I don’t think I’m telling you any tall tales when I say that a lot of us have trouble putting a little something away.   I remember seeing a story on more than one occasion that a good chunk of us in here in America would be in some real trouble if we got sick, or if we had a car break down with something major, or a major appliance breaks down and need replacing.   I’ve certainly been in this place, I feel like a lot of us have.   On a related note, no matter how much our young folks save, it seems like simple housing—even a studio apartment—appears to be out of reach of the younger generations.   I have three kids, my youngest is gonna be 24 in October.  They all still live here at home, because they can’t afford to live anywhere else.  It’s at the point where I feel like the best course of action is to pay off this house and give it to them with the understanding that you keep a room handy for Kim and I, and we go traveling in our later years.  That’s the goal.  

For those of us who have children, we are now entering nervous season.  For me, Fall has meant the anxiety of thinking about Christmas.  Putting stuff under the tree.  Now, I have long since passed the age where Christmas has thrown up all over my Living Room.   I still get gifts for everyone, but nowhere near the tonnage I used to.  The anxiety of putting that money away has lessened a great deal, but I still get pangs as we get closer to Christmas.   But I have found a solution that works for me and mine, and I want to share it with you.    I call it my Christmas Club account.   If you don’t know what that is, I’ll explain.   I don’t know if this is a thing anymore, but you used to be able to go to your bank and set up an automatic deposit into a savings account to have that money there when it’s time to go Holiday Shopping.    

But let’s say you manage to put some money away for Christmas.  I have a wad of money that needs something to do, but I generally have no idea what the kids are into at this moment in time.  If you’ve bought toy horses for the daughter because she told you she liked horses in May, but has moved on to Anime in September and never mentioned it, you might know what I’m talking about.   So, I’ve devised a solution that makes everyone happy, and I get to take care of Christmas with as little anxiety as possible.  The only thing I have to deal with is the usual Holiday Gloom that I get every year, but that’s another story for another time. 

The main ingredient you need for this recipe is Amazon.  If you object to Amazon for whatever reason, that’s fine.  I understand, and there’s no hate from me.  Vaya con Dios, compadres.   It’s simple.  First, everyone in the house has a wish list that they’ve shared with me.   Over the year, they can put whatever they want on it.  Second, you have a gift card account with your Amazon account, and it’s reloadable.  I use it as a savings account.  Every paycheck I put a minimum of 25 dollars on that gift balance.  Just using the minimum if you’re paid twice a month, you have 500 bucks in that account by the end of October.  Of course, you need to make sure that you don’t use that gift card if you buy something on Amazon in the interim, so make sure you check how you’re paying for something before you place that order.    

You must do this first.  Don’t think about it, just do it.   If you sit there and think about it, you’ll find another reason for that 25 bucks.   If you do it and don’t think about it, you may find that you don’t miss that 25 bucks, and it’s residing in a place where it can do some good in the long term.   Of course, you may find that you can contribute more, but I would say this.  If you can find you can contribute more, then your brain has made the jump into knowing you can put money away.   Take that extra money that you’re thinking about putting in the Amazon account and put it in a savings account for when you’ve got to replace that refrigerator.   Like you do.  I hope this helps, and if you have other ways to handle this, I’d love to hear about them.  

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been possessed with a single thought:  Exactly how much stuff should reside on my to-do list?  If I had a to-do list, that is.   Until a couple of weeks ago, I did not have a to-do list put to paper.  What I had is the same as many of us middle-aged married men have, the HoneyDo List.  It’s an ethereal mass of effort with not so much a starting point as it is the face of a mountain laden with tasks, with the words “YES DEAR” emblazoned on its face in flaming letters.   It’s an intimidating image, and as such it left me stymied as to how to attack it.   

So I recently decided that there was only one thing for it.  I had to sit down and write it all down.  I sat down at my Mac, opened the Notes App, set a timer for 30 minutes, and wrote down all the things I thought I needed to OH MY GOD THAT MUCH!?!

I don’t mind telling you that having an ethereal mass of effort is way less terrifying than having an exhaustively detailed list of all the shit you have to do.    Thirty-plus items I came up with in that 30 minutes.  Since then I’ve added another 10 or so when I see something I hadn’t thought of, and in that time I’ve gone from abject paralysis to abject terror.  Not just because of the size of it, but now realizing that I  have no idea which one to do first.  

After thinking about it for a while, I thought it would be best to try to group these things into sections that make sense, and that made things a little easier.  I was able to start things.  The good news is that I’ve managed to clear half the list.   I have now reached the firstiest of the first-world problems all related to this tangent:  Now I’ve cleared all the stuff that requires nothing but time,  I have now reached the things that will require learning time or a budget, and if the past is prologue, that’s my next step.  Trying to figure out what the priority is, and now I just need to see if the priority is the investment in time, or the investment in money to hire a pro for the stuff that’s outside my ken. 

So that’s one exercise in Executive dysfunction resolved.  Now, we just need to dedicate time to sitting down and keeping that list refreshed.   That reminds me of a technique from one of the mountains of books I’ve read called The Weekly Review.   A way of keeping track of what I have done and keeping track of what I need to do in the next week or month or so.    I realize that this might seem like a no-brainer to a lot of you, but it really isn’t one to me.  The older I get, the more I realize that I need to have alarms and buzzers and notes and things that do everything but explode in front of my face.  

And today, I realize that this whole tangent is a lesson that I haven’t done.  Or that I have and I let it all go to pot at some point.   

So I need to set that shit up again, Don’t I?

One of the worst things that social media of the 21st Century has inflicted on us is the influencer.  I think we can agree on that.   But one of the worst forms of these influencers is the productivity/hustle mongers that tell you that the pathway to your dreams lies in not sleeping. 

I have to be honest, it’s an alluring concept.   To be able to find systems and processes that help someone like me keep track of what in the fuck I’m doing, and the idea that if I can do it—whatever it is—consistently from 5 pm to insomnia o’clock from now until the heat death of the universe I might get what I want out of my life just before my nervous breakdown and confinement in a rubber room. 

The problem with that mindset is that for some of us, there’s no off switch, and circuits that are constantly energized eventually short and burn out.  Bad enough when it’s the compressor switch on your refrigerator, that’s a week’s worth of food down the drain.  When the switch is your brain, that’s another problem altogether.    For me, a person that is simultaneously goal oriented and riddled with ADD, there’s a lot of self-loathing that occurs when I can see the thing, and I want to do the thing, but I’ve already failed at doing the thing in my head because I couldn’t keep up the pace of what I thought the thing requires.   Take this podcast as an example, or the stories I’ve started writing, or the myriad of websites I’ve scrapped and started over because I wanted to clean the slate and try again.  I think my want to play mad scientist and nuke everything and start over gives me some squirt of the happy brain juice because as near as I can figure, the planning and making of the thing gives me more joy than the maintaining of the thing.  It’s the only thing that makes sense to me. 

There’s another layer of suck you can add to this 7-layer shitcake, and that’s the input from people who think adding some shame into the game is going to help.  Bitch, you can’t beat me up any more than I beat myself up, so have a Coke and a smile and a fucking seat.  I can do that part all by myself, thanks, and I’m so much better at it than you are.  I’m not an expert at much, but I can knock myself out.  Trust me. 

That’s why I went on a quest to find external help in the form of self-help books many years ago.  I thought I might find the one thing that unlocks my problem and explains it to me like I’m five so I can figure out THE PLAN ™.  Unfortunately, as I’ve said before, self-help is a long con, where many different faces and personalities say the same 6 or 7 things and offer you more help if you’re willing to pay for it in their members-only section.   THERE IS NO HELP IN THE CHAMPAGNE ROOM, ONLY A RECURRING CHARGE. 

Finally, and this is a new thing I’ve been dealing with, does any consistent endeavor really matter when you look around and see the world around you going straight to hell in a handcart?  It’s really hard to be creative—much less funny—under the circumstances we’ve found ourselves in the past few years.  I can’t lie, I’m hung down, brung down, beat down, my head hurts, my feet stink, and I don’t love Jesus.   

There’s a reason I hit on this subject this week, and it started when I ran into an old friend last weekend who asked me how my Act III was going.   Honestly, it isn’t going at all, but the more and more I think about it, it’s because I haven’t been trying.   Between me and Act III is some self-invented Final Boss that looms in front of me.  It’s a koan that presents me with a real problem, but then that’s what koans are for. The hell with logical thought, this way to enlightenment, you fool!  

And in the spirit of forgetting all about logical thought, the answer is simply that my brain is playing a neat trick on the rest of me of thinking I’m burned out and on task all the time.   No, I have no idea how that works.  No, I have no idea how to stop it.   Yes, I have an idea, and again, in the spirit of forgetting about logical thought, I’ve decided that the first thing I need to do is stop caring about it so much.   It makes no sense, but somehow I’ve hit upon the idea of trying to get one over on myself.   Maybe this gets easier if I don’t beat myself up over it and just do with no expectations and let things happen organically.  I don’t know, it just seems like it’s crazy enough to work when you stop to consider the wetware I’m working with.  

Or not.  We’ll see.   

In 1968, after Congress passed a gun control bill that was, in the words of the late ABC anchor Frank Reynolds, “emasculated”, Lyndon Baines Johnson asked—to paraphrase—how much more anguish must America endure?   Now, before we start going down the gun control rabbit hole—Trust me, we’ll have time for that—I’m choosing to focus on that quote, and another one.  You’ll know this one, it’s Patrick Swayze from Roadhouse.   “I want you to be nice until it’s time to not be nice.”  

I find it hard to not be nice anymore.  Here’s another quote for you, Keanu Reeves.  “I’m at that stage in life where I stay out of discussions. Even if you say 1+1=5, you’re right – have fun.”  I want to be kind or be silent.  I want to get rid of all the drama, go live by the beach somewhere, and just…be. 

