before. But there was something about Ali's vulnerability which changed the temperature of the room. It was electric. People were sitting so far in their chairs I thought they would fall out.

When Ali finally finished, he told us the purpose of the evening was not just to talk about the successes of our YouTube channels, but bond over the shared struggle. Becoming a YouTuber was a daring, difficult, act, and trying to gloss over that fact, didn't help anyone.

We split into groups of four to five and shared our own YouTube stories. The first person was uncertain. But one by one, everyone told their deepest vulnerabilities, their struggles, their doubts. By the time it was my turn, I'd completely forgotten about all the successful things I was going to talk about.

For the rest of the evening, we laughed, and chatted, over not just YouTube, but our personal lives, our ambitions, our hopes. I connected so deeply with the people there, I met many of them for lunch or dinner over the following weeks. For a year afterward, I continued to meet on a weekly group call to discuss YouTube.

And yes, I got to talk with Ali Abdaal. No, I didn't tell him how well my YouTube channel was doing. I told him, "thank you."

Gatherings Don't Have To Suck Actually

I didn't realize it at the time, but the PTYA event subconsciously changed something in me. I'd never thought of myself as a group kind of guy. I told people whenever the topic of relationships came up that I preferred one on one or one on two settings. Gatherings always felt like they lacked purpose, meaning, spice.

The PTYA event showed me what an incredible gathering could be. Even though I continued to have terrible gatherings--mostly parties--at Cornell over the subsequent few years, a part of me always held on to what was possible.

This led me to reading The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker. In it, I consciously learned that gathering was both a science and art. I laughed the more I read, because basically everything she said was embodied in that PTYA event. The realization excited me. If I could learn the elements that make up a great gathering, perhaps one day I could make an event as touching as the PTYA was for me.

The Elements Of A Great Gathering

Purpose Over Categories

A friend once asked me what the purpose of my book club was. "Why, to discuss books," I said laughing. What a stupid question.

But as I thought about it more and more, something about it seemed off. The next book club I had, I realized why. My friend and I were discussing Demian by Herman Hesse. They had read it around my age, 19, and were reading it for the second time at 50 years old. This made the discussion fascinating because they continually talked about how their interpretation of the book had changed with their increased life wisdom.

That's when it hit me: the purpose of the book club wasn't just to discuss books: it was to stare at the same story through different decades of living.

This hits at one of the themes in Parker's book. Gatherings should focus on purpose, not categories.

Too often, we mistake the category of a gathering for its purpose. A wedding is for marriage. A family reunion is for talking with family. A party is for partying.

This is understandable, but it creates stale, forgettable, gatherings. The best gatherings have a clear, disputable purpose. Think of a birthday party which is about celebrating a transition to a new stage of life. A wedding which is about bringing two families together through connecting across difference. The more specific the purpose, the more powerful the gathering.

This extends into the next parts of making a great gathering.

Choosing Who To Invite And Where To Gather

Many of us believe more is always merrier. We don't like being exclusionary.

The problem is Inviting everyone means pleasing no one.

If I invited a ton more students around my age into our book club, it would have diluted its true power like soda poured into wine. Imagine if Ali Abdaal had brought a bunch of non-YouTubers to the PTYA event. It would have been awful. They would have felt lost and confused amidst everyone else discussing their YouTube journeys.

This logic extends itself to where you host as well.

The gathering environment should be a reflection of the purpose of the gathering.

Instead of dinner in a dining room, place the table just off the shoreline, toes kissed by waves. Host a birthday party in a graveyard lit with fairy lights. Hold your high school reunion on a ropes course where the only way to reconnect is literally not fall.

Breaking the script paradoxically opens us up to more intimacy. We think scripts protect us from harm. But all too often, they also wall us off from connection.

This same problem extends itself into hosting.

Being A Great Host

I at least, often assumed hosting meant being as unobtrusive as possible. We want the gathering to flow naturally after all. Why force your power onto others?

This is great in spirit, but it fails to understand that when we don't enforce our power, we simply allow others to enforce theirs. If no purpose is set, one person--usually the loudest and most flamboyant--sets their own in whatever small group they're a part of.

The secret to being a great host is having generous authority.

Generous authority involves using your power over the gathering to set a purpose which allows all guests to share in the magic. You're protecting the guests from themselves. Without a tone set, we resort to the scripts we're most used to because they feel the safest. We share our successes, unconsciously fall for power dynamics, and talk about, well nothing.

Another great principle for breaking scripts is creating rules, not etiquette.

