Active Recall!

Check out the full notes for “Soundtracks” by Jon Acuff

In a “Build in public” sort of approach, I’ll share some of the process while making this podcast episode. I’ll see if it’d be worth doing for future episodes as well.I do a bunch of private writing that’s pretty structured that probably wouldn’t take too much to make into something useful that’s public.The idea here is that this will evolve to the show notes page for a finished episode. I’d usually write this outline somewhere and then forget about it. But I can already feel the “Write in the editor” effect working. Writing it in the WordPress editor means I’ll be maybe 5x more likely to actually publish it.

Okay on to the podcast episode… First, the outline

Grabbing a few quotes from the book to talk about while writing. Aiming for three.

“One of the greatest mistakes you can make in life is assuming all your thoughts are true.”

A lot of these thoughts are formed pretty early from parents and slowly the influence transfers from parents to friends.

A side quest…

“My life is dope and I do dope shit.”

This is not Jon Acuff’s quote (though he does have a cool life writing books and then talking about them). It’s from a Jimmy Fallon interview with Dave Chappelle where he talks about something Kanye said to him.

“I’m watching sketches that no one’s seen before. Because my life is dope and I do dope shit.”

(P.S. go take a moment to listen to Kanye’s “The Food” performance. And then his “Everything I Am” performance on SNL when he messes up and freestyles the rest.)

Okay I only meant to spend 8 minutes on this outline grabbing quotes but it’s one of those where connections come to mind. The Roots are Jimmy Fallon’s show band.

Questlove from The Roots has a book on creativity called Creative Quest. And here’s what he says about his other gig, DJing live shows. (I went to one of his sets at Brooklyn Bowl on Valentine’s Day when I was single so that was awesome/not awesome.)

Questlove talks about moving people with his music:

And in the same way, this is the sort of thing you can learn to do with your inner voice.

“I’ve got a wave of dread scheduled for this Saturday at 2 p.m.!” Is that what you did, or did those thoughts just show up unexpectedly, not at all connected to anything else you were doing at the time?

Those are called broken soundtracks, negative stories you tell yourself about yourself and your world. They play automatically without any invitation or effort from you. Fear does not take work. Doubt does not take work. Insecurity does not take work.

Retire Replace Repeat

Three actions to remember.

There are three actions to change your thoughts from a super problem into a superpower:

1. Retire your broken soundtracks.
2. Replace them with new ones.
3. Repeat them until they’re as automatic as the old ones.

Retire. Replace. Repeat.

Similar to a bad habit, it’s hard to just turn the thing off cold turkey. You need to recognize it happening and then replace it. What’s triggering your negative thought and what’s a different true thought you can replace it with?

Something that’s been useful for me is changing “I don’t have time to work out” to “A little bit is better than none. What movement can I do with the time I have?”

Recording this episode

Talking about re-framing is helpful because I’ve been trying to re-frame my thinking around things that I’m making.

In particular, this podcast.

It’s the most fun creative outlet for me. Just writing this outline and adding links and things reminds me of the joy that I had growing up with a WordPress blog. Sharing random things that come to mind and massaging them a little bit so that they’re a little less random.

Some types of writing are hard. This type of writing is energizing and fun.

And I’m remembering something that Jack Butcher talked about in a Visualize Value office hours a few weeks ago. Hard work does not mean something is valuable. And fun, light work does not mean it’s not valuable.

Podcasting is fun, light work for me. There’s value in that itself. But to make it valuable for the audience means I do need to take a couple things more seriously.

1. Actually having an audience — I’ll need to share the podcast more but that also means that…
2. … I need to make the package better — I say package because a podcast isn’t just the single audio file. That’s the core thing, but it needs to be packaged with show notes and other things to make it more discoverable and better when people do actually give it a shot.

Which is why I’m doing these show notes and sharing the process as I try to build a better podcast.

Reframe: It takes too long to write show notes → Show notes are a multiplier of the value from the previous time spent

Bad analogy: You’re in a BBQ competition and then forget to bring the tray to present it to the judges and you get DQ’d.

(I’m sure they’d be able to provide you with a tray, but anyway…)

If I write show notes it’ll increase the likelihood that anyone will check the episode out. It will also just lead to a better episode if I start a show notes page right from the start as the outline for the episode.

I already do that writing anyway so I may as well make it public.

Okay the export is done so that’s enough. Thanks for reading (and possibly listening!)