But I can’t.  Because it’s time to ask once again, how much anguish we must endure.  It’s time to not be nice. 

It’s time that we do not agree with the people that think 1+1=5, and tell them to have fun.  All the fivers believe there is an objective reality where this is true.  They have people in the alternative and mainstream media that pander to their fivieness, They have politicians that lock on this fivedom and run on it.  They post fivist memes on social media to own the twos.   Frankly, I’ve had my fill of fives.  

It’s time to insist that 1+1=2.   Firmly.  

It is time to not be nice. 

It is not time to reason with the fivers that ask “What about the threes?  You don’t mind the people who think 1+1=3?”   It is not time to justify a Two who said something nice, or even something atrocious about the fives years ago.  It is not time to deal with the fives of bad faith who scream about why you, a two, won’t debate them.  

It’s time to insist that 1+1=2.   Firmly.  

It is time to not be nice. 

Fives did not suddenly appear out of thin air.  They weren’t created in a vacuum, they weren’t grown in a vat of ooze, they’re people who, in a lot of cases, hopped on board much later.  It’s kinda like going clear and then they tell you about Xenu and the Space DC 10’s flying Thetans into volcanos.   You, a two, look at these folks and ask HOW IN THE HELL DO YOU BELIEVE THAT? THAT’S CRAZY.   That’s easy.  1+1 didn’t equal 5 originally.   They found time in 1968 while Mayor Daley was out preserving disorder to just bump it up a little.  It equaled 1.1 back then.  And little by little, they bumped up just a tad every year until they got caught with their hand in the cookie jar in 1974.  Then they had to reset.  1+1=2 all the way through to 1981 when they found a guy who was good at making people believe 1+1 was whatever he wanted to be, and we went along with it, mostly, because whatever 1+1 was at the time, this guy had a way of making us feel really good about it.  So much so that we didn’t notice what those incremental little bumps were doing to some of us.  These little bumps continued until someone with a uHaul truck and the belief that God told him the answer was 2.5 said the quiet part out loud and blew the front of a building off, and then things quieted down for a bit.   But one of those guys who got ejected during the reset of 1974 decided he needed to create a platform for all the folks who knew objectively that 1+1 was whatever we say and if you don’t agree, you’re Two Stupid.  They even made up a nickname.  Two Stupid.  If you’re Being Two Stupid you have mental problems.   You might even be what’s destroying this country!   And over the years that number has been growing and growing until some guy who deals with more zeroes than anything else got elected President getting people to believe 1+1 is now 5.   And now you see how things start small and snowball, and it gets crazier and crazier and the people get more and more zealous and…

It’s time to insist that 1+1=2.   Firmly.  

It is time to not be nice. 

I don’t want to be an asshole, I don’t want to cancel anyone, and I don’t want to belittle anyone.  I don’t want to own the fives.   As my Dad used to say “You have the right to be wrong.  You also have the responsibility of what being wrong means.”, and that’s where the proofing meets the problem, which is twofold.   First, the fives believe that there’s no consequence for believing 1+1=5.  Second, and this is more important, there are more twos than fives.   A lot more.  

And it is time to insist that 1+1=2, it has always equaled two, and it will always equal two. 

Not maliciously, not condescendingly, but kindly and firmly. 

Because, at long last, it is time to not be nice.  

I want to take a second to talk about my day job.  Sort of.  I’m not going into a great amount of detail about what I do, but I’m going to talk about where I do it.  The job I have is a work-from-home job.  I started working for this company in August of 2021, and I’m very happy with where I’ve ended up.   I’m making the money I was making before the pandemic, the bills are getting paid, and I have nothing to complain about.   

Almost. 

I want to talk to you about something I’ll call “Man on an Island Syndrome”, and the more and more I think about it, the more I think this is the source of the deep blue funk I’ve been in.  If you work from home, it’s very easy to get into a rut.  You sit on your ass in the office, you sit on your ass on the couch, you sleep, you eat, you gain 15 pounds, you get lethargic and don’t want to do anything, and then you get depressed, and when I say you I mean me all GD day.  

You, a human being that is hopefully blessed with two brain cells that fire in succession and a modicum of common sense, may know this to be true, and I am happy to tell you that you are right.   However, there have been times in my life when I didn’t HAVE two brain cells that fire and succession or even a quark of common sense, and THIS has been one of those times.   How do I know this?  Because on Monday I got the hell out of the house, drove up the Eastern Shore to Ocean City, cruised the Coastal Highway, and made a POV video of that drive for YouTube, and I felt amazing.   What this means is that I’m a creature of habit, and when I fall into a routine that gets comfortable it doesn’t mean it’s healthy.   Just the opposite.   I’ve been an advocate for the Work From Home Lifestyle as soon as it was established that productivity didn’t suffer as a result, contrary to what the PTB wanted to tell you.  I still believe it.   However, I can see a benefit to the hybrid setup.  3 days home two days office, for example.  There’s a need to get out of the house and deal with people closely every day, and I haven’t had to do that.  

The other thing that I’ve mentioned before is the vortex of suck you get drawn into when you have the self-awareness that you’re not ok but not the motivation to take care of yourself.  In my case, it’s the need to make sure everyone else around me is ok and ignore my problem.  I’m very, VERY good at that until it’s unavoidable.  For me, that means a day to myself to rest, to reflect, to reconnect with that part of me that wants to do stuff.    I used to be good about taking what some of you would call a ‘mental health day’ every couple of months or so just to recharge the battery.  I haven’t done that in a long time, and I need to get back to that.   

I don’t know if there’s a takeaway here other than to say Hi, it’s me, I’m the bad example, it’s me.   Take the time you’re given to take care of yourself, don’t stay cooped up in your damn house all day every day.  At the very least go do something you think you like to do.  The act of doing, of creating, or just going…you verb however you verb, but if you’re in my situation you might find that you feel better.   

I suppose it’s incredibly passé for writers — especially on Medium — to write some kind of year looking forward post, so here I am with mine. You’re welcome.

It occurs to me that I should frame this particular year looking forward in the style of this new theme, for a lack of a better way to put it. So, I intend to put to bed the last couple of years of doing it wrong, and chart a path forward into doing it right. The simple fact of the matter is if we want a world that’s doing it right, then it starts with the self.

I think I heard that in a song once.

The following items, in no particular order, are the things I wish to change, start, or carry with me into the new year.

The Personal

Everything starts with kindness

If you assume that this is the third part of a trilogy starting with my article “We’re Doing It Wrong”, then you may remember that I started talking about this in the second part. I think the bare minimum we can do as a society is treat people with kindness. Everyone, no matter what they look like, where they come from, or who they love, is deserving of respect and kindness.

That includes ourselves. Believe me, I know how hard that can be.

Recently, I was in a corporate training class. Several times within this class the facilitator implored us to ‘give ourselves some grace’. Now I won’t lie to you; when I first heard this line in the context of corporate training, it was an immediate eye roll. I’m a little hard-boiled when it comes to hearing things that sound like motivational corpspeak. In the weeks since, I have found that line working its way into my psyche.

I don’t know how or when it happened, but I find I’m not beating myself up as much. I also know that I’m not the only one that beats themselves up over the tiniest of things, so when I recognize that in others, I make sure they know I’m a safe person to talk to. That’s a connection with another human that didn’t exist before, and it reminds me of a quote by Paul Williams in his book Das Energi, “Each man is an island. Each island is an extension of the same damn planet.”

Kindness within begets kindness elsewhere. Start with you and watch it spread.

Declaring iFreedom

Prior to the invention of the iPhone, I carried a utility belt of devices. What I wanted was The Hitchhiker’s Guide, and I pretty much got my wish. The iPhone has combined them all into one, and I should have been more careful what I wished for. My phone rarely stays in my pocket, and it’s always in view. Now, I have a goal to regain ownership of this tool I possess, instead of it owning me.

I’ve never had any notifications or sounds on my phone. It’s always silent. So is my watch. That will continue. What I need to stop is having my phone in my hand, playing with it. It’s a huge time suck, and the longer I’m doom scrolling through Twitter and TikTok, it just demolishes any hope of getting work done.

One thing I know for sure: removing all the time sucks from my phone is a sure way for me to end up reinstalling them very quickly. So, I’m going to do something a little counterintuitive. I’m going to use my phone to keep me from using my phone. I’m not entirely sure how that’s going to work yet. There may be something new in iOS called Focus that may set this up for me, but at the bare minimum I’m going to set alarms on my phone for when I need to bury it in a deep dark hole.

Part of declaring iFreedom means getting rid of all the distractions, and so I’m going to create a workspace free of them. Working in a single full-screen writing app on my Mac, for example. I also plan to start wearing noise-cancelling headphones, and most importantly, reinstalling a door to my office that I can close.

A simple morning routine that even I can’t break

I used to get up at 5am, but lately I have fallen into the habit of hitting my snooze button and sleeping away my morning time. It’s really unfortunate, because that time between 5am and 8am is the only real quiet alone time I get during a day. I need it, and yet I also need to sleep for more than 5 hours in a night. I can survive on six, but I really need more than that.

So, with the understanding that your morning really starts the night before, I’ve been picking what I’m going to wear the night before. I generally sit in a hot tub for about 30 minutes before bed and listen to my Daily Calm. I make sure my room isn’t warm. I tend to turn the fans on blast while I’m in the tub.

In the morning, I hit the water before I hit the caffeine. This is the point where some of the high-falutin’ guru types tell you to practice gratitude or journal. My brain isn’t wired that way, and I’m not going to force it to do something that will end up frustrating me early in the day. So, I’m just quiet. I read, and I’m quiet. Did I mention the part about being quiet? As I’m writing this part, it’s 9 at night, and I’m surrounded by a screaming bird, melodramatic adult children, and a cat that thinks I should be somewhere else and wants to tell me so very loudly.

I like my quiet mornings. A lot.

