The Making of a Prodigy: Practice Makes Perfect - I Will Not Lose Podcast - #0023

Transcript

[00:00:08.350] What's up, gang? Good morning, good evening, good night, good afternoon, whatever time you're listening in, wherever you're listening from.
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[00:00:24.250] Coming live from my voice to your phone, headphones, TV, or car stereo.
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[00:00:37.070] Whether you're right now is working, running, exercising, cleaning, laying down, flying,
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[00:00:45.390] Failure can be frightening.
[00:00:47.010] However, as Winston Churchill reminds us, success is all about going from failure to
[00:00:51.530] failure without losing enthusiasm.
[00:00:54.190] This is I Will Not Lose Podcast, where we set out to prove everything is learned from
[00:00:58.070] failure, and we must persevere and recognize it as one step closer to success.
[00:01:02.550] I'm your host, Tony Ortiz.
[00:01:04.650] Let's jump right in.
[00:01:07.870] I don't think there's any such thing as a prodigy.
[00:01:12.430] There's a big debate about practice versus prodigy and whether or not it's all about
[00:01:17.850] how many hours you put into the grind or whether or not some people are born with an innate
[00:01:24.330] gift to be great, whether that's being a great boxer, being a great fencer, even if it's
[00:01:31.990] not in competition, you know, just being a great artist or musician.
[00:01:35.630] there's all these examples of child prodigies i mean we have a word for it but it i don't know
[00:01:45.070] whether it's how much practice you put in or whether or not you're born with something so
[00:01:49.890] we'll kind of go through some thought experiments talk about this and see where it leads to so
[00:01:56.310] uh what got me thinking about this is i spend a lot of time on reddit on our podcasting and
[00:02:04.390] they were saying that your first 100 episodes in podcasting are essentially throwaways.
[00:02:10.470] So it takes time to get good. It takes time to work the kinks out. And that being said,
[00:02:16.970] we're like a quarter of the way through. So if you're listening in now in the pre-100 episodes,
[00:02:22.450] you're listening to Greatness Manifest. So thank you for coming along with the ride.
[00:02:26.890] thank you for witnessing greatness unfold but um no that's just going to say not that there's
[00:02:34.770] anything great about me but if i stick with this and i keep doing this i'm bound to get better
[00:02:39.950] so first hundred episodes are throwaways uh knowing that does that mean that i just kind of
[00:02:47.440] wing episodes and just kind of get them out and get some done for now till 100 episodes
[00:02:54.380] um i don't think that's the case i like to believe that you perform in the game the way that you
[00:03:01.760] drill and practice so pretend like it's game time pretend like that whistle's blowing every time
[00:03:08.520] you're going to do it so even though i'm episode um i believe this is episode 23 or 24 we have a
[00:03:15.940] few guest episodes coming in there so i'm not sure which one this is off the top of my head
[00:03:21.060] believe this will be episode 23, but we're not even a quarter of the way there. But every time
[00:03:28.120] we still make sure the camera angles are set up, we make sure the mics are good to go. There's
[00:03:33.740] really no time for mistakes. Mistakes are going to happen, but they have to happen because you're
[00:03:39.920] trying, not because you didn't try, if that makes any sort of sense. So the way that you would drill,
[00:03:46.760] the way you go over your moves in practice, the way you go over your swings and the batting cage,
[00:03:52.960] it all comes down to how you're going to perform in the game. And I believe that it's all about
[00:03:59.040] practice. It's all about drilling. And so I enjoy the journey of putting out episode week after week
[00:04:06.240] and putting everything together. I think that as long as there's an incremental increase,
[00:04:15.880] You know, I don't get too hung up on the checking stats, except when I'm posting once a week
[00:04:22.000] and then I'll just see, OK, did this episode do as good as the last one?
[00:04:25.420] Is there anything I can change or what are people coming back for?
[00:04:29.460] How many people are coming back?
[00:04:31.500] That sort of thing.
[00:04:32.620] But it's growing.
[00:04:35.220] It's growing incrementally.
[00:04:37.100] So sure, it's easy to go and compare yourself to others or say, hey, I should have this
[00:04:42.720] much.
[00:04:43.160] trust me we all look at those little likes and those little hearts but in all honesty the goal
[00:04:49.840] is to improve you know if you see yourself plateauing a lot of people deal with that
[00:04:55.800] where whether it's an exercise or whether it's in their career where they're growing they're
[00:05:00.680] growing and then suddenly they hit a plateau it's like what do i do now so just measuring success
[00:05:08.080] but not getting too bent out of shape if you're not where you think you should be.
[00:05:14.220] Who's really to say where you should be or what numbers you should have?
[00:05:19.420] As long as you know you're doing your best, as long as you know you're putting out the
[00:05:23.180] greatest content or the greatest work or your best performance, then that's all that should
[00:05:28.760] matter.
