Episode notes
Transcript
Download .txt189 timestamped passages
Yo, Mike Chex, is this thing on?
Good morning, good evening, good night, good afternoon.
Whatever time you're listening in, wherever you're listening from,
shout out to my Spotify listenership, Apple and Google Podcasts, Stitcher, and YouTube if you're watching in.
Thanks for giving me a reason to pick my hair out today.
Coming in live from my voice to your phone, headphones, TV, or car stereo.
Your attention could have been anywhere, but it's here right now.
Take a moment and be present. Recognize that it's now. Right now.
What you're right now is working, running, exercising, cleaning, flying, laying down,
driving.
Be grateful we're alive.
Failure can be frightening.
However, as Winston Churchill reminds us, success is all about going from failure to
failure without losing enthusiasm.
This is I Will Not Lose Podcast, where we set out to prove everything is learned from
failure, and we must persevere and recognize it as one step closer to success.
I'm your host, Tony Ortiz.
Let's jump right in.
I almost nailed that intro. We'll just leave that in there. But today's we're going to have fun today. We're going to have fun today. We're going to be talking about success versus quality. I'm going to call this a deep dive into creators journeys. So this is part encouragement. If you're out there, if you're a creator, I'm telling you, persevere, keep creating, especially in the face of likes and all this digital currency that we have nowadays or even money.
the big one. If you're not getting paid what you think you're worth, please do not give up.
We're going to talk about cases where quality content didn't immediately lead to financial
success and what sort of things can influence the payoffs for creators and inventors.
So I'll give you a hint. It's not all in your control. There's a lot of luck involved with
popping off, so to say. But a lot of people get it misunderstood and they see somebody else with
more popularity than them. And they say, I'm better than that person. You know, I'm objectively
better. Why are they getting a shot and I'm not getting a shot? And you hold resentment towards
that and that turns to anger. So is it the best gets the money? Is it quality? Let's look at like
Betamax versus VHS. Let's look at some examples of quality versus success. You probably never even
heard of Betamax. The late 70s, there was a race between that and VHS. And even though Betamax was
better picture quality, you've never heard of it. It just didn't make it. VHS won the format war
basically because it had longer recording times. It was less expensive, so more expansive to the
market. And it was supported by more manufacturers and movie studios. So if the movie studios are
supporting VHS and it's less expensive, which probably tied into why they were supporting it,
it's going to pop off. So you'd think, wow, everybody will be going for the great picture
quality. You had something on more of a level playing field with HD, DVD versus Blu-ray.
That was more recent, maybe 20 years ago, if you want to call that recent. But Toshiba had this
thing called the HD DVD. It was all like red. The branding was red. And Sony had the Blu-ray,
which came in blue discs and they had their own players it was an entire shift in the market
and it brought you from vhs quality to full hd which is still pretty much the standard today
you know we have 4k but that's hardly the standard um it's moving there but i would say
both formats had their merits but blu-ray won because of business strategies and alliances
so it was more of a who you know type of thing and warner brothers decided to exclusively release
movies on blu-ray and the library just couldn't compete uh within a few years you just can't get
hd dvds anymore they're not worth much to sell um you get into opinion when you decide whether
something is objectively better or not and don't get me wrong art is not subjective um
your opinion of it might be but there are definitely objective things that make something
good or bad so it's easy to watch if somebody doesn't hit all those uh there's even in hollywood
or even television commercials there's mistakes or things that are made where sometimes the
commercial doesn't even get across the brand but it makes you laugh and somebody says well that was
the greatest commercial, you know? The best ones are the ones where they make you laugh and you
remember the brand. It really helps with word of mouth. But sometimes it's your partnership. So
don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to get out here and say, don't focus on creating quality
content. That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is don't get discouraged if you haven't
blown up just yet. Another example you have is Microsoft Windows versus Apple Mac, the Mac OS.
People argue that Mac's OS is more stable, more secure. Mac is kind of like a cult. They love
their devices, but Windows dominates the market. It may not seem like it because Apple's such a
huge company, but so much hardware runs off of Microsoft Windows. It's more affordable.
