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This is I Will Not Lose Podcast, where we set out to prove everything is learned from
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I'm your host, Tony Ortiz.
Let's jump right in.
I don't think there's any such thing as a prodigy.
There's a big debate about practice versus prodigy and whether or not it's all about
how many hours you put into the grind or whether or not some people are born with an innate
gift to be great, whether that's being a great boxer, being a great fencer, even if it's
not in competition, you know, just being a great artist or musician.
there's all these examples of child prodigies i mean we have a word for it but it i don't know
whether it's how much practice you put in or whether or not you're born with something so
we'll kind of go through some thought experiments talk about this and see where it leads to so
uh what got me thinking about this is i spend a lot of time on reddit on our podcasting and
they were saying that your first 100 episodes in podcasting are essentially throwaways.
So it takes time to get good. It takes time to work the kinks out. And that being said,
we're like a quarter of the way through. So if you're listening in now in the pre-100 episodes,
you're listening to Greatness Manifest. So thank you for coming along with the ride.
thank you for witnessing greatness unfold but um no that's just going to say not that there's
anything great about me but if i stick with this and i keep doing this i'm bound to get better
so first hundred episodes are throwaways uh knowing that does that mean that i just kind of
wing episodes and just kind of get them out and get some done for now till 100 episodes
um i don't think that's the case i like to believe that you perform in the game the way that you
drill and practice so pretend like it's game time pretend like that whistle's blowing every time
you're going to do it so even though i'm episode um i believe this is episode 23 or 24 we have a
few guest episodes coming in there so i'm not sure which one this is off the top of my head
believe this will be episode 23, but we're not even a quarter of the way there. But every time
we still make sure the camera angles are set up, we make sure the mics are good to go. There's
really no time for mistakes. Mistakes are going to happen, but they have to happen because you're
trying, not because you didn't try, if that makes any sort of sense. So the way that you would drill,
the way you go over your moves in practice, the way you go over your swings and the batting cage,
it all comes down to how you're going to perform in the game. And I believe that it's all about
practice. It's all about drilling. And so I enjoy the journey of putting out episode week after week
and putting everything together. I think that as long as there's an incremental increase,
You know, I don't get too hung up on the checking stats, except when I'm posting once a week
and then I'll just see, OK, did this episode do as good as the last one?
Is there anything I can change or what are people coming back for?
How many people are coming back?
That sort of thing.
But it's growing.
It's growing incrementally.
So sure, it's easy to go and compare yourself to others or say, hey, I should have this
much.
trust me we all look at those little likes and those little hearts but in all honesty the goal
is to improve you know if you see yourself plateauing a lot of people deal with that
where whether it's an exercise or whether it's in their career where they're growing they're
growing and then suddenly they hit a plateau it's like what do i do now so just measuring success
but not getting too bent out of shape if you're not where you think you should be.
Who's really to say where you should be or what numbers you should have?
As long as you know you're doing your best, as long as you know you're putting out the
greatest content or the greatest work or your best performance, then that's all that should
matter.
And so if you think that there are people scattered among us who have just been born
with the innate gift of, let's say, podcasting, for example, that these guys are just good,
you know, they say to always you have to always be the best. You have to always think you're the
best. I know in rap, it's a very competitive field and everybody always wonders why does
every rapper think they're the best? It's like, well, you have to, you know, otherwise that
confidence is going to get picked apart if you don't think you're the best. So anything you
could do to stop yourself from getting discouraged, uh, thinking that there's all of a sudden these
people out here. Um, if you look at me, not that I think I'm the best, but if you look at me and
you think, all right, he's pretty decent at this thing. Uh, just know that I put time into public
speaking, practicing speaking through Toastmasters. It's an organized group where, um, you practice
public speaking based on a group. There's timers. It's a completely, I don't want to say it like
it's very lax. A lot of the people are very calm in there, but it is structured. That's the word
I'm looking for. It is structured practice for speech. So when I decided to start a podcast,
I was coming with years of audio engineering experience, a creative background and practice
speaking. That being said, I'm still not 100 episodes in. I'm still a complete amateur at
this stuff. I don't believe that anybody was born with the ability to just be phenomenal on a mic
or with a paintbrush or a baseball bat or a boxing glove or anything like that.
You go and you have, I remember a professor of mine was telling me a story. Shout out to
Professor Chose, Kutztown University. We're talking about how he's performing. He's a musician
and he's performing in a jazz trio with a younger, I think the kid was 14 or 15.
And he was just phenomenal. Everybody was talking about how good he was. He was running circles
around people in the band. And he goes up to him and he says, you know, man, you're such a prodigy.
You know, you're really good. And kid was practicing in the meantime while he interrupted him to say he was a prodigy. And he said, don't you ever call me that. He said, I practice more than anybody I know, adult or kid. I didn't just I wasn't just born like this, you know.