Stop watching and listening to infotainment media

I am an information junkie. I’m the guy that watches C-Span, school board and city council meetings for fun. However, two years of a pandemic on top of four years of horrible 24-hour news cycles filled with as much batshit crazy as humanly possible has pretty much destroyed my desire to know what’s going on in the world. I have an acute case of news fatigue, or I would if what I found myself watching was actually news. It’s not. It’s the empty calorie infotainment of cable news, where they spend 2 minutes on the actual news, and 8 minutes with a panel of people that tell you whatever it is they think you want to hear.

Like a lot of you, Desert Storm was the gateway drug for watching cable news for hours, because you never knew what was going to happen next. All the ensuing Breaking News events over the years kept our eyeballs firmly on the screen. This is a habit I need to break. I have one guilty pleasure that I had intended to keep, which was watching Rachel Maddow. However, as it appears she’s stepping back from a full-time stint doing her show and pulling a ‘Carson’, it’s probably the kick in the butt I need to break this habit.

I’m cutting out all the infotainment and news out of my life. If it’s important enough I’m going to hear about it. I’m also cutting all the political content out of my podcasts and reading habits for the foreseeable future. The year ahead is going to be chock full of those nuts from here until November, I’m sure I’ll hear enough about that as well.

The bottom line is that I’ve found this has a detrimental effect on my motivation to create, and I’ve had about enough of that.

The Practical

De-weaponizing my Socials

Just like watching too much news as a detrimental effect on my creativity, the same goes for my social media feeds. I’m going to spend a lot of time curating my feeds to put creative content front and center in there instead of the loud and angry squeaky wheels that seem to dominate my timelines.

Far be it from me to urge anyone to do anything I’m doing, but in this case I’d like to make an exception. Instead of doomscrolling through Twitter finding reasons to be angry and depressed, why not eject those accounts and replace them with people and things that actually interest and inspire you? Does curating your accounts to purge the negativity take time? YES. Is it worth that time? I think it is.

Create a Workflow

As far as I know, I don’t suffer from ADD or ADHD. What I do suffer from is the ability to get lost in the muck of a project very easily. As I reflected on that fact, it occurred to me that I’ve never constructed proper workflows for any of the projects I work on with any regularity. I’m sure that constructing some proper systems and workflows will aid me in turning out more consistent content, like writing articles for Medium. But honestly, who wants to see that?

Create first, consume later

In a way, this goes and in hand with breaking my phone addiction. As I mentioned in that section, if I grab the phone first thing in the morning, it’s over. So, along with that is blocking out a period of creative time early in the day to create first. I believe I’m going to start with a block of 30 minutes after my morning quiet time where the phone is not in my line of sight to work on the project of the day. Social media time may be used as a treat for making good progress.

If I can hold to 30 minutes for a prolonged period of time, I intend to raise that in 15 minute increments until I reach a point where my flow gets broken. I find that after a certain period of time I reach a point of diminishing returns, so the hope is that I can raise my attention level to something more acceptable.

Practice Consistency

The hard truth is that inconsistency is the result of much I’ve written above. If I want my content to gain wider acceptance, consistency is key. I’m hoping that blocking out this time will lead to more consistent output. However, in the spirit of practicing consistent output, my intention is to determine some reasonable interval I can commit to, and sticking to it until I feel comfortable increasing my output level.

Finding that interval is going to be really important because if there’s one thing I can tell you about me, it’s that I bite off WAY more than I can chew regularly. I know myself enough to know that once I miss on overdoing it, I lose momentum. So it seems to me that starting small and slow is the way to go.

There is a downside to going small and slow, and that’s not being able to grow as fast as I’d like. The only way you make up for that is creating the kind of content that makes people want to wait. I hope I’m able to do that.

The Professional

Becoming more comfortable with promoting my stuff

I’m going to fill most of the readers my age with heart-stopping anxiety in one sentence. Ready?

Hi. I made you a mixtape.

Honestly, I think I’d rather gargle ground glass than ever do that again. But let’s be honest; the fun in the mixtape is in the making of it, right? It’s when you go to hand it to another person that the it all goes wobbly. I think it’s the same for promoting what I do. I can’t be the only person who thinks like this. I can create my art all day long, but when it comes to holding it up to the world, I feel very much like a nervous teen. I also get the horrible feeling that I’m a slimy little spammer when I post my stuff on social media.

I know where this comes from. At least, I think I do. It’s some weird hybrid of not feeling like I’m good enough to waste your time, and feeling like a salesman. It’s something I need to get over, because the only reason anyone would think I’m a spammy salesman is if they’re seeing my feed in their face ALL. THE. TIME. No one does that. So I should be able to post something I’ve done at least once a day without feeling crummy.

Also, I am good enough. That’s someone else’s voice talking in my head, and while it’s hard to get him to leave every once in a while, it’s just trying to stop me from doing something I enjoy.

Learn how to pitch and attract clients

With the exception of one person, every paying client I’ve ever had was a friend or family member insisting on paying me for my work, with me insisting they didn’t have to pay me BECAUSE they were a friend or a family member. If I spent half that time learning how to pitch and attract clients or commissions, I’d probably be much farther ahead.

I have to be honest, this is the one that really stumps me. I haven’t a clue on where to begin. It’s not for a lack of looking for training, I can assure you of that. Unless I’ve been staring a class on how to do this right in the face and don’t know it, I don’t know how or where to begin this. So, the first step as far as I’m concerned is finding some training on the subject, and preferrably one that explains it like I’m five. I need the Freelancer’s version of USA Today: bright colors, big fonts, small words.

Gain my first recurring freelance clients

Of course, I plan to make use of that training to gain my first clients in the areas of writing, audio and video production and editing, and photography. With that said, I believe I’m best served focusing on one thing right now, and I believe that’s going to be writing.

Writing is a lot like learning to play piano; it’s the gateway to a lot of other instruments. Anything I write, I can repurpose. If I can repurpose it, I can spread it around. If more people can see or hear it, then it should build a base of support around my work, provided I can follow through with a few of the other goals I’ve set for myself.

I know, I said ‘should’. Humor me.

Make my first thousand dollars in freelancing by the end of 2022

This is where the rubber meets the road. The ultimate success of consistent creation and promotion, and learning how to pitch and attract clients will be in my ability to create revenue from it. I may have set this goal a bit high, but I think I want to challenge myself here.

I want to generate one thousand dollars from my content in 2022. I think that’s a substantial enough amount where I can say to myself that it worked. If it worked to one thousand, then it will work beyond that.

Final Thoughts

To recap, I want to practice kindness. I want to break my addiction to technology, infotainment, and negative social media. I want to spend my mornings in quiet solitude, and block out time to create art before I consume other media. I want to create reliable workflows so I can create consistent content. I want to break the mental barrier I have about promoting my work, and attract new clients so I can realize my goal of making this work a source of income.

I believe that this is my way of doing it right in 2022, and I want to succeed.

So, let’s do it right.

So, you’ve decided to jump and follow that tiny voice in your head that told you it’s time to leave a job you hated and try to make a living out of something you love. If you’re anything like me, you may have started from a place of excitement with a side dish of abject terror. Let’s admit something to ourselves: We’ve spent twenty or thirty years following a schedule, procedures, and rules someone else made.

Now we’re in control, and if you’re anything like me, your brain had a little bit of a short circuit. So it’s likely you may have gone in one of two directions. First, you may have gone full bore into everything all at once because you were a little apprehensive about the immediate future, or you took a week off to process everything and then went full bore into everything all at once.

Or, you’re me, who has a slight problem with executive dysfunction from time to time and got frozen by the prospects of starting. Of course, I started. Otherwise, you wouldn’t see anything here, but I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you that I wasn’t overwhelmed by the size of the task before me. It took me a little while to wrap my brain entirely around the fact that I wasn’t working for ‘the man’ anymore and that my income was going to ultimately depend on what I could pitch, create, and deliver. Even though I prepared for it on a few levels, I was not anticipating having a short circuit over it. I did, but I’m ok now.

I’m ok now because I had to get myself into the right mindset for what’s to come. That’s not an easy task for someone of my age and previous mindset. First, I crave certainty because my upbringing and the jobs I’ve worked for years relied on certainty. There was a particular order and logic to my being raised as a Navy Brat by a Navy Chief, and most of the jobs I’ve worked were full of If = Then logic, quality and performance numbers, and KPIs. That’s all gone now, and I was looking for something to replace it in the vacuum left behind. So I had to ‘detox’ for lack of a better term, and start looking at the concept of creativity in a way that my mid-life brain could handle and begin to move forward.

Don’t Be That Guy

The first thing I had to do to create that new vision for my mid-life creative future was to get rid of the voice in my head that kept trying to tell me I would fail. I mentioned this in a previous article. For me, weeding that garden was not an easy task. I couldn’t just tell that voice to go away; I had to look at the life behind that voice and realize why he was telling me that. I also had to compare the end of that life to how I envision the end of mine.

It sounds like a grim view to take, but it was the only way it would work for me. Somewhere along the way, I picked up an idea from someone to start at the end — your ideal eulogy — and work your way backward. I have some experience writing eulogies and rewriting them several times because I thought better of telling too much truth to the living. Still, every point I edited out stayed with me, and I use those points to remind me that I am not that guy. I will never be that guy, and I deserve to be my own person who can succeed in life doing what he loves, not what others force him to do.

Four Principles

Of course, there’s more to cultivating a proper mindset than just digging in the dirt and freeing yourself from your past inner voices. You have to create a foundation for your future. As a person who wants to be a Creative for the 2nd half of our lives, we need to live a different lifestyle than our parents did and separate from the life we lived before. I think that our future starts with the following four principles.

Curiosity

Since it’s trendy to do so these days, I will make a Ted Lasso Reference. The darts scene references the Walt Whitman quote, “Be curious, not judgmental.” At my age, I remember that my father would just come home and sit in a recliner for the remainder of the evening and not do anything. He had no hobbies and no interests.