Businesses choose to use it. Things were running off Windows XP for years until they force an
update and everybody is forced to still continue to go with Microsoft because they're positioned
in the market. So that's great. Have your great OS. If that's what you're going for, you have the
choice as a consumer to go with what you want to do. What else did you never hear of? You guys
remember quibi is that streaming platform 2020 uh mobile viewing with short form content despite
having high quality production and big names involved the platform failed within a few months
of its launch it struggled due to several reasons including poor timing lack of unique content and
an overall reliance on star power so it's funny because everything is about short form content
Snapchat came in 2016 and killed it. Instagram stole that. Then Facebook had stories. And now
everything's about reels. LinkedIn is even doing stories. So it's funny. The idea of short form
mobile viewing content was not a bad idea. It was just poor timed. So a little bit of timing,
a little bit of luck. But the one thing you can control is your quality content. So keep putting
out dope stuff man popularity in the arts depends on not just uh your marketability but there's some
examples where it just takes a long time to pop off um if you guys saw breaking bad i was one of
the people that heard about it after the fourth season and what it really was was netflix uh with
the partnership with netflix i think breaking bad was exclusively on amc american movie channel
and all of a sudden it was available to stream and they had a long break during the writer's
strike between the fourth and fifth season and that allowed people to get caught up they ended
up putting out season five in two parts it was so popular they estimate like a hundred two to a
hundred ten percent increase from season four to season five which suggests that over half the
people that are fans of Breaking Bad didn't catch on until the fifth season. So keep creating,
keep getting dope. You're only going to get doper and people are going to look back at your stuff
and they're going to say, wow, that was consistently he was quality five years ago.
How come I never heard of this guy? You know, it's because I'm going to keep saying it. It's
not always the greatest music that gets heard, that gets put out. If you keep your ear to the
local music scene. There's tons of people that you would think would at least be touring, would at
least have the popularity to tour independently. But it's amazing. We go through flavors of the
month, and there's just so much content out there that it sometimes gets daunting. It sometimes gets
hard to say, how am I going to stand out amongst this? But who else took a long time to pop?
You guys know Van Gogh? He's one of the most famous painters in history, known for his expressive and emotional style. But during his lifetime, nobody knew who he was. He struggled with poverty and mental illness and pretty much went unrecognized. He sold one painting while he was alive. And now, hundreds of years later, we are celebrating his work after his death.
don't get me wrong you don't have to die to pop off this is not telling you that you need to go
out and die in order for your music or your art or your content or your podcast to become popular
it just shows that sometimes it takes a long time god willing you'll be able to enjoy it and smell
your flowers while you're still alive but a lot of artists claude monet uh most of his work wasn't
appreciated during his lifetime. But now we refer to his style of art as impressionism,
and it's taught in schools. It's literally one of the founding art styles that you have to learn
about through art history classes still to this day. But the art community in France was like,
no, rejected. So I don't know. Sometimes it's about it's not about the recognition. So stop
measuring things based off your likes. It'll read through if you're creating quality content from
your heart. It's going to read through. I don't do this podcast for any sort of notoriety. I think
it's great that it's going to connect me to people that I may otherwise not have met, but I'm
creating content because it moves people, because people listen, and because it's a great outlet for
myself. So I'm going to continue to do it. But overall, the quality does not equate to the
impact of your work. You can go back and look at the impact of Tupac and people can argue whether
or not he's the greatest rapper, whether or not people have come talented since then. People could
talk about that with Biggie. Tupac was in movies. He was an American poet, actor, and there was
bad things. He was definitely notorious for things as well, but we're not looking at his objective
acting. Tupac essentially played himself in a lot of the movies. He wasn't a phenomenal actor
that could jump into a period piece. Maybe he was and maybe he would have been. The man was in his
20s. He was not old by any means, but it doesn't equate to quality and impact. Sometimes your
ability to network and promote yourself is what helps is what happens. And you're playing different
games. The game of creating quality content is one promoting that quality content. It's a common
thing that people fall into. It's like they like creating, but they don't want to showcase it or
they don't want to. They're afraid of criticism. You know, I'm worried about it, too. God, I've
been creating for almost 15 years and I'm still scared to post some stuff because I'm worried
about what some bum who's never lifted Photoshop in his life is going to think about it. But you
know what? That's why we create. Whether you're a comedian or whatever, you're there for criticism.
Your work is there to be criticized and create a conversation. But who else? I mean, there's
plenty of people who didn't pop off, but they were consistently making music for a while.
uh lizzo she didn't get popular till truth hurts like right before the pandemic but she dropped
her first album in 2013 um it wasn't until and the thing about truth hurts is that was originally
released in 2017 and then went uh viral on tiktok so it took a while for even the thing that popped
to pop. So after that, fast forward, tops the Billboard Hot 100 years after its original
release. It just shows that sometimes it can come from unexpected places. My man Anderson
Pack, I'm actually playing his song with Cordae 210s on repeat. Every morning I just wake up and
it sets the vibe. That's my one for right now. But he's critically acclaimed. He blends funk,
R&B, hip hop. He dropped his first album in 2012. I probably heard of him after his album Malibu
dropped in 2016. If you go and listen to his earlier stuff or you listen to Malibu or you
listen to his stuff now, he's been consistently dropping with that style for a clean decade now.
