Patience and Time Unfortunately0:00/397.06122448979591×

Transcript:

Okay, so this next bit is a little, uh, you know, podcaster inside baseball. So bear with me about a year ago, I guess because we had been doing this for so long, we suddenly became people that others would ask advice of. And, um, that was weird because we have no idea what to say, but a lot of the questions asked are about.

Promotion, right? How do you promote your show? How do you make your show popular? What do you do? Do you do Instagram ads? Stuff like that.

and I never have anything useful to say to this question because there is nothing to say,

Eric Newsom, who's a podcast producer of some repute, uh, loves to tell the story about how a show that he was producing got a full page spread in the New York Times, and it did not move the needle for his show at all.

Ronald Young Jr. Made a show called Weight for It a couple years ago, and it was a critical darling and it won a ton of awards. And then a year later I heard him on a podcasting round table talking about how he still struggles to get people to listen to the show. And he has not made any money from the show.

And the biggest bump in downloads he got was actually from being a guest on normal gossip.

and then just recently author Amy McNee in her newsletter starts talking about how she. Was thrilled because she got word that she was gonna be a guest on. Jay Shetty's podcast. Jay Shetty, one of the biggest podcasts in the world. She was very excited, really excited to talk about her book,

and then when she checked her book sales a couple of days later, she was. Shocked to find that nothing happened. She just talked to millions of people about her book and nothing happened.

I.

And in the newsletter, she goes off on this for a while. She talks about how you know artists are taught to chase external validation. Taught to chase big breaks, but these are flashy opportunities and they rarely translate to anything tangible.

So we're sitting here constantly outsourcing our power and we're kind of being sleeping. Beauty, you know, we're encasing ourselves in glass, trying to look as pretty as possible, and hoping that Prince Charming will come along and wake us up.

I am wondering if the days of the big break are behind us. I mean, certainly there are big hits out there from time to time, but I don't know if there's any way to turn that into some sort of math problem, right? Like you do this plus this and it equals big break.

It seems pretty random, like winning the lottery.

We seem to have this inclination to think of everything as if it were the internet. And what I mean by the internet is, uh, going viral and tons of likes and trending and all that stuff,

but the truth of it is some things just don't operate like the internet. Some things are slow.

When you think about all of the things that went viral, they're gone in 10 minutes. You don't even think about them anymore. I, but there are other things out there

that have a long trailing history.

And even though we regard the internet as this place where things happen instantaneously and are gone instantaneously, there are people and organizations out there who have this long history on the internet.

the internet. Writ large isn't this world of the instantaneous. It's an entire ecosystem, and in any ecosystem, you have things that are short-lived and long-lived. There are things on the internet that are like the GAD fly. They have one day in the sun and then they die.

And I think the frustration of a lot of people may come from the fact that they want to be that instantaneous, instantly popular thing, and it's just not a sustainable way to live.

It's not a sustainable way to exist as someone trying to make things. IThe internet is blindingly fast, but creating a reliable entity there goes very slowly and steadily. Like a tree in a forest, it requires a trillion swirling bacteria, all of them with the lifespan of a few seconds. And beneath that, the mysterious network of Mycelia. You are a creature of this forest of the internet, but you are the slow and methodical timekeeper.

You are not the paramecium. You are not the gadfly, you're the oak. Slow to grow, but once grown a giant.

There's so much out there that tries to seduce us into doing something instantaneously, but in the end, what we've always come back to is just patience and time.

And you know what? That sucks. I really hate that. It would be great if it was instantaneous, if it, it would be great if there was some sort of short path, but I haven't found it. And it certainly sounds like no one else has found it either. So it's all the long road. There's so many people out there who are just in audition mode.

They're creating things on the internet in an effort to get the attention of something or someone bigger than them.

And if that's your chosen path to success, then go for it. I celebrate you. I guess my thing is. When you're making something just to try and get the attention of someone else when your several episode audio fiction is just an audition for a TV studio. I can smell it in the work. It doesn't seem like something you're enjoying.

It seems like a means to an end and that's, it's never fun to listen or watch a means to an end. It is that feeling you get when you're at a party and you're talking to someone and the person you're talking to would much rather be talking to someone else in the end. Unfortunately, it's patience and time.

I don't you hate that?