There was a time when there weren’t aisles full of self-help books at your local bookstore. I recall that there were some self-help books that your local B. Dalton or Waldenbooks wouldn’t have carried. For those, you had to go to your local crystal-wearing, chakra aligning, toad licking new age store.

Today, there are two or three aisles at Barnes and Noble, and they consistently rank higher and higher on Amazon. Not only that, but since they are no longer content just to have a bestseller, they’re all over YouTube and Instagram, and they have podcasts. I don’t know if it’s because the snake oil salespeople have gotten better, or we, as a society, believe we’ve gotten worse. Of course, believing we aren’t quite right is what self-help gurus want us to do, and millions of us have bought into that idea. I would suggest that, for the most part, we’re fine, and we need to stop believing the motivational flavor of the week.

I have a few reasons why I believe we need to see this industry as the flim-flam it is:

First, a personal note: If you have to plant doubt and possibly a small amount of fear into a person to get them to buy something from you, I just don’t think you’re a decent human being. No amount of baby-kissing, puppy rescuing, or school planting you do in Africa, I can’t escape the fact that you profit off that doubt and fear.

Second, there’s a small part of the population that suffers from a sort of self-help attention deficit disorder. They jump from method to method, and when they don’t see immediate or short-term improvement in their lives, they give up and move to the next method that hooks them. In truth, the books aren’t the help that person needs, rather recognize that the action of moving from thing to thing when one doesn’t work quickly might be the beginning of the answer to their problems.

Third, and I can’t stress this one highly enough, most of these books say the same thing. Of course, they dress it up to match their personality and voice, but the basic premise is almost always the same. I spent two years reading every self-help and productivity book I could lay my hands on while researching a character for a comedy podcast. After that many books, I concluded that it’s almost formulaic:

• These books always start with a generalization. It’s meant to describe for you the person who ‘needs’ this book. It’s almost always written generally enough that many people will recognize some trait they possess in the writer’s avatar. That plants a seed of self-doubt in your mind, and that’s by design. If you recognize yourself here, the chances of you buying the book go up.
• Next, the writer will introduce themselves and explain why they are qualified to help you. Generally, they do this by telling you they were once where you are right now through a sad and almost tragic story but for the epiphany that changed their life. Depending on the writer, they will next go into what has happened since then. They might tell you the number of accolades they’ve received. They might name-drop people that you will certainly know to suggest an association. Some writers will tell you of their abundance, while others will share their philanthropic efforts. They will tell you that you can live that same life if you follow their directions, not all of which will be in their book. More on that later.
• In every chapter of their book, they will have a quote from some deep thinker you might know. They’ll lay out a premise that will introduce the subject of that chapter and then unnecessarily remind you of who they are through a ‘personal story’ that relates to that chapter. They’ll then cut to the main idea of that chapter and give a list of x number of reasons why they think they’re right. They’ll recap and close.
• At the end of the book, they’ll offer some congratulations and tell you that if you want to get even more information, you can go to their website and get their online course, join their premium membership, or buy some product that costs more than people have the sense to pay.

When you see this formula laid out, it makes you wonder: If it’s all the same, why is this a bajillion-dollar industry? You’re not paying for the content. You’re paying for the personality, style, and voice that hooks you for whatever reason. Once on the hook, you’re part of their gravy train until you decide you want off this ride.

I believe the best way to get off this ride is to give you the common denominator. So, here are the things that every self-help book has in common:

1. Set A Goal, Make A Plan

The first thing you must recognize is that getting your life under control can’t be a scattershot thing. Start small and identify a particular area of your life you would like to improve, and define what success would look like. For example, I wanted to get up earlier and have at least an hour to myself before going to work. This would mean I needed to get up between 4:30 and 4:45 in the morning on the weekdays, much earlier than I was used to. Working backward from there, I realized that I needed to go to bed earlier, stop consuming caffeine at a certain point in the day so I could go to bed earlier, lay out clothes and pack a lunch at night before bed, and stop taking devices into the bedroom and read a book instead, and force myself not to hit a snooze button no matter how much I would like fifteen more minutes. After a month of incorporating these steps into my life, I have made that time possible. Now I can move to the next goal.

2. You Can’t Just Think About It.

This is the linchpin of everything else I will put on this list. If you’re addicted to self-help and productivity porn, and you plan and make lists and think about it and never take action, everything else is useless. For years, I would carry a notebook with me everywhere, take all kinds of notes on to-do lists, and write endless ideas and vision statements I never used. I was always ‘Fixin’ to get ready,’ which is another way of saying I wasn’t ready. Eventually, I had to recognize that the reason I wasn’t moving forward was that I wasn’t moving at all. Once I took action, things started happening. You have to make procrastination and paralysis a thing of the past. Go do the thing.