So why didn't he blow up five, six, seven years earlier? Imagine if he would have stopped during
those five, six years and we would have never heard the thing that popped off. He would have
just been another great artist that didn't reach mainstream success. But these examples are here
to illustrate that the journey to success and recognition can vary greatly. It might take years
of producing quality content before you gain mainstream recognition. Some people do find
success relatively quickly, so we can't ignore those. You have plenty of tools in a digital age
to go viral. You look at somebody like Billie Eilish. She essentially had immediate recognition
with her and her brother, but the timing and the luck was there. She had a different, innovative,
pop-like culture with a little bit of electronic and indie, and it was home produced. So gaining
traction on SoundCloud led to the mainstream success. So even without traditional marketing
and promotion. If you have unique and high quality content, the time has never been more perfect for
you to get out there and create and connect with other creators. Don't be afraid of people in your
city that are doing the same thing as you. I jumped on Phase One's podcast. I had him on my
podcast. We're going to share a conversation and hopefully my followers become his and vice versa.
I hope to jump on some other local podcasts soon because it's not just about getting things for myself.
It's about promoting and showing that what the effort that other creators are putting in doesn't go unrecognized.
It could be a little like, it could be a little share.
You have no idea how far that goes.
And if you go back and listen, we had this conversation a bit with Phase One on the last
episode, and you got to be selective, especially if you're known as somebody with great music
taste.
It's not just free charity shares and likes to say, hey, support.
Somebody says, hey, why didn't you ever support me?
You know, maybe get to the point where your content is good enough to be picked up by
the blogs or your podcast has, you know, that one chance that goes viral.
And God willing, your content for the previous six months or year is good enough that people
can go back and listen to it and have enough.
There's no perfect level of content.
You know, you can post every day and not gain traction.
You can post once every two weeks.
And if it's quality content that gains conversation and engagement, the algorithm is going to
keep pushing your stuff.
so all the more reason why you should create for the love of it and let monetization come
don't worry about critics don't you think that there was da vinci uh don't you think somebody
was sitting there watching da vinci like build flying helicopters and was like that guy's not
that talented and i don't know who he thinks he is trust me everybody has haters um well i'll tell
you what. I'm just going to look over my notes, see if there's anything that I missed. Then we'll
get into announcements. Nope. Create for the love of the craft. Let monetization be a potential
outcome. And even if you're great, you're going to face criticism. A couple of announcements I'm
going to be jumping into. I want to get back out my shell. One of the things that the podcast
allowed me to do is be public again. The previous six months before I launched, I was essentially
off of social media. I didn't do anything on Facebook, slowly got back into Instagram after
a good six month break to kind of get some things together and focus on mental health.
And now that I'm connected again, it's like I'm running into people. People are messaging me.
They're in my inbox. I'm more aware of things that are going on, but I just want to get a little bit
out of the basement. I'm going to be going to Pocono Mountain East in the next couple of weeks,
speak to the kids in the sports marketing program. So I'm really excited about that.
Just waiting on some clearances and approval to come back for that. And then that'll be good to
go. I'll be sure to keep you guys in touch and tell you how that's going. I didn't plan on having
guests. And I wanted to make sure that I could produce the show on my own. But that being said,
I look back at season two and over half the episode are guests episodes. So one of the things
I'm going to be working on is setting up remote interviews so that I can interview people or at
least have a conversation with them for the show, even if they can't come to my studio. So that's
coming in time. Stay tuned, man. If you're a new listener, I hope you enjoyed this. Please consider
subscribing or just check back in a couple weeks. And if I'm consistent, do me the favor and listen
to my content. Other than that, if you have been rocking with me this whole time, we're on episode
29. Whether you got here on episode 20, 10, or you've been rocking since episode zero, I just
want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for giving me a reason to create. And if nobody's
listening at all, I'm still going to keep doing this because it's pretty damn fun. This has been
I Will Not Lose podcast where we set out to prove that everything is learned from failure and we
must persevere and recognize it as one step closer to success. To support the show, visit the website
shows.acast.com slash I Will Not Lose. Subscribe on your favorite podcast player. You can share
the episode link, leave a comment. Your contribution is appreciated. Thank you for listening.