I want to create something out of nothing but nothing isn’t a great place to draw from.
Mitch Hedberg
On February 21, 2006 a guy launches a video blog. The results, even by 2006 standards, were far less than perfect. The lighting is terrible. The camera unsteady. There’s a use of zoom and text effects that remind me of my mom’s VHS videos of my sister and I figure skating in 1990.
Later episodes have funny text effects where the title of the blog swims into view like a novice PowerPoint presentation. There’s a glass picture frame behind him reflecting whatever light fixture is in the room, and that’s all your eyes want to look at.
The first episode has 14 comments made in its entire first year. This definitely didn’t take off like a rocket ship.
People who’ve been fans of my blog and the writing I’ve done on places like SvN have messaged me that they’ve missed my writing. I haven’t done as much lately. Why? The answer is pretty simple. As Jason Fried might say, I just don’t have the attention. It’s easy for me to spend an entire day writing and researching an article. But, running Highrise is a big job. There’s so much to do. Building a brand new team, managing the current product and its support, and reinvigorating product development on an old product, takes all of my attention.
And there’s a hesitation now in publishing my work.
Success breeds hesitation. Even the modicum of success I’ve had writing has created a hesitation to publish something that isn’t perfect. I want each article to be even better than the last one. But that just makes it impossible to publish thoughts and ideas and observations when I don’t have the attention to make them perfect.
Hesitation becomes this empty void where we stop producing good ideas, because we no longer have that bucket of just fair ideas to draw from.
How do I fix it?
That video blogger kept at it. In episode 1000 the intro graphics are now this fancy professional animation that reminds me of the quality of the Mad Men intro. And he’s definitely found an audience.
Today you know him as Gary Vaynerchuk and this was his Wine Library TV video blog. Today, with over a million Twitter followers, he hosts another video podcast called the #AskGaryVee show. The production quality is light years past that first episode of Wine Library TV. There’s perfect lighting, multiple cameras, fancy editing and effects that all come off as interesting and professional. And there’s thousands and thousands of people watching. He’s clearly made something many of us aspire to after publishing and publishing and publishing stuff that was less than perfect.
One thing that’s helped recently reinvigorate my writing was to give myself channels where I don’t feel the pressure for perfect. Comments on forums are great for this. Most people have very low expectations of the quality of “comments” online.
I use Reddit to practice. I’ll find someone asking something I think I could riff on, and I’ll just go. I’ll try to work in some personal anecdotes or something I’ve observed and see if I can make it interesting. If I like the result I might polish it a little and put it in more places. Here’s an example of a question on Reddit that I answered.. Seemed like it got some folks interested, so I polished it some, and posted a different version to this blog which sparked a great conversation.
If I didn’t have that first mediocre attempt at an answer, I wouldn’t have ever gotten to publishing the better one. I needed a far less than perfect place to start.
A few weeks ago Jason Fried pinged me with:
We got together to hammer out a few details of what it would look like. Soon after, we filmed a pilot episode that we recorded but didn’t tell anyone about. We wanted to see if it had any kinks. It had kinks.
It took us 15 minutes just to figure out places with good internet connectivity and lighting – so you could actually see my face. After that, we finally got to chatting. The results were still terrible. We had a fun time talking, but it was unlistenable. There’s an echo of my voice in the video. We later figured out from chatting with people who’ve already done this a ton like Chase Clemons and Shaun Hildner, it’s probably from Jason’s laptop mic picking up the audio from his speakers – problem would be resolved if we both used headsets.
Ok, let’s do another. So we discuss, how often can we sustain doing this? What’s the name? Do we need better cameras and mics? What about lighting? Maybe we can get Shaun to help us? Should we use Hangouts or a different app or technology. So many unanswered questions and so much room to keep making low quality attempts at this podcast.
This Monday came and we didn’t have answers to any of our outstanding questions. I debated if we should do another “off air” episode, just so we can practice more. I hesitated. Jason’s reply? “Let’s do it live”
And so we did. Our second “pilot” episode went live yesterday, August 24 at 3pm. And it was as you’d expect, less than perfect. I somehow accidentally turned off the voice detection Google Hangouts uses to automatically decide which face to show in the video, so you see Jason’s face throughout the beginning until Shaun comes in and tries to fix our setup. Then you can see I’m distracted by the monitor and manually switching who is seen in the video.
People still enjoyed it.
So awesome: @jasonfried and @natekontny talk product design — https://t.co/oZmyVqndX3
— Eric Trinh (@eric_trinh) August 25, 2015This is how life works. This is how most things we enjoy and call successful start. They aren’t as good as we want them. They need a ton of practice. And even when we get something to the place where it is good, now we have a new challenge: our hesitation at being bad again.
Just keep publishing. Keep putting out the stuff that’s not perfect. When you find yourself in a spot where the expectations are too high, just find another spot. We need that place to draw from.
Jason and I are going to keep publishing these “imperfect” chats of ours. You should follow us on Twitter: @jasonfried and @natekontny. We’ll talk about not just the things we see other folks struggling with and asking questions about, but the things still bugging us. Life is far less than perfect for us, and we keep leaning on each other to help us through our current challenges. Hopefully recordings of us hashing them out will prove useful to others going through the same.
If there’s anything you’d like us to ever cover, please hit us up on Twitter or ask in the comments of our SvN posts. We’d love to hear from you.