It’s possible that the day job just took all the energy out of him, but I believe that’s because he had nothing to look forward to at the end of the day. I love coming home and spending time with the family, and then once everything for the evening is taken care of, I can get to writing, or podcasting, or just noodling around with the guitar.

When I’m not actively creating, I’m learning. Whether it’s classes on Creative Live, YouTube Tutorials, or something heavier on LinkedIn Learning, I’m doing my best to work on my craft when I don’t have the energy to sit down and make something of my own. That’s the promise and the investment I make in myself as often as possible. To learn how to make better art and then do the best work I can.

At our age, we must maintain our energy level throughout the day and cultivate and maintain that level of curiosity — of play — that we ad when we were younger. It’s easy to become ‘set in our ways, but I think that’s the act of surrender. We still have more in the tank than we think, and I challenge you to find that reserve and make your art whatever it is.

Boldness

If you’re a one-person army dedicated to creating and promoting, then there’s one thing you already know: No one is coming to help you. Because so many of us have been a part of some organization and working with teammates for decades, it’s easy to trick yourself into thinking that there’s another person somewhere to give us direction. But, unfortunately, there isn’t, and the sooner you accept that, the better it will be.

However, because there’s no one else to give you direction, that also means that there’s no one around that says no to your ideas. Let that sink in for a second, and then think of all the things you’ve always wanted to do but were afraid someone wouldn’t let you do it. For example, I made a list of all the projects I’ve always wanted to work on over the years but never had the time or the belief in myself that I could do them.

After I finished my latest project, I felt a little lost about where to go next. Then I remembered I made that list and found it. As a result, I’m writing the first work of science fiction that I’ve done in about 30 years. Unlike my previous attempts, this one comes from a place of relative happiness instead of the pretty dark place I was in my teens and twenties. With any luck, it will turn out better than anything I’ve written, but the result isn’t the point. The point is to be bold enough to try something well out of your comfort zone. I’m better for having tried.

Discipline

The self-proclaimed gurus often amuse me with names like the barefoot creative, the hammock writer, or the four-hour photographer. They make it seem so easy. But, of course, we know being a full-time creative is not easy. It can be overwhelming. It’s incredibly overwhelming for a person who’s lived on a schedule for most of their lives. Clocking in and out and being prepared to account for every moment they’re unproductive. The freedom from not having to account for every second of your day is lovely, but it can very quickly lead to a lack of direction and motivation if you’re not careful.

Stopping to watch the baseball game one day can lead to hours in front of the idiot box. Checking your notifications on Twitter leads to mindless doom scrolling, and TikTok is an endless rabbit hole if you don’t put a stop to it. Wiser people than I have said this, and it’s true: If you’re consuming, you’re not creating. The day ends, and you wonder where the time went.

Additionally, I have a problem with planners and journals. I like the idea, but my brain doesn’t want to stick with them. Instead, I go in with a basic idea of what I’d like to do on a given day or week, and I check those off the list I make in Apple Notes. I don’t overthink it, but I know I need discipline to accomplish my goals. Since July, I’ve been trying to keep a Bullet Journal again, and I’m having some success. I forget to add in my daily thoughts on some days, but I’m trying to remember that it’s not the daily that’s so important to me. What’s important to me is the whole record. I want some way to document this new journey to look back on it later and see how far I’ve come along. That seems important, and for that reason, I’m sticking to it.

Patience

If it was easy and I knew I’d be successful overnight, I wouldn’t have waited so long to do it. Making this choice was scary, and part of the reason was that I didn’t know if I could do it or how long it would take to make any money from it. The truth is, if you’re doing this to chase money, you will fail. I want to pursue the thing that brought me here, and it wasn’t a dead president. It was a need to be something more than a tech support agent and a need to do something I found meaningful.

If you commit to something like this, you can’t just duck and run when it gets complicated, when you get stuck in the ‘messy middle,’ as one of my friends calls it. You have to have a certain amount of faith that the art you’re making is worth it. You have to have the patience to stick it out through the difficulties like rewriting an article for the fourth time because it’s not working, relighting that shot because it just doesn’t look right, or re-editing that podcast because something about the sound isn’t working for you.

This enterprise takes a lot of time and work, and you must be in it for the long haul. Three months in, I seem to be making headway, but it’s only been three months. So let’s see where we are at six months and then a year. Maybe I’ll fail. That’s fine. I’ll have failed because I tried, and if I fail, it won’t be because I panicked. A year is what I’ve given myself, and my patience can last that long, especially if I know I’m working hard to change that year to Year One.

Final Thoughts

We had the curiosity to wonder if this would work. We had the boldness to jump. We can cultivate the discipline to make progress every day, and we have the patience to see it through to the end. That’s our mantra. Those four pillars are the foundation we need to build our lives. May it continue, and may we succeed in what we’re trying to do.

It’s 6:00 AM on a Monday, and millions of people stare at their bathroom mirrors, dreading what will happen in the next few hours. All over the world, people will clock in at a job they hate that makes them feel dissatisfied, which has taken over so much of their personal lives that they feel empty.

Of course, it hasn’t always been this way. When we were younger, we bought into several ideas that we learned in school, that our parents taught us, and that society held as truth. If you show up and work hard, your contributions will be rewarded. In the world of our parents and those before them, that world did exist. But that world doesn’t exist anymore for many people staring at that mirror at 6:00 AM on a Monday.

The pandemic has changed the meaning of work for everyone. That’s not surprising. What is surprising is the insistence by some companies — or, better to say, the upper management of some companies — that nothing has changed despite the evidence and would like to return to the business model that suits them best. If successful, it would be one of the only times the toothpaste has been returned to the tube successfully.

For one group, the pandemic has caused more than just a redefinition of work but also a reprioritization of work related to the rest of their lives and the kind of work they’d like to be doing. So after years of working at jobs with little to no advancement, recognition, or reward, they leave those jobs, deciding to keep their talents at home and use them to benefit themselves. They are writers, photographers, podcasters, audio editors, video editors, graphic artists, etc. They are creatives. They are in their 40s and 50s. They have set a new course for themselves after half a life of doing something that didn’t fulfill their need to Be.

They are Mid-Life Creatives, and I am just one of this great talent migration, and this movement isn’t going to go away. Here’s why.

No security

One of my grandfathers worked for General Motors for decades, the other for American Airlines. My wife’s grandfather worked for Ford. It was a different time back then when a company hired you, and you had job security. Workers had rights, and there were strong unions to protect those rights.

Today, job security is an illusion. The days of working 40 years for one company for a gold watch and a pension at the end is gone. Not only that, but the world of at-will employment now means that we can arrive to work one day, and they advise us that our services are no longer needed. Not for any performance or disciplinary issues but simply because the company needs to cut its budget.

So, why continue to believe that lie and that worker protections will ever be strengthened, and unions will be reinvigorated? That job security will ever be more than an illusion?

No retirement

The previous generations had the security of Social Security and Pensions to fall back on in their retirement years. Then, in 1978, Congress established 401k plans. But unfortunately, while 401k plans offer workers the ability to save for their retirement, we have often seen how less stable they are compared to pensions over the past twenty years. That’s because 401ks are tied directly to market performance, and defined benefit plans like pensions aren’t.

The market would like to tell you that overall the performance of the market is bullish in the long term. Still, we’ve seen stories of people on the verge of retirement having their savings wiped out, as well as stories of the fees on withdrawing money — even after retirement — taking up to and over half of a retiree’s savings. The very design of 401k’s lets the gamblers play with the house money and keep as much of it as possible.

In addition, the previous generation had Social Security to add to their income in their golden years. So we all pay into this system. Still, people of my age and younger can’t expect Social Security to be there when we retire as the previous generation continues to deplete it faster than the tax base pays to keep it solvent.

So, knowing this, why continue believing in the illusion of retirement when the system won’t be there for us?

No equality

The American Dream is just as much a melting pot of ideas as America is a melting pot of people. However, the overall concept is that everyone has an opportunity to succeed. You’re promised the same shot as the person next to you. However, that’s not true for a myriad of reasons.

We live, whether we choose to admit it or not, in a classist, sexist, and racist system. A ruling class has set up this system to benefit themselves by transferring wealth to their coffers and keeping it through monetary and social policy. That same ruling class tells us that we can have a seat at the table if we follow the rules, but the rules keep changing. They also tell us that the reason we don’t already have a seat at the table is that there’s a set of people trying to take that seat away from us. So instead of fighting the ruling class, we fight that set of people. In truth, they aren’t fighting us; they’re trying to follow those same rules. The ruling class sets us against each other, and when we fight, they win.

There will never be class, gender, or income equality in our system. Despite years of happy talk about the American Dream and have equal opportunity to sit at the table, the ruling class doesn’t want that to happen. So why continue to believe the lie, and hope that the people in power will do anything about it?

Now, that’s a lot of negativity thrown at the Powers That Be. It’s harsh, and some of you may not take the same view I do. But, we can agree that whatever you believe, the pandemic has changed much about how business works.

After 18 months of the world on pause, we’ve learned a few things. First, the pandemic made us realize that:

Businesses are not families

The corporate line that “We’re a family” is hogwash. It’s time we stop believing it. We’re cogs in a piece of massive machinery, and we’re replaceable. I’ve had to learn this lesson twice.

You can work over 40 hours a week for a company habitually, have excellent performance reviews, participate in corporate activities, volunteer for corporate initiatives, be appreciated by your colleagues, and still be on the chopping block if the company decides you’re no longer needed.

There is nothing ‘family’ about that.

The Status Quo is gone

Had they made an effort to keep their human capital during the pandemic, the status quo would have been maintained. But, now that things are angling back towards normal, they would like you to forget that for the past 18 months, we still did the job. It doesn’t work for them, you see. It doesn’t work for them because this ‘family’ doesn’t trust you any farther than they can throw their server room. No, they need you back here in the office so they can ensure you’re doing the job you’ve been doing all along. That’s what works for them.