And so it goes to think if that kid is practicing seven, eight hours a day, they're going to get to that 10,000 hour mark. Malcolm Gladwell, I don't know if he coined it, but he definitely wrote a book about it. It's called Outliers, about how you have to essentially put 10,000 hours into anything to master it.
so if you're putting seven eight hours a day i'm not even going to do the math essentially it takes
like five to ten years to get that sort of hours into anything so if the kid started at four or
five years old and practiced all the time by 15 he could be a master at the musician you know um
i think it's pretty disheartening to think that some people are just given and i don't think that
if you are good or you have natural ability, that that doesn't mean you still need to practice your
ass off in order to compete at an extremely high level. You know, anything you do, there's going
to be a lot of competition. And ever since we've been in this global world where you can compete
with everything, I mean, you can have an Etsy store and be competing with a Walmart in Kansas
technically. So it's pretty crazy. But if you think about the Beatles or you think about any
master musicians. They had spent 10,000 hours playing in pubs and bars before they made it,
before they came to America. They had tons of time playing together. They probably had 10,000
hours just playing with each other, let alone as solo musicians themselves. So I have yet to see
somebody who just no skill, no sport, just jumped into something and was absolutely great at it.
that'd make for a great story. I'd love to hear it. Let me know. But, you know, you hear stories
of famous singers being homeless, like The Weeknd being homeless before he blew up. And I like
stories like this because it shows, you know, you're never really out of the fight. You're
never really you never really have to hit the reset button. It's not losing. You're not losing
so bad that you have to surrender. There are people who make it out of rock bottom. But that
doesn't mean that every homeless person is going to be a pop star. There's drive that sets you
apart. There's practice that sets you apart. And people don't like to talk about it, but there's a
lot of luck. There are two people who have been practicing the equal amount, and one of them
meet somebody who brings them on to an opportunity and the other one doesn't. Maybe you had a
financial opportunity or you had something, but luck does come across the way. And if you look
at any major, I mean, even Elon Musk or even any of these billionaires, there were things along
the way that happened with them that aren't the normal story. It isn't just, okay, you work hard
and you make it and you succeed. You know, I really wish that was the case, but that's not
the way it goes. So this is kind of a message to if you're new at something, specifically if you're
new at podcasting. I mean, if you're if you're thinking of starting anything, I would say just
go and do it. I mean, what do you really have to lose? Now, if you're the financial sole provider
of your family. That doesn't mean quit everything you're doing for income and decide to be a tap
dancer or something like that. But set yourself up, man. My first podcast episode was the goal
is to fail. And I knew everything wasn't going to be perfect. And we are still doing it. And so
I've had a few people reach out to me and say, hey, I was thinking of starting a podcast. I say,
do it. You know, I've actually helped a few people. They say, hey, you know, can you help
me set up the equipment, help me purchase. In a previous position, I was in charge of purchasing
audio video equipment. So I'm able to spend it like I would spend my own money. I usually buy
gear used, but I know what good equipment is. I know what you pay for. I know when you're just
paying for the brand. And so I was able to help some people get started. And fast forward, let's
just, let's just do a quick thought experiment. What if I didn't start this podcast? There are
people who have heard an episode that touched them in some way that they reached out, let me know,
pass that forward to somebody else, you know, shared an episode, said, hey, this was something
that I think this person could really get a hold of. You know, you told this really well, so get
a hold of it. So there's all those people of that message. You know, I'm not thinking about the
10,000 people that I haven't reached yet. I'm thinking about the people who have connected,
the people who tell me that means the world to them. They're looking forward to Mondays when
I'm dropping a new episode and they make sure during the week they're going to get to my episode
along with their other content. So, wow, man, like that's that means the world to me. That's
awesome so if you're thinking of getting into podcasting now's the time you know there's people
who have to hear what you have to say and what you have to put out there and in 2023 it's so easy to
be able to put stuff out there to the world so if you think that somebody else is better than you
maybe they just put more of the time in what they don't tell you is that person had a ton of fun
along the time. I mean, you just, if you don't love what you're doing, you're not going to grind
to the point where you hit those 10,000 hours. You're going to give up way beforehand. So people
who say, I want to get into podcasting because there's a ton of money in it or because they see
fame or notoriety, you know, you're looking at the top 1% of podcasts. You know, I look into
the statistics. I know what money is available and what was there. And so that was never the
reason why I got into podcasting and I'll be doing it for a lot longer because of that.
If you're worried about just you being the only person and trying to get someone,
I wouldn't say. And one thing I didn't want to do was get into it with a co-host. And that's
no dig to anybody that has co-hosts. There's people putting out great content with co-hosts.