Raphael Scartezini
on 25 Aug 15Great show! Live is the deal! Being recorded live is a great brain exercise. You have to be 3 to 5 sentences ahead on your mind, to avoid taking the argument to a dead end or embarrassing end! (although usually an embarrassing situation might be the best part of the show.)
Keep it up!
Ps. Gary’s show and content really are unbelievably good! Even in the early days of wine library there are some fantastic episodes!
Devan
on 26 Aug 15Good effort. But I am amazed at the number of podcast creators that still persevere with cheap USB mics and laptop speakers for creating their work.
A nice 2 channel audio interface and studio quality condenser mic will set you back a couple of hundred bucks, but will greatly increase the quality of the audio component, with less clipping, better directional pickup and less room echo & background sounds.
Also, taking the time to route the audio through Garageband (free on all Macs) in order to process the signal through a de-esser or reverb plugin will make the listening experience a lot better too.
Lastly, a decent set of monitoring speakers or headphones will also enable you to tweak and improve the audio signal considerably, as well as isolate the incoming audio to prevent crosstalking and feedback – although then the costs start to climb quite high.
Not saying that your production was bad – it wasn’t, but it deserves the best treatment… ;)
Nathan
on 26 Aug 15Thanks everyone! @devan: you have great advice, but that was largely the big point in this article. we will make this better. And by episode 1000 it will hopefully have Mad Men quality graphics :) All of these things you’ve mentioned have crossed our minds. I’ve researched mics, and headphones. I’ve even been researching lighting: do I get a light box and a circular light. Now I need a lighting meter. What’s the best angle? On and on the rabbit hole goes.
In the second episode:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=td59ArHBBiU
I made some changes that hopefully improved the production: spent more time looking at the camera, changed to a darker background, actually switched back to the laptop camera as I thought the quality was better than the usb camera i was using in episode 1. But then there’s the content and the format. Stuff we’re still figuring out and how to provide the best value.
We’ll get to all of it eventually. But the big point really is, let’s all stop thinking so hard about the stuff we do. Just get anything out there that provides some value. Even if we know we could do better. Why wait? It’s just going to stop us from actually starting. Getting this out even if it was totally screwed up, could still help someone with a problem they are going through. Get something, anything, out there, and now we have something to refine from.
Charles Roper
on 27 Aug 15Really interesting take on Anne Lamont’s “shitty first draft” idea, Nathan – thanks! You know, that hesitation you talk about, I think it has wider effect. So many people are now afraid to post stuff online because production values are so high, generally. That early spirit of the web of wide-eyed experimentation, clunk and all, has been lost to a crippling expectation for the slick and professional (at least within the tech and digital creation industries). Writing must be profound, witty, elegantly set in fine type. UX has to be considered. Visuals have to be on-trend, using the latest techniques. It’s all so razzle-dazzle but somehow it feels so much more shallow and less interesting for it. Free, loose, rough, authentic self-expression has been pushed aside, like a child growing up suddenly getting self conscious. No child under a certain age ever declares “I can’t draw!” yet most adults do. What happens to us?
Justin Jackson makes a good point: “It’s more important for a writer to be interesting than a good writer.” Interesting doesn’t have to be high quality, accomplished, polished – it just has to be interesting. The web is a big place. Lots of people find lots of things interesting. Just put it out there.
It seems to me that we all have a responsibility to let it hang loose, to put our shitty first drafts out there, be honest, authentic and, as Brené Brown puts it in Daring Greatly, be vulnerable. That way happiness and wholeheartedness lies. Taken to the extreme, you could even record your actual writing. How endlessly fascinating would it be to see some of the great writers at work like this? Read the section To what end further down that article for more of James’s thoughts on that idea. Designers and coders – do the same – record your work!
But it’s hard right? We’re wired up to feel shame, to hide our less-than-perfect, vulnerable selves. So if you feel that nagging hesitation, just have another read of Theodore Roosevelt’s Man in the Arena speech, from which the title of Brené Brown’s book was taken:
Charles Roper
on 27 Aug 15Or, as Anne Lamont herself puts it:
“Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.”
Nathan Kontny
on 27 Aug 15@Charles, you nailed it.
“So many people are now afraid to post stuff online because production values are so high”
I’m afraid too. Diving into doing something like this podcast definitely brought some new stress and thoughts of how crappy it’s going to look and be compared to the AskGaryVee show or other shows I’m a fan of. I’m not immune to those thoughts.
I see so much good stuff out there. I remember releasing Draft(http://draftin.com) to the world. It did a few things you couldn’t find anywhere else, but man did some of it look bad. The feature was helpful but it was terrible looking. I knew I could do a better job, but from all this experience I have doing this now, I also know, I could easily have not released it, and spent a year making it perfect, and then I probably would have never gotten around to releasing it. Or a competitor would have arrived and gotten the attention for some of the ideas. I remember even getting some shit from friends about making this screen or that screen better, and all I could say was, “I know. I know it could be better, and it will be. But it’s out.” And it got a lot better.
And now I see us as a team struggle with this at Highrise. There’s so much we want to do. So many neat ideas. But we get stuck in these loops of debate about what a help file looks like or even how the words on the page are bordered. Worrying about details isn’t bad, it’s great actually, but only as long as we’re still getting better about shipping the big ideas faster. They’ll get more and more polished. But people ache for new things in their lives to accomplish things they can’t today. They don’t ache for polish.
This discussion is closed.