But, what works for them doesn’t necessarily work for us. This long-term experiment in telework, which many businesses swore was not feasible, became a success. Millions of people learned they don’t have to spend hours in traffic, spend thousands on daycare and gasoline, or eat the gas station sub for lunch. Many of us no longer have to punch out to go to the bathroom, to be interrogated afterward about why we’ve spent so much time being ‘unproductive’.

We choose to live

We’ve finally realized that the final element of this Information Economy that we live in is the shedding of one of the Industrial Economy’s last elements: The need to centralize. You and I get it, but business hasn’t grasped it yet. Until they do, the Great Migration will continue, and many more people like me will find something else to do because we’ve realized that we can choose to live a life where our career doesn’t suck the life out of us. We can choose to do something for ourselves if the career path we’ve been on no longer brings us joy. We can choose to live and do something that calls to us and fulfills our need to Be.

Final Thoughts

Now is the time for the work-from-home employee. The independent worker. The freelance worker. It is part of the future promised to us but never realized. It is a future we need to fight for now because, with no protections, no retirement, and no equality, the risk is the same. If that is true, then we should act in our self-interest precisely the way a business operates in theirs.

It’s our time now. Let’s embrace it.

My wife and I celebrate our 27th Anniversary this year. Every year, it continues to blow my mind that two people so diametrically opposed finding ways to keep making this work. Years ago, a musician I’m very fond of coined a term for pulling off a seemingly impossible task. He looked at a large stage that would resume its primary duty as a city skyline the next day. He called the act of turning that expanse of buildings into a show the equivalent of “making a steamroller fly.”

I love that phrase.

You could argue that anything hard worth achieving is on the level of making a steamroller fly.

Still, it seems so appropriate in our case. If opposites attract, Mother Nature pulled off a miracle in our case. My wife is more thoughtful and calm, and I am a pinball made flesh. I love the ocean and will move back to the Caribbean tomorrow. My wife would love to live in a log cabin in the country with no neighbors. My wife loves Autumn. I think seasons are overrated and believe that if it’s too cold to waterski naked, it’s too cold.

There was an age before the internet, friends. Right now, you should be extremely thankful for that.

My wife and I are, in many ways, polar opposites. She cross-stitches, reads fantasy novels, and plays video games without apparent end. On the other hand, I podcast, love professional wrestling, and Cyberpunk stories. The last time I played a video game, it required a quarter.

Yet it works, and I’m glad it does.

The Week Of Fun

The Week of Fun is my cute little name for the days between the 20th and 24th of July. I generally take the week that encompasses it off. You see, the 20th is my wife’s birthday, the 21st is our Anniversary, and the 24th is my birthday.

At the time, the bank I worked for declined my request to take either birthday off due to availability. But, for some reason, they had no trouble with me taking the entire week off if I was getting married. So that’s what we did, and that’s how it started.

In 2014, I worked for a camera company, and the photography bug returned and hit me hard. I found a really great deal on a DSLR and two lenses at a pawn shop, and I was off. I was going out to different places and shooting, mainly by myself.

Up to this point in our marriage, the wife and I had never had a shared hobby. We’re very much the square peg in the round hole in many ways, and it had never occurred to me that she might like to come along.

So when she mentioned that she might want to do that, I was more than happy to oblige. I found a decent camera for her birthday, and we went shooting. That opened up a lot of doors. Soon we were driving up the Eastern Shore to Ocean City for the weekend and finding many things to shoot along the way.

Photography is part of every weekend, and it’s the best thing to ever happen to us.

Now, we find ourselves thinking of new places to go and things to shoot. Moreover, it turned out that photography was a gateway to finding ways to make our relationship stronger.

We Time

We’ve been married 27 years in July, and we’ve raised three neuro-divergent children, both of us with full-time jobs. So to say that there hasn’t been a lot of time where it’s just been Kim and I is a bit of an understatement.

Regarding photography time, it’s a scheduled time that’s just us. After raising three kids, each of us having a job, and of course, the past 15 months, in particular, it’s time for us just to go do something and be together.

On the shore, in the woods, or just long rides in the car to get where we’re going, it’s just us, and it’s an opportunity to reconnect with what it was that made this wonderful.

In situations like ours where there’s very little time or energy to do anything after kids are in bed, it’s easy to grab a book or a screen and check out.

Also, sometimes you just need to have ‘neutral corners’ if you’ve been having a disagreement. Indeed, we’ve done both those things, but what I have found is that the scheduled time on Saturday has given way to other things. Maybe one night, I’ll not bury myself in creative work. She’ll not find herself in a video game she can’t get out of, and we’ll sit in the living room and just watch more of a series we’ve found on the streaming service. Or we’ll go back and watch a movie I’ve never seen (of which there are plenty; I only just watched The Fellowship of The Ring for the first time). Or we’ll work out where the next adventure will be early in the week.

Communications Aid

Here’s one thing about me that some people find surprising: Negativity affects me profoundly. Conflict elicits an actual fight or flight response due to how I was raised, and flight is the option I choose most of the time. So I will hide from it if I can.

Now, my wife and I don’t argue much. That’s not to say we haven’t, because that’s silly. All couples have disagreements, and that’s why I embrace the concept of the neutral corner I wrote about earlier. That said, there have been times I have been hesitant to say something for fear it would start a disagreement. That’s a communication breakdown, and it’s one that was on me to fix. The problem was I didn’t know how to fix it. I didn’t have the tools.

Then, one day while we were shooting, I had a great shot of a heron and limited time to get it before it took off. My wife was in the shot, and I had a choice. Take the pic with her in it, ask her to move, or just forget about it.

This one sentence made everything else easier.

“Could you move, please? You’re in my shot.”

It doesn’t sound like much, but that was really hard for me to do. Thankfully, my wife knew this about me and understood. She graciously moved aside so I could get the picture. This was a massive breakthrough for me, and I told her this.

After that, it became much easier to talk to each other about other things and not listen to the kid in my head that was scared about bad reactions or hurt feelings.

Future Plans

Planning the weekend shoots has led to thinking of long-term projects we’d like to do. For example, I’d like to go and shoot Tangier Island, a small island in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay. It’s a unique place that is slowly sinking into the bay. I’d like to chronicle life on that island before it becomes impossible. A longer-term project is to do the same for small coastal towns along the East Coast, not unlike my hometown of Machias, Maine.

This is notable because we’ve lived paycheck to paycheck for most of the time we’ve been married. So we have resigned ourselves to the belief that future plans aren’t a luxury you can afford. However, it turns out that future plans aren’t a luxury; it’s a motivators. It’s a goal to set and then figure out the finances and logistics to make that happen. We agree that it’s complicated to travel much in our circumstances. Still, we’ve found a lot of fun and hope in the planning.

Finding a shared hobby like photography made what was already a good relationship with my wife even stronger. I’m so happy we found something to enjoy together and new reasons to enjoy each other’s company even at this point in our marriage. I’m looking forward to many more Saturday morning shoots and future adventures.

In the fifteen years that I’ve been a podcaster, I’ve used many different kinds of formats. Daily shows, weekly, long-form interviews, unscripted improv, monthly magazine-style. None of them have stuck with me as something I’d like to do long-term.

I’ve noticed the surge in seasonal podcasting due to the popularity of shows like Serial and the rise of True Crime podcasts. So I decided to experiment with seasonal podcasting and dedicate each season to ideas I’ve had swimming around in my head for thirty years. Once I committed to this idea, I found it remarkably liberating, so much so that I could come up with an idea and produce twelve episodes of a season in a matter of weeks. To my delight, this season has been the most popular in terms of downloads, unique listeners, and fan engagement that I’ve had in some time. It’s led me to believe this is where I should have been all along, and I will continue making seasons of my show from this point forward.

With that in mind, I’ve got some observations about why this switch to seasonal podcasting became a natural fit for me.

They’re easier to outline

The first decision I made was the number of episodes I wanted to produce in the season. At first, I thought ten was a suitable number, but after some thought, I upped it to twelve because I would let the next nine episodes drop weekly after an initial drop of three. With that decision, I gave a topic to each episode, wrote a draft, and then edited it down. Because I took the time to do this first, I wrote the scripts for all twelve episodes in about ten days. It was a much better process for me than the grind of prep, outlining, writing, and producing every three to four days.

There’s a beginning, a middle, and an end

A season of a podcast is the same as the season of a TV show. You’re telling a long story that arcs over weeks. In this season of my podcast, I spent the first three weeks establishing the character called ‘This Pirate.’ Then over the following weeks, I let him reveal more and more of himself until we get to the last episode, which is a callback to the first episode and a nice ending to the season. The first-person narrative of ‘This Pirate’ made the writing very easy for me. Still, as I move into the next season of my podcast and a third-person narrative, it will be vital to tell a complete story with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

You can explore a variety of ideas

The following season of my podcast will continue the This Pirate line, but I have other ideas for future seasons. One of these ideas has been in my head since 1989, the rest since 1999. Of course, they’re fictional and will require more resources than just talking into a mic. Nevertheless, this switch to seasonal podcasting has lit that fire underneath me to start writing these stories and put them out in the real world in a way I never could do before. Perhaps it’s better to say that I’ve never felt as empowered to put these stories out in the world before now. Regardless, I’ve never been as positive that I can produce these figments of my imagination as I do now.

I find them less taxing than a weekly podcast

A daily or weekly podcast is a Sisyphean effort of prep, outline, write, produce, distribute, and repeat. It’s almost too much for one person to do, and I respect anyone who can. I can’t. I’ve repeatedly tried, and with kids and a job and obligations, it’s just too much for this guy. While the effort it takes to create a whole podcast season in one shot may seem just as much a struggle, it’s just for a short time. Once done, I can move on to the next thing on my list, like Promotion, community building, and scheduling some downtime to prepare for the next season. The weekly grind creates anxiety for me, and when I have that anxiety, I can’t perform consistently. I would rather be anxiety-free and consistent than be bouncing off walls and podcasting on a hit-or-miss basis.