But I know that I wanted to be able to match my own work ethic and I wanted to be able to rely
on myself. At the end of the day, if an episode doesn't drop, it's my fault. So if you're thinking
about relying on somebody or needing somebody else in order to put it out, I've read a ton of
stories about people who got into it, even did it for a year, and then something happened with one
of the co-hosts and they weren't able to continue to do it on their own. So if you're worried about
too much work to do it on your own, there's AI tools. Nowadays, there's AI that can help you
leverage everything. ChatGPT, I put out an episode about it and I talked about how the
gravy train was going to end. And like three weeks later, it was a paid service. You can still access
ChatGPT, but they have a paid tier to it if you want to really get the good stuff and the new
algorithms that they're putting out, but you cannot use it for headlines. You can use it for
episode ideas. Uh, they have AI that you can literally, I tried it out this weekend. You can
upload a video and it will cut. It uses chat GPT to transcribe your episode and takes the
best highlights out, makes little viral cuts. Um, if you're watching the cut of Lawrence,
the barbers episode uh that was completely generated by ai the captions everything so i'm
completely blown away by that i'm excited to live in a a world um inspired i don't want to say
inspired by a ai but um influenced by ai see people don't realize how much ai is already
influencing you know chat gpt was one of the big things that made it that said hey here's a real
world application of what tons of data sets and a language model can do in terms of speaking to a
human. But AI has been involved in all sorts of things. When you call your Uber, it was actually
interesting. Happy April Fool's. This Saturday I woke up, last Saturday I woke up, and I'm listening
to Spotify's AI DJ. They have a little DJ that talks to you and suggests different songs based
on your listening preferences. Super cool. I'm listening to it and it says, so here's some
hits that were charting 1100 years ago. And it's playing some like Gregorian chant, like an Ave
Maria. And I'm in the shower. I'm like, what's going on? And then it finishes and it's like,
oh, April Fool's, I got you. I thought, oh man, that's freaking nuts. So my AI is talking to me,
suggesting my types of music, I can understand how this scares people. I can understand how this
would be completely scary and people would say, I wouldn't let an AI do that. But it's already
involved in so much of the ads that you see, Amazon, your shopping recommendations. I mean,
machine learning and AI has been building up for a while. So I'm excited to see where it goes.
but give me a second. So the fact that AI is already ruling our life, I realized that
technology adapts a lot faster than people adapt to it. You know, rest in peace to Gordon E. Moore.
He was the founder of, or one of the co-founders at Intel. He actually was the definer of Moore's
law, which essentially says that it was the principle that the speed and the capability
of computers can be expected to double every two years as a result of the increased number
of transistors a microchip can contain.
So if you're in tech, you're familiar with Moore's law.
Whether or not it was a prediction that just happened to be true or whether or not the
tech industry just completely developed breakneck speeds in order to keep up with this at the
pace. His prediction in the 1960s about rapid advances charted the course for the age of high
tech. So we are either, I think Moore's law went up to, and I'm going to shoot myself in the foot
if I try to get into this, but we're reaching the end of Moore's law based on physics. So it was
only supposed to go for so long. And he didn't predict AI and this sort of stuff, this machine
learning, this new form of computing that we're going to see. But it's going to be affecting your
everyday life before you choose to say, hey, I want you to do this for me. I think back to
around 2010-ish, I was pushing everybody to get onto Google Hangouts. I just thought of it as a
much better way, not better, it's a different way to communicate. It's faster in some instances.
and the resistance was crazy.
I mean, I have to click something
and download software to my computer.
I don't know if I trust that.
Nothing beats an in-person meeting.
And I agree, nothing beats an in-person meeting.
But when you're billing by the hour and for travel,
people are like, well, why are you doing this?
Well, we have the option for a Zoom meeting.
If I'm gonna drive 30 minutes to you,
spend an hour and 15 minutes
with something that could have been emailed digitally,
somebody has to pay for the the travel you know but that was 2010 it took a global pandemic
and corona for people to finally catch on to zoom and there's people now here there's people now who
are still trying to get used to zoom but for the most part just about everybody is familiar with
that. I say Hangouts, Zoom, Uvu. There was tons of FaceTime. There was tons of video
conferencing software, but it just took so long for it to take. I don't know why, but people are
very slow to adapt for stuff. The thing with this AI is it's going to be adapting faster than we
can um chat gpt and chatbots things like it are going to be as mundane as excel you know when
excel spreadsheets came out and everybody was like oh this is going to be the new thing
everybody's like no now we send spreadsheets with uh everything it's just a way to send
information there's whole databases built off of spreadsheets so i say that to say this man
ai is not going anywhere um it's going to be able to do some pretty amazing things in the next year
or two and in the next five years gonna be damn near unrecognizable so yeah man we hit a good 20
minutes i think we about did it for the day um announcements there is a podcasting black effect
podcast event. Charlemagne, the God is throwing. It's in Atlanta, Georgia, April. It's in like
three or four weeks from now. I know tickets are going to sell out, but I think I'm going to try
to get some tickets. If I'm really going to be about this, I should go and travel to where there's
going to be people teaching the business of podcasts. There's going to be famous podcasters.
and you know um it's really about connecting with other content creators and that's not just
with podcasting photographers should connect with other photographers graphic designers should
connect with other graphic designers you never know what you learn in the industry with other
people who are keeping up in it so um i'll keep you posted if i do fly out there i'll be sure to
pod about it and check some things out hell i might even not drop an episode and miss the first
week and four months just to go to that event. But we'll see how it goes. That's all I got.
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. To support the show,
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