3. Progress Is A Daily Practice.

When I was a very young child, I had a problem with a bully kid punching me every day on the playground. I cried to Dad about it, and he said, “If he hits you, then hit him back”. The next day I went back crying to Dad. “Did you hit him back?” He asked. “Yes, but then he hit me again,” I said. Dad was confused by my answer. “Well, why didn’t you hit him back a second time?” I got very upset by the question. “Because I didn’t know I was allowed to him *again*!” 
You can’t just hit the bully once because they’ll hit back. Only this time, the bully is Life, and Life hits harder. Hit Life back hard every day. You may not win, but you will get stronger at dealing with the bully.

4. Your Discipline Equals Your Results

It’s this simple: If you can get your mind right, you can get your life right. The more you can incorporate the second and third points on this list into your life, the more you will be able to get your life under your control and work towards the goal you set. When my life is going the way I want it to, it’s because I have followed the systems I built for myself, and I do my best not to let other people control my day. I make time for quiet; that’s generally my drive to work in the morning. I don’t keep my email open during the day, and I don’t ever open it up first thing. I do one thing at a time because I know I can’t multitask. I find the time to hit the gym. I get a good night’s sleep. I block out time for the side gigs during the week, and I ensure that every day includes the wife and the kids because they’re the reason I do anything. When I forget to use these systems and lose my discipline, my life is not where I want it to be. So I do my best to keep to my discipline. Find what works for you, and stick with it.

5. It Won’t Happen Tomorrow

As I previously wrote, people often jump from system to system and guru to guru because they don’t see results in a short amount of time. To quote a favorite meme of mine, ‘That’s not how this works’. I started lifting weights on Memorial Day Weekend 2018. It’s a year and a half later, and I’m finally seeing some visible positive results from working out two to three times a week. I had to commit to putting in the time and the work for the long term. If I had become discouraged six months in, I wouldn’t have ever seen the progress I see now. Now that I see results, I’m more compelled to keep going. I have a simple goal. I turn 50 in July 2020, and I want to define what 50 looks like. It’s a long-term goal. This isn’t a sprint; it’s a marathon. Stop treating everything like a sprint.

6. You Need To Own It.

When you have minor setbacks or major failures, sometimes we look to place the blame on anything but ourselves. “It’s not my fault, the dog ate my homework. Mercury was in retrograde. The Illuminati towed my car.” Having agency over your own life means you get the wins AND the losses. You have to own it, so stop making excuses for why things don’t go well. Learn, Adapt, Overcome.

7. You Don’t Have To Be Nice But Don’t Be A Jerk.

People will understand if you’re having a bad day if you’re honest. What people don’t deserve is your sour attitude. Try to be nice, try to be positive, but on those days where it’s hard, make an effort not to be a jerk. Or, as my Nana used to say, “Be nice, or be quiet”.

It seems a bit weird to say ‘It’s that easy,” because clearly, it isn’t. But, without the fluff, it does look simpler than the motivational voice of the day makes it out to be. You don’t need to find the next voice out there that hooks you; instead, listen to your own. You’re OK. Yes, everyone can be better at something, but that does not mean you’re a failure. You don’t need self-help. What you need is self-help that works.

Where I come from, self-help that works…is help.

In the late Nineties, when getting audio posted on the internet was more complicated than now, I remember using a headset mic to record audio with a Sound Blaster 16 PCI Card, then editing it with SB Studio on my 486SX PC.

(Yes, humans had evolved to the point of having opposable thumbs by then.)

To stream audio on the internet back then, you either used Windows Media Encoder or, my personal preference, RealAudio. Both methods needed two files to work: the audio file itself and a file that acted as a middleman. When you clicked the play button, you were engaging the middleman file, which pointed to the audio file on your server. Once accessed, it loaded up in Audio Player, and once it felt like it had enough lead time, it would play. The smaller your audio file the better.

Having a small file was great for another reason — you didn’t have a lot of space for things back then. My first website was on GeoCities, and that gave me 10MB. Megabytes. By today’s standards, that’s microscopic, and yet we managed to get audio entertainment up on the internet long before podcasting and long before anyone really cared much about audio quality. As a result, the bit rate on those early sound files was usually Mono 16-bit 22kHz files — they’re pretty horrible. You won’t be listening to Dark Side of the Moon at that quality, and if you are, I seriously question your life choices!

Today, we don’t have these problems. Definitely not one of length or server space if a podcaster like Joe Rogan can go to three hours regularly. And not one of quality if you’ve heard anything from NPR — the gold standard of production quality. That said, if you’re just starting out, no one expects you to produce anything like the quality of Serial.