They can be pre-produced and pre-scheduled

After I wrote the 12-episode season, it took me another four days to produce and distribute them. So from the initial idea to distribution, I created 12 episodes in about two weeks. Pre-scheduling these episodes to drop means I have a podcast season that runs weekly until July 30th. I plan to add one more episode out of the Pirate character, but I plan to record that closer to the end of the season to include more behind-the-scenes material. So this podcast will end on August 6th, and by then, I hope to have most of the next season produced, tentatively scheduled to start around Labor Day. The mental bandwidth it gives me and the pressure it takes off me is priceless.

Consistency is built-in

You must maintain consistency in creativity to keep an audience engaged. After a while, if the audience can’t rely on you to deliver when you say you’re going to deliver, that audience will move on to someone who can. With this method, your consistency is built-in. You’ve guaranteed that there’s a new podcast dropping next week for the next couple of months while you’re working on the next thing. Because it’s a season, you can bake the expectation of a hiatus until the next season into the last episode of this season. As long as you tell your listeners what’s happening, they’ll be there waiting when you get back.

Promotion is easier

Let me get this out: Promotion has never been my strong suit. I know they won’t just come if you build it, but telling people that I’ve built, it has always made me feel — and this is a technical term — icky. I despise high-pressure salespeople, and I don’t particularly appreciate feeling like one. However, with the reclaimed time I have using the seasonal method, I can create graphics and stories for my social media accounts and pre-schedule those posts using Buffer. A bonus to this method is using my social media accounts to be me, which lets me feel better about the scheduled posts hawking my stuff. I tend to schedule those posts about four hours apart, so those posts are bookends on a sandwich, with me being a human in the middle.

The M Word

Finally, we get to the elephant in the room. Of course, the obvious upside to seasonal podcasting is the possibility of monetization. I uploaded all the podcasts in the season to Patreon. I offered early access to all the shows for five dollars a month, with the ability to access a subscriber-only podcast and a monthly get-together on Twitch. With this new way of doing things, I admit that the Patreon approach is not yet working. However, I believe it will take hold because the podcast is still growing. Looking at the data for my show, I reached the total downloads for May on June 14th. On that trajectory, I should double the number of downloads, and if that trajectory holds, I should be able to continue outperforming the previous month. On the subject of unique listeners, I continue to attract new listeners every day, and repeat listeners return for the next episodes. I think it’s only a matter of time before the subscriber model starts working.

Conclusion

Of course, your mileage may vary. For me, this switch to seasonal podcasting has been the best decision I’ve made for my creative work since I decided to start creating audio for the internet back in 1999. So if you have a day job, family, kids, obligations, or you want to start a podcast but don’t think the weekly grind is for you, I would strongly recommend seasonal podcasting. I see no better way for me; I hope it works for you.

When I first started podcasting in 2006, I didn’t possess the technology to do interviews, so I left that out of my show for a long time. One of the first interviews I did in 2008 was with a gentleman named George Tabb, a NY punk icon and early activist for those who suffered from 9/11-related sickness. While it was a bit stilted and awkward, it gave me a definite idea of the kinds of interviews I wanted to do in the future.

I think the essence of a good interview is that it isn’t an interview at all. It’s a conversation. That’s why Larry King and Howard Stern are so good at their job. They engaged in a conversation with their guests, and in doing so, they could draw more out of their guests than intended. Someone who has appeared on Stern has said they told him things they would never have spoken to anyone else. I think that’s a high compliment, and it’s certainly something I try to emulate. Last year, I did a limited series of interviews on my podcast related to how people became creatives and how they stayed creative during the pandemic. I’m biased, but I think it’s some of my best work because I think I managed to get into a personal zone with people and gain their trust during the process.

I am by no means an expert, but I do know what works for me. So I’d like to share with you five things I would do when interviewing guests.

Do your homework

If your guest has written or appeared in anything recently, you need to know about it. Read and consume anything relevant to your conversation, and maybe go beyond that. I like to ask relevant questions, but I also look for human moments in a person’s bio, social media, blog posts, and videos. If it’s funny, all the better.

Now, you may want to tell the guest you found this moment and ask if it’s ok to bring it up. Don’t go for embarrassing the guest. It’s crass, and that guest has friends who will hear about it and never appear on your show. In my experience, the human moments we all share can be a real icebreaker or pressure release during an interview. If you can get the guest to share that laugh with you, you’ve got a good conversation going.

Listen. Really.

It’s easy to get sidetracked doing other things while the guest is talking. Riding a volume level, responding to chat if this is a live stream, posting quotes on social media, and other things. I’m asking you to stop that. Your focus should be entirely on the guest and what they are saying. I have heard my share of podcasts where The host prepared the questions well in advance, and the guest said something nullified a question, only to have that question pop up later in the show. That’s an unforced error, and you’ll pay for it. The other problem with not focusing on the guest is that it becomes very awkward. Sure, you can fix long pauses between questions in Post, but the guest may have a bad feeling about it, and it will reflect in their attitude, and the quality of their performance as the interview goes on. If you realized the person you were talking to wasn’t paying attention, how long would you stick around and participate? Exactly.

Be prepared to go off the list

I want to be clear about this point. I am not saying that you shouldn’t have a list of questions or a game plan for this interview. I am saying that if you’re actively listening to the guest, they may say something that opens up a whole new line of questions you hadn’t thought about and might be worth exploring. Conversations are not linear; you can drop one thread, pull on another one for a minute, then come back to the first one. That is what makes for an organic, authentic experience for the guest and the listener. If the guest feels you are in this experience with them, chances are they’ll trust you more, and they’ll loosen up and give you the interview you want

Stay in tune with the guest

You should be getting a good read on your guest as the interview proceeds, and you should be getting an idea of places you should and shouldn’t go. If you inadvertently head down a path the guest doesn’t want to go, and they might clam up a bit, don’t push. In some cases, the guest might say something they didn’t realize would take them down that path and then give you some indication that they’d rather not. If you hit a boundary, respect it.

Know when to end it

Ideally, you’re looking for an interview to take up a substantial part of your regular podcast, but like any party, you should be looking for hints that the party is ending. The guest might start giving you shorter answers or other context clues when they start feeling like they’ve said everything they need to say. When I get to that point, I have two questions I ask to signal the guest I’m starting to wrap up. I’ll ask what they’re working on now (or next) and how people can connect with them on social media. Then I’ll thank them and wrap it up. Know when that time is coming, and don’t stretch it out. An interview that goes too long becomes awkward later, and the listeners will pick up on it.

Interviews don’t have to sound like interviews; they can be all call and response and no substance. To get to something real, don’t treat it like an interview. Treat it like you’re just talking to a new friend you want to get to know. The result is a better product for you, a better experience for the guest, and trust as an interviewer grows in your field.

I want to start this by suggesting each of us ask ourselves a question: Am I OK?

I know that might sound simple, and you might think that’s ridiculous, but I’m dead serious. I want you to ask yourself if you’re OK, and I want you to be honest with yourself about the answer.

The reason I’m talking about this is pretty straightforward, I have had to ask myself this same question, and my answer is “I’m not sure.” I’m not OK, but I’m not in dire straits or anything. I can only describe myself as being in some weird limbo state that allows some things to pass, and other things stick and drag me down a little bit for a little while. I don’t know if anyone can relate to this, but maybe you can. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve lost my audience by talking gibberish, and it certainly won’t be the last.

Basically, I’ve spent most of my time in the company of my family or outdoors, far away from everyone else. The main human contact I’ve had is with people that share my last name. I have seen other people three times in the five months we’ve been in this state. The only time I can tell you I am in the company of other people for any length of time is on Sunday Mornings when we do the groceries. I have not done any delivery side jobs since the shutdown because I think it’s dangerous. I lost a job I absolutely loved at the end of May. I’ve been looking ever since. I’ve been doing freelance work, but it doesn’t replace my income. I wish it did.

Some of you will tell me that I’m acting like, as one friend has put it, a covidiot. There are a few people in my life that believe that this thing has been blown out of proportion, that it’s not as bad as the news has made it out to be, that it’s a big hoax, and that I’m a sheep. If that’s what you believe, you’re more than welcome to believe that. You do you. What I’m not going to do at any point is argue with people about this because that’s time out of my life that I’m never getting back, and what I have seen out of the arguments I’ve read or been a witness to is that the anti-maskers are all about demanding respect for their rights, but not willing to respect the rights of others. I’m not into recognizing your right to put me in a possibly bad situation, but I’m not going to change your mind, and you’re not changing mine, so let’s just leave it.

I realize that I will probably have to break my promise to myself that I will never take another Customer Service / Tech Support phone call, and I hate it because the second I take that job, I feel like I’ve given up. I have done many things, but giving up is not one of them. Still, coming to that conclusion has not done wonders for my disposition. It’s depressing, to be honest. I had a great job, and I want to keep doing it. I just have to figure out how, and I don’t have much of a plan as I have a bunch of ideas that barely string together to form a coherent thought.

As near as I can figure, what I need to do is post content every day and promote the heck out of it. I need to reach out to people and ask if they need something I can provide, like podcast editing or Voice work, for example. I think I’m going to create a storefront to sell my photos somewhere. I’m going to write like the dickens and get it submitted places. I would like to start making videos again, and that one seems to be the hardest button to button. I suffer from what I’ll call “Neistat Syndrome.” I just don’t think my life is that damn interesting compared to people like Casey Neistat or Peter McKinnon, and while I know I’m comparing myself to two of the tippety-top YouTubers, It’s still a thing I’m dealing with. I need to think about the format.

