Young Achiever Merrick Hanna

Born on March 22, 2005 (the same year I was born) in San Diego, California, Merrick Hanna has become a dancing prodigy. With his unique robot style of dancing, Merrick has been featured in commercials for H&M, Honda, and Gap Kids. With 750,000 instagram followers, 344K Youtube subscribers and a net worth of $125 million, Merrick Hanna is a “flo bot” phenomenon. Here’s how it all began.

At a very young age, Merrick saw a robot which made him want to act like a robot, whether he was eating or walking. It was only the beginning. At 9 years old, while watching America’s Best Dance Crew, Merrick saw the Jabbawockeez hip-hop dancers and was immediately hooked. He started teaching himself what is known as the “flo bot’ style of dancing by watching online tutorials.

At 10 years old, his fame accelerated after a video of his dancing went viral. His social media following began to grow along with his fame. Merrick and his younger brother, Sagan, used to dance on the street together, showing off their talent. But get this, they made about $100 every half hour! That’s $1,000 in 5 hours!

He’s also attended numerous dance battles facing off against adults who were stunned by his talent and killer moves. All of this eventually got him on the Ellen DeGeneres show where he danced and talked about his passion and how it started.

A year later, 11-year-old Merrick aired on Nickelodeon on the Lip Sync Battle Shorties, a kid version of Lip Sync Battle where the dancers move their lips to hit songs. In 2016, he danced to the song Radioactive by Imagine Dragons with lasers and flashing lights. To this day, that video has been viewed over 47 million times! In that same year, he performed live in So You Think You Can Dance getting extensive praise. but it was only the beginning.

At 12 years old, Merrick Hanna went on America’s Got Talent giving a spellbinding performance which got a standing ovation and had all the judges saying YES! Including Simon Cowell who said “this is one of the best dance performances I’ve ever seen on this show” and he’d have Merrick feature in his own pop videos in a heart beat.

On top of that, he’s also dabbled in acting, performing in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing and A Winter’s Tale. He’s been in the TV series Mani, The Adventures of Velvet Prozak and the 2020 movie Alienated. Plus, he’s hosted the Fox show Dance Squad where he teaches people how to do signature dances from movies like The Greatest Showman, Rio, Ice Age and more!

All this to say, age didn’t stop Merrick from following his passion to be one of the most famous, young robot dancing machines in existence. Anything is possible. There aren’t any rules saying you have to wait to be older, better, richer, greater or have more talent. Just do what you love, sit back and watch the results.