Rules Free Your Gathering

We've all been to an occassion where we feel absolutely lost. There's a hidden etiquette which we weren't away of, and now we feel like a pterodactyl in a yoga retreat. The dining rules are insane—spoons only for soup, unless it’s chilled, then it’s forks, unless it’s a purée, then it’s back to spoons but the tiny ones used only on alternating Tuesdays--oh, and don’t you dare sip until the host taps their wine glass with a shrimp fork.

Etiquette often strangles gatherings, making them feel uninviting and confusing. But too often, we extend this same contempt toward rules.

This is unfortunate, because rules are a powerful tool for making our event magical. They free our gathering in the sense that they open us up to having a truly memorable, unique, experience, rather than the scripted, forgettable, ones we are all so used to.

Rules are different from etiquette in that they are temporary, easy to understand, and simple to follow. They create a temporary world only to be exited when guests return to society.

Rules might include no use of technology while in the gathering space. They could be you can only fill the wine glass of others, not your own. They might be you have to sit with people who you have never met before.

I once participated in a board game night of Wild West Sandbox where we had to speak in a southern accent. The entire night I spoke in a terrible Texan accent, and laughed as others tried the same. It was one of my favorite game nights of my life, and funnily enough was the night I met my first girlfriend. I like to tell myself it was in part because the rules of the occasion opened up different parts of myself.

Navigating Conflict

You've likely heard the old adage to avoid politics, sex, and religion at your gatherings. It seems wise in principle. Let's not talk about the most contentious topics at a group setting. Sometimes this can be a good idea, if you know the people you are talking with aren't capable of emotionally intelligent respectable conversations.

But often, this advice leads to stale, forgetable gatherings. Conflict is inevitable. People believe different things, whether it be politics, sex, and religion, or how to navigate an issue at work. Throwing it under the rug doesn’t make it disappear—it just turns it into a landmine.

The secret is gathering with mindfulness of conflict. If you think conflict will be an issue, tone set and ask the group how they can treat each other amongst conflict. What can they do to ensure it doesn’t spiral out of control? What topics should be off limits because they might be too contentious at the time? What should the group do if things get too heated?

Conversations like these before conflict spirals out of control can be lifesavers for preventing harmed relations.

These are the elements that make up a great gathering, but the book also dives into the stages of making your gathering happen. The last piece of the puzzle.

The Stages Of Creating A Great Gathering

Priming, Ushering, Launching, And Closing

90% of a great gathering happens before the gathering even begins. This is the priming stage. It involves finding guests, a location, setting rules, preparing food or drink, and preparing people for what's going to come.

Next comes ushering, which is all about bringing people into your temporary new world. This is the part of your gathering where people are beginning to come but not everyone is there yet. Many hosts make the mistake of assuming this is dead time, spent doing nothing but waiting for everyone to be there. What a waste. Instead, you can spend this time introducing guests to each other, having people work on a relevant game, priming people with a question to discuss, and more.

Next comes launching, setting the purpose, tone, and rules for your gathering. If you remember one thing: do not begin with logistics. Start with a speech, an experience, a reminder of the rules, anything instead of logistics. They can wait.

Finally, unfortunately, every gathering must come to a close. The biggest mistake hosts make in this step is not having a closing. You've experienced it. The gathering sizzles out, as people slowly go back home over the night. This is fine for a party, but if a gathering is made more special, it feels like a letdown.

So, it's essential you signal closings are happening in the first place. Make an announcement or some other indication fifteen minutes before things wrap up you are going to close. Once you do, great closings have two parts:

• Turning inward: reflecting on what was learned, experienced, or felt here with the group?
• Turning outward: asking how people want to take this into their real world lives?

If you’re wondering how to close when some people want to go but others want to stay, you can have a pre-closing ceremony like moving to a different room and saying anyone who’s tired can go now but we will continue the party in X. This allows the gathering to continue for those excited, but gives a way out for those who are more introverted or busy.

The Closing Of A Gathering, The Opening Of A Life

When I left the PTYA gathering that night, London looked different.

The curry-scented wind was still there. So were the gum wrappers and milkshake cups and lost pigeons. But I wasn’t trudging anymore. I was walking—lightly. Like something had shifted in my spine.

It wasn’t just that I’d met Ali Abdaal. It wasn’t even that I’d shared my story.

It was that, for the first time, I saw what a gathering could do.

It could make strangers feel like friends in less than an hour. It could make ambition feel less like competition and more like communion. It could remind you that behind every screen, every video, every “creator journey,” there’s just a person—nervous, hopeful, searching—trying to make something that matters.

That night didn’t just change how I see YouTube. It changed how I see people. And how I want to bring them together.

And maybe, just maybe, it can do the same for you.