In the end, I think I have what Michelle Obama says is a ‘low key’ depression, maybe? I don’t feel bad, I just feel resigned to certain things and disappointed. I’m fifty years old, and that’s a factor. I indeed have more time than my parents had; there is a limited amount of time on the game clock. So I’ll do what I always do. Work, and try to pull off the seemingly impossible.

Today, I want to talk about freelancing. Not any particular line of work but the subject in general. Freelancing has enjoyed something of an uptrend lately; Lots of people were doing it before of course, but I suspect there are a lot more people doing it right now, partly out of necessity. For some, it may be how food gets on the table.

I’ve been fortunate to get a few gigs here and there, and things are working out. Did I wish I had a steady gig? Yeah. Do I wish I had, oh, I dunno, something with benefits? DUH. Am I just a little bit nervous that the Apocalypse is going to happen in a couple of weeks, and it’s all going to hit the fan? OH YEAH, TRUST ME. But right now is right now, and that’s what I need to keep a focus on. I hit the job boards every day and fill out a gang of applications, and then I hit Upwork and submit some proposals. Upwork, for the uninitiated, is a freelance job board where people post what they need, and you can submit a proposal to fill that job. If they select you, you have the gig, and you get to work. With any luck, you get paid.

I find myself wondering about the folks that are dipping their toe in these waters for the first time because I know how frustrating it was for me to pitch and pitch and pitch…and hear crickets. Contrary to popular belief, the worst thing you can hear isn’t “No”; it’s hearing nothing.

I am not going to lie to you, it took what seemed like forever to get my first yes, and before that first yes was several bites on the hook that I couldn’t reel in, but for me, the real frustration was in hearing nothing at all. Not a yes, no, hi, boo, f you…not a thing. To be honest, I have to tell you that I found it hard not to take it personally until I didn’t.

The reality check is that nobody owes you anything regarding this. They’re — hopefully — paying decent money for the result they want, and if they decide you’re not for them, there’s nothing that says they have to contact you to say “Thanks, but no.” it would be NICE, but they don’t have to do it. Once I got over that hill, it became easier to hear nothing, “No” became easier, and of course, “Yes” is just THE BEST EVER.

But let’s get back to the crickets for a second. It’s a buzzkill, for sure, and that’s where Mo comes along. It’s hard to keep going when you’re not getting anything, but that’s just momentum working against you. The overused cliche is running uphill, but it’s the most appropriate. You’ve got to spend that extra energy and dedication to keep swinging. Keep Pitching. Keep saying to the world, “I can make this for you”, and realize that you’re going to have to take no and nothing for an answer until that first person says “Yes,” and then the most amazing thing will happen. You’ll be able to show the world that one person said yes, and you’ll be able to show the world what you did with that yes, and someone will see that and add another yes to your pile. That’s when Mo comes around and starts working for you. “Yes” means results, and results attract more Yes.

I know this sounds oversimplified, and honestly, it is. But it has the benefit of actually being true! Ask any best-selling writer you can think of, and I’m sure they’ll be able to tell you some of the most hilarious and mind-boggling rejection stories before that one moment that changed their lives. How many actors and actresses, how many songwriters and musicians, how many artists were told they didn’t have what it took and that they’d never make it until they did?

We are on that same road, you and I. We’re on the highway to that town we’ll never work in again until we find there’s a house with our name on the door.

A question that is weighing on my mind lately is how much structure helps or hurts a creative. I was talking with a friend who, by all accounts, has mad organizational skills, and she runs a filmmaking business. There’s a lot of structure in her day that is taken up doing the administrative work that you need to do to run a business the right way, and she’s very good at that. However, she tells me that she spends so much time making the admin work and the proposal writing for grants and things she laments not being able to spend the time actually creating as she would like.

For purposes of comparison, I don’t have a licensed business; what I do is what I call a hobby on steroids. It could be a business. I spend so much time on the creative side that I don’t spend any time on the promotion or administrative side. So, I would be the polar opposite of my friend, as you can see. I’m sure there’s a third person out there that promotes like the dickens but doesn’t have anything created and likes the idea of calling themselves a business. Three legs on three separate stools, and every one of them is wobbly.

I’m about to say two words that I hate hearing, and I suspect a lot of us hate hearing. Time Management. We need to employ some of it. Now, I know the urban myth of the creative is some person who’s a night owl, who can’t hold a deadline with both hands, a bucket, and handles, who suffers and bleeds for his art, and haven’t we grown up enough to understand that this is simply not the case most of the time? I mean, I know one person who works all night creating clay yonis and selling gemstones on Etsy, but other than that, most of us who are creatives are day-walkers, probably with jobs. We have too much on our plate for any day, so we need to plan what those days look like. The problem is, we don’t. So, the thing that we hate doing is the one that gets put off until the Twelfth of Never.

Since I am home full time, I’ve been experimenting with time management. I block out three sections of time during the day for things. I get up at 6 am and have some quiet time before the rest of the house gets up and moving. I have a trial balloon of a project I’m trying for the first time this week that starts at 7 am, and once that’s up and running, I take the time between 7 am and 8 am to plan my day. The morning period between 8 am, and 12 pm is for new stuff. For example, this article was written during the morning period. I’ll post any blog articles, drop any podcasts or videos I’ve completed, and look at my idea pile for what I want to tackle next.

Then I take lunch and get out of the studio. If the weather is decent, I go outside and take a little walk. Generally, I take my earbuds with me, but I’m finding that this is one of those times during the day when I am by myself, and I’m finding the usual noises of being outdoors — I hesitate to call it silence — preferable. It allows me to think more clearly about what I want to be doing and not concentrate on what someone else is saying.

I return to the studio around 1 pm, and for my afternoon work period, I work on what I will call the ‘big’ project. The priority item that I would like to get shipped sooner rather than later. Right now, I have two such items, a podcast interview and a video. Both things require attention. The interview has a deadline. The video doesn’t, but I would like to get it done. So any items that require voice, or shooting, or anything like that will happen at that time. I work until 5 pm, then I shut everything down and get out of the office.

The third segment of my day happens between 7 pm and 9 pm when I do my social media for the day. I try to focus on certain hashtags. This is not posting my own work, I did that earlier that morning. This is social media outreach. I follow and commented on accounts during that time. At 9 pm, I head upstairs, put the phone on the charger, and wind down. Lately, I’ve been reading non-fiction stuff before bed. I’m out by about 11 pm if I’m doing it right.

Rinse, Lather, Repeat, as they say.

Now, there are days when I can’t keep to the schedule, if I have a Doctor’s Appointment, for example. I just don’t sweat those things when they happen because I find that getting discouraged by my schedule is the first step to not following it. As this is an experiment, I’ll be tweaking this as we go to find what’s optimal for me, but for right now, this seems to be working ok.

Time Management doesn’t have to restrict your creativity, and it doesn’t have to manage your time minute to minute. If you just lay some minimal guidelines down as to what you’re working on and when you may find that it helps move you forward with everything.

Over this summer I’ve been trying to build up some content for my website and let people know I’m open for business. I say I’ve been trying. I’m sure you well know that you can have good intentions to get things done and you get a good start, but then you poke your head out of your creative cubby hole and notice that there’s housework that needs to be done, and there are errands to run, and then someone needs you to do something else, and so on. So you do all of that and get back to the cubby hole only to find it’s 9 pm, and you wonder how in the hell did all that time get sucked away from you? So you wind down and try to get a good night’s sleep so you can get a good start tomorrow, and you know what happens. Rinse, Lather, Repeat.

If you’re a creative that wants to go pro, the outside world trying to barge in is a real problem because your family members and friends may not realize that this is your job now, and it’s also possible that you may not realize this is your job now. It’s also possible you might feel guilty doing your creative things when you look around and see there’s so much to be done. I can tell you that I’ve dealt with all three of these issues, and in this time of isolation because of the pandemic when every day seems almost identical in a way, I find myself wondering if there’s a point to it. It’s easy to get discouraged. It’s tempting to quit. We mustn’t quit.

If we want to be professional creatives, we have to show up. We have to do the work if we want the reward, and we need to gently but firmly tell the outside world to step off while we work. I would bet good money that the people in your life would get very upset if you came to their job and interrupted what they were doing, yet that is exactly what they are doing to you. If you’re like me, you hate saying no, but the simple fact is we need to say it more often. It’s the only way our to-do list will be a priority over someone else’s.

The other person who needs to hear that being a creative is your job is you. In the book “The War of Art”, Stephen Pressfield talks about The Resistance, which is the excuses your brain gives you as to why you shouldn’t be doing the work. We’ve all heard them. The voice tells you that you’re not good enough, that someone else is doing it, that you should be something else with your time, that you’re missing the game, and so on. The Resistance wants you to give up, and we just can’t let it win.  Who’s the judge of who is good enough? Not the Resistance. Who cares if someone else is doing it? This creative work is the best use of my time; it’s time someone else learns to do the laundry. I can DVR the game. It’s not that important anyway.

This is our job now. We need to schedule it as such. Block out time every day to do your job. Right now, I’m working from 9 am to 12 on writing, I take a lunch break, and I work from 1–5 on the project I’m shipping. I don’t answer the phone, I try to avoid picking it up to scroll through Twitter or Instagram but I have to tell you, sometimes I fail at that. I wear noise-canceling headphones because I don’t want to get distracted, and I have some instrumental music on. I found some albums by Tycho a few years back, and I think they’re just about perfect for my work time.

I have made two rules about working in the studio: I only work in the studio, and I only work in the studio if I know what I’m going to be doing. Especially right now, it’s very important to separate work and life. I have not been very good at this in the past because the studio is where my Mac is. I bought some new living room furniture over the summer, and it would be a shame not to use it. At the end of the day, I leave the office, and I don’t go back in. Regarding the second rule, in the last part of my night I write down what I did today and where I left off. Then I write down what the next steps are on anything I’m working on. Sometimes, I’ve made a checklist for big projects, and I check off what I’ve done. I check my calendar for anything I have to do the next day, and then on the next page, I write down tomorrow’s plan. That plan is my ticket into the office the next day, and yes, I do think of the door as a checkpoint.