Most independent podcasters are an army of one, while big podcast outfits have the staff to dedicate to production. Most people who evangelize podcasting will tell you that the message is more important than the production quality if you’re connecting with an audience. As you gain experience, the desire to make your show sound better is perfectly natural. I have found this a stress point for some beginners because while they might have a decent audio editing program, they’re not quite sure what to do with it beyond recording. This is compounded somewhat by people who would like to make this sound complicated so they can sell you their solution. The good news: it isn’t complicated at all.

There are seven steps to making sure you have decent podcast audio.

1. STFU or GTFO

Simply put, if it’s in your recording space and it makes noise, silence it or remove it. Clinking glasses, pencils or fingers tapping on tables, pets, kids, you name it. If it cannot be made to be quiet, it should be made to leave. The less noise you have to deal with during recording, the less cleanup you’re going to have to do later. Remember: “We’ll fix it in post” is a pipe dream, and sometimes you just can’t fix it.

2. Stop That Damn Racket

Some noise can’t be silenced — air conditioning, for example. It’s also possible that the ambient noise in the recording space can’t be quietened much at all.

That’s OK. Most of Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) available today can capture a ‘noise print’ from a file and remove as much of that noise. When you record, make sure to have at least five to ten seconds of silence before anyone speaks so you can capture that noise print. I also like to leave five to ten seconds at the end of the recording.

You can also use a noise gate that quietens the input if the signal falls below a certain level. If you have a budget, you can purchase DAW plugins or standalone programs that analyze the sound file and attempt to correct them automatically.

Once you’ve removed most of the general noise, make sure you listen to the file and check for any other noise that needs to be removed manually. Sometimes, you can’t remove a noise because someone is talking over it. In that case, assess whether you can remove the line and still retain the context and meaning of what the speaker is saying. That brings me to the next step….

3. They’re Smarter Than They Sound. Really.

This next step is not only helpful for good sound, but it’s also a great idea if you don’t want you or your guests to sound like idiots: get rid of the filler words like ‘Um’, ‘Ah’, and ‘Er’. If you or your guests stammer through something and trip all over the words, remove it. Likewise, if you or your guests use crutch words or phrases like ‘you know, ‘like,’ or ‘I’m just saying,’ remove them if you can.

I personally can’t stand the relatively new trend of people starting an answer with the word ‘So’. If I can remove it, I do. Shorten long pauses. Remove audible breaths. Finally, as you edit, you may become familiar with the talent’s pacing. Do your best to match that pacing throughout. The talent will sound much more professional, and if it’s a guest, you have increased the odds of having that guest back.

4. The Audience Can’t Listen If They’re Deaf

I’m sure everyone has had this experience watching TV or listening to radio or podcast: The ads are much louder than the content, and you break speed records to wrench the volume down before you bleed from the ears.

Dialogue, music, remote interviews, and sound effects are sound files that come from a myriad of sources, and almost none of them are recorded or exported in the same way. Also, you may have spots within your own dialog where your volume goes up and down while speaking. It’s your job to make sure you don’t leave your audience riding the volume knob to hear you while running the risk of leaving them with permanent hearing loss at any moment. DAWs can do this through the normalization function, while websites like Auphonic can do this automatically.

Aren’t You A Little Tweaker?

Next, we need to make the talent’s voice sound good. To do this properly, I need to give you a hard truth: every voice is different, so the things that make one voice sound good will not make every voice sound good. Another hard truth is that, for the most part, no one sounds quite like they think they do. I think most people believe their voice is deeper than it really is because it sounds that way to us. When you play a person’s voice back to them, it’s entirely possible they don’t recognize it. Sometimes, people will tell you upfront they don’t like hearing themselves — that’s perfectly natural. Using equalization, this is very much a trial and error process where you’ll be tweaking the low end, midrange, and high end until you hit a sweet spot. Since every voice is different, it’s simply a learning process. For example, you don’t want to add more low-end to someone who already has a deep voice. Instead, you may play with the mids and highs to add some crispness and brightness to the voice. In some cases, you may decide to add some light compression, but I don’t think it’s always appropriate to do so. Your results may vary, but the only way to learn this is to do it.

Put It All Together

Now we’re ready to assemble all your resources and add them to your multitrack space. Intros, outros, music, dialogue, sound effects, and anything else you need for your production. Lay them out on your timeline, adjusting the volume so that everything sounds natural and has the right flow. Nothing should be drowned out; nothing should overpower.

Are You Listening?

Finally, listen to your whole timeline in real time and correct any mistakes you haven’t caught. Once you’re satisfied, export your file at -16 LUFS. This is the standard for loudness with podcasts and ensures that your podcast will sound consistent with the loudness of the majority of podcasts out there today.

You won’t get it right the first time— that’s ok! By following these steps to getting good podcast audio, you’ll increase the chances of having the kind of consistent, high-quality podcast you want — one that listeners will appreciate and share with others.