Other self-described ‘gurus’ say there should be some accountability built into your process. I agree to the extent that there ought to be some factor like a deadline to indicate some kind of measurement, but other than that I say we are grown-ass people who know what we should be doing. I’m not really a big fan of life coaches, mentorships, or accountability partners, so I don’t use them. If you feel you need a person in your process to hold you accountable or give you direction, go for it. My accountability is my ticket into the office, I have a deadline for the content I’m creating, and my reward for getting the job done is I go play on Instagram and Twitter for a block of time.

So, to recap, we’re creatives now. This is our job. We must tell everyone, including ourselves, that we have work to do. We need to schedule that time and not break it. We need to have a plan for the day. We need to separate work and life. We need to recognize we’re adults who have a job to do, and we need to do it.

You’ve decided to take the leap and step out on your own in this new iteration of the New Normal. Fantastic. You’re creating, posting, and wondering why nobody’s coming to see it. You built it, but they’re not coming. Why?

Well, let’s start with a hard truth. The only place “If you build it, they will come” works is in that movie. I don’t know how that got translated from a film about a baseball field into creative work or entrepreneurialism. Still, it’s the worst fantasy anyone can have when they begin this journey. Think about it; If that saying were true, we’d live in a world without billboards, commercials, print ads, and infomercials. I’m a child of the Eighties, and to say that my generation was a target demo is like saying a hurricane leaves things a little damp. They made damn sure we knew they built it. They went so far as to tell us they built it that companies made several cartoons solely because there was a toy they wanted to sell. That’s what I call effort.

I get it. I’m just like a lot of creatives. I love the creating part; I hate the promoting part. Partly because the social media people have convinced me there are magic beans involved, and I don’t have them, and partly because I hate being THAT GUY.

I was at a Christmas party for my wife’s place of work about ten years ago. While the party itself was just fine, I have very little memory of it that didn’t involve a person who was just there to hand out business cards and practically projectile vomit his resume at people. Once someone mentioned that I was a podcaster, I had a friend for the rest of the night. He was enough of a bad example that I swore that I wouldn’t be THAT GUY, ever. Instead, I think I’ve gone too far in the other direction, and if it’s happened to me, it must be happening to somebody else who is nervous about self-promotion.

So how do we, the nervous promoter, tell people we built something for them? Here are a few things that helped me get over some of the anxiety.

First, to get to the point that you can sell yourself, you need to have a good product. In the creative person’s case, that’s your writing, photos, video, graphics, crafts, or whatever you are shipping. There’s a school of thought in creative work that amounts to “The heck with it, ship it.”, and I don’t think that serves you as well as you might think. We lived in a world where “Good Enough” was good enough. I don’t think we live there anymore, and all the promotion in the world isn’t going to help if your product sucks.

Second, it’s helpful if you don’t consider it a sale. Unless you have a product or a service ready to go, you’re not selling anything, and even then, I wouldn’t think of it as a sale. I don’t think I have ever sold anything, and I never will. What I have done is educate someone to the point that they have decided to buy something of mine, and that process has lessened my anxiety quite a bit.

Third, how you educate someone is just as important. I’m a storyteller, so when I promote something of mine, I decided to take a prospect on a little journey. I’m not just telling them what I made, I’m telling them what led me to make it, and if they’re interested, I might even tell them how I did it. I’m not going to read War and Peace to them, and if I get the feeling they’re just polite for my sake, I’ll cut it short. It’s vital to get a good read on who you’re talking to because if you bore them to tears, you’ve lost them.

Third, don’t go low on competitors you might have, people you’ve dealt with personally or professionally, and not on yourself. I have witnessed a person promoting their podcast, and when another podcast name came up, the promoter went negative and lost that person immediately. Why? They were related to the other podcaster. If you don’t know who you’re talking to, keep it civil. Regarding self-deprecating, that can be funny at the right time. But if it’s all you do, you’re just going to sound depressing, and that’s a turnoff in any scenario.

Promoting your creative work can be nerve-wracking. I know. If you remember to make something you can be proud of, educate people about it by telling a story, and not going negative, you might find promoting that work a little less frightening.

As a creative, I get a lot of satisfaction from making things. I’m lucky enough to have a job that allows me to do it for a living. At home, I get a lot of satisfaction out of writing articles like this and producing a podcast. There’s nothing like that little shot of happy juice in the brain that you get when you accomplish something you enjoy doing. However, every once in a while, that shot of happy juice isn’t enough to counteract the cyclical nature and occasional frustration that comes along with making a weekly podcast. When your job is to create something on a regular schedule and you start thinking that the work doesn’t end, or when you don’t feel like you’re getting any feedback on what you’re creating, that’s when burnout sets in. I don’t know the percentage of dead podcasts out there that just faded because the producer got bored or burned out, but I’m sure it’s significant. Many podcasts ‘podfade’ or stop making new content before they reach ten episodes, and that’s the most generous of the stats I could find. This leads to a hard truth: producing a podcast is easy, but producing a quality podcast on a regular schedule is not.

I’m no stranger to podcast burnout. We’re good friends. He comes along every few months and raids my refrigerator and camps out in my studio for sometimes weeks on end. He’s always a surprise, but he shouldn’t be. Burnout always announces himself before he arrives. It’s subtle, but the signs are there a long time before Burnout knocks at the door. It could be the act of sitting in front of a screen, staring at a blank document, and having no ideas at all, or it could be the preference to binge an entire season of a show instead of working on an episode. We never recognize these signs at the time, but when Burnout shows up and takes up space in your life, hindsight is clarity. What isn’t very clear is how to get rid of your unwanted guest, or better yet, how to keep him from darkening your door in the first place.

Consider these ideas to keep from getting burned out on making your podcast.

• Long before you’re starting to feel the burn, grab a notebook and start writing down topic ideas. It’s very important to not self-edit here, just dump everything out of your head onto the paper no matter how weird it might sound. Also, don’t feel bad if you can’t come up with much if you’ve never done this before. It may take a few sittings to come up with a sizable list. Later, when you’re scratching your head about what to do next, go to the list. That’s when you can prioritize the list into what’s usable and what’s not. After a set period, if there are topics you haven’t done and aren’t likely to, cross them off the list. However, ensure you add to the list as you develop new show ideas. Add them as you go, or make an appointment to sit and brain-dump regularly.
• In the past, when I reached the point of burnout, it was because — as an independent podcaster — I am an army of one. It’s nice to be the Chief Cook and Bottle Washer in this outfit, but the downside is that I write, record, produce, distribute, and promote the show myself. I will be the first to admit that when you do everything, something may not get done. For me, it was usually podcast promotion because I’m not a very good salesman. Of course, when you don’t promote, you don’t attract new listeners, which becomes a negative loop. I got discouraged, and that led to burnout. Take a look at your process and identify what you can either delegate to someone else provided you have someone, outsource to a third party for a fee, or optimize it, so it happens automatically without your intervention. In my example, I created graphics and pull quotes for an episode in advance, and once I had uploaded and scheduled the episode, I created posts in Buffer to all my social channels at various points during the week. Later, I would ‘Rebuffer’ some of those same posts over the next 30 days, 90 days, and six months on Twitter and Facebook. With that done, I could get back to producing shows, which I find much more pleasurable. One last thing: when you do a deep dive into your process, if you identify something that just doesn’t make sense or it’s a redundant step, get rid of it. You have enough to get a podcast out the door without doing unnecessary work for yourself.
• A periodic listener survey may help you determine what direction to take the show. This could be as informal as a Twitter chat, a post on your Facebook page, a mailbag episode dedicated to this topic, or something more formal like a listener survey form on a tool like Google Forms, for example. There are many ways to do this, and the more detailed, the more you can use the data for potential sponsors down the road. I’ll cover that in a future article. The basics you should be thinking about for this purpose aren’t very complicated at all. Ask them why they listen to your show, what they like about it, what they don’t like about it, what they think should be added, and what should be deleted. As a bonus, announcing the results of this survey and your conclusions is a built-in show topic. That episode is important because if you’re going to ask your listeners for their input, please give them the courtesy of giving them the input results.
• One of the biggest causes of burnout stems from its cyclical nature. Putting out an episode weekly can sometimes feel like a Sisyphean task, especially if you’re a solo podcaster. Does your podcast lend itself to a seasonal release instead of a weekly release? Can you batch produce a season of shows, release them all at once or schedule them to drop weekly as you take a little break and then get back to producing the next season? This may work better for scripted shows, but I see no reason why a weekly podcast couldn’t run for a set number of weeks and then announce a short hiatus. Anecdotally, it’s been my experience that breaks usually happen over the Summer or during the Holidays. That’s usually when people are doing other things, and listener downloads might be lower over that time. Use that time to take a break and prepare for the next season.
• Lastly, it’s possible that you just need a break. It’s OK. Even Cal Ripken Jr. had to stop eventually, but before the Orioles took the field that day, it was already announced that Cal wasn’t starting that day. Everyone knew what was coming, and the audience in the stadium that day more than understood. They gave him one of the greatest standing ovations Baseball has ever seen. Your audience will understand if you have to stop for a little while. Make sure you talk with your listeners about what’s happening. You don’t need to tell them why if it’s personal, but what I think you should do is give them a return date when a new episode will drop. In the interim, you might consider scheduling ‘best of’ episodes or just make sure the audience knows nothing will be dropping in the meantime. As long as you communicate with your listeners clearly, they’ll understand. If you do announce a return date, treat that as a promise, and don’t break your word. If your listeners can’t trust you, they may leave and not come back.

In 2019, podcasts can no longer afford to be a ‘when I feel like it’ production. Produce a show on a schedule you can keep, and keep your audience in mind for those times when you need directions or when you need to step away. If you can keep those things in mind, burnout can be minimized if not wiped out completely.

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.