[00:05:29.980] And so if you think that there are people scattered among us who have just been born
[00:05:35.760] with the innate gift of, let's say, podcasting, for example, that these guys are just good,
[00:05:41.680] you know, they say to always you have to always be the best. You have to always think you're the
[00:05:49.410] best. I know in rap, it's a very competitive field and everybody always wonders why does
[00:05:56.190] every rapper think they're the best? It's like, well, you have to, you know, otherwise that
[00:06:00.110] confidence is going to get picked apart if you don't think you're the best. So anything you
[00:06:06.610] could do to stop yourself from getting discouraged, uh, thinking that there's all of a sudden these
[00:06:11.170] people out here. Um, if you look at me, not that I think I'm the best, but if you look at me and
[00:06:16.870] you think, all right, he's pretty decent at this thing. Uh, just know that I put time into public
[00:06:23.670] speaking, practicing speaking through Toastmasters. It's an organized group where, um, you practice
[00:06:31.610] public speaking based on a group. There's timers. It's a completely, I don't want to say it like
[00:06:39.330] it's very lax. A lot of the people are very calm in there, but it is structured. That's the word
[00:06:45.510] I'm looking for. It is structured practice for speech. So when I decided to start a podcast,
[00:06:51.370] I was coming with years of audio engineering experience, a creative background and practice
[00:06:59.350] speaking. That being said, I'm still not 100 episodes in. I'm still a complete amateur at
[00:07:05.030] this stuff. I don't believe that anybody was born with the ability to just be phenomenal on a mic
[00:07:11.830] or with a paintbrush or a baseball bat or a boxing glove or anything like that.
[00:07:18.190] You go and you have, I remember a professor of mine was telling me a story. Shout out to
[00:07:25.090] Professor Chose, Kutztown University. We're talking about how he's performing. He's a musician
[00:07:31.950] and he's performing in a jazz trio with a younger, I think the kid was 14 or 15.
[00:07:39.470] And he was just phenomenal. Everybody was talking about how good he was. He was running circles
[00:07:44.190] around people in the band. And he goes up to him and he says, you know, man, you're such a prodigy.
[00:07:49.970] 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.
[00:08:10.340] 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.
[00:08:30.700] so if you're putting seven eight hours a day i'm not even going to do the math essentially it takes
[00:08:38.310] like five to ten years to get that sort of hours into anything so if the kid started at four or
[00:08:45.350] five years old and practiced all the time by 15 he could be a master at the musician you know um
[00:08:54.110] i think it's pretty disheartening to think that some people are just given and i don't think that
[00:08:59.410] if you are good or you have natural ability, that that doesn't mean you still need to practice your
[00:09:04.870] ass off in order to compete at an extremely high level. You know, anything you do, there's going
[00:09:10.830] to be a lot of competition. And ever since we've been in this global world where you can compete
[00:09:16.290] with everything, I mean, you can have an Etsy store and be competing with a Walmart in Kansas
[00:09:21.130] technically. So it's pretty crazy. But if you think about the Beatles or you think about any
[00:09:29.110] master musicians. They had spent 10,000 hours playing in pubs and bars before they made it,
[00:09:39.660] before they came to America. They had tons of time playing together. They probably had 10,000
[00:09:44.540] hours just playing with each other, let alone as solo musicians themselves. So I have yet to see
[00:09:51.460] somebody who just no skill, no sport, just jumped into something and was absolutely great at it.
[00:09:57.900] that'd make for a great story. I'd love to hear it. Let me know. But, you know, you hear stories
[00:10:05.080] of famous singers being homeless, like The Weeknd being homeless before he blew up. And I like
[00:10:13.240] stories like this because it shows, you know, you're never really out of the fight. You're
[00:10:18.240] never really you never really have to hit the reset button. It's not losing. You're not losing
[00:10:23.960] so bad that you have to surrender. There are people who make it out of rock bottom. But that
[00:10:32.320] doesn't mean that every homeless person is going to be a pop star. There's drive that sets you
[00:10:37.940] apart. There's practice that sets you apart. And people don't like to talk about it, but there's a
[00:10:43.180] lot of luck. There are two people who have been practicing the equal amount, and one of them
[00:10:49.640] meet somebody who brings them on to an opportunity and the other one doesn't. Maybe you had a
[00:10:57.900] financial opportunity or you had something, but luck does come across the way. And if you look
[00:11:03.160] at any major, I mean, even Elon Musk or even any of these billionaires, there were things along
[00:11:10.180] the way that happened with them that aren't the normal story. It isn't just, okay, you work hard
[00:11:16.960] and you make it and you succeed. You know, I really wish that was the case, but that's not
[00:11:22.100] the way it goes. So this is kind of a message to if you're new at something, specifically if you're
[00:11:28.560] new at podcasting. I mean, if you're if you're thinking of starting anything, I would say just
[00:11:35.680] go and do it. I mean, what do you really have to lose? Now, if you're the financial sole provider
[00:11:42.700] of your family. That doesn't mean quit everything you're doing for income and decide to be a tap
[00:11:48.660] dancer or something like that. But set yourself up, man. My first podcast episode was the goal
[00:11:56.800] is to fail. And I knew everything wasn't going to be perfect. And we are still doing it. And so
[00:12:02.560] I've had a few people reach out to me and say, hey, I was thinking of starting a podcast. I say,
[00:12:07.760] do it. You know, I've actually helped a few people. They say, hey, you know, can you help
[00:12:12.340] me set up the equipment, help me purchase. In a previous position, I was in charge of purchasing
[00:12:18.180] audio video equipment. So I'm able to spend it like I would spend my own money. I usually buy
[00:12:25.160] gear used, but I know what good equipment is. I know what you pay for. I know when you're just
[00:12:30.060] paying for the brand. And so I was able to help some people get started. And fast forward, let's
[00:12:38.480] just, let's just do a quick thought experiment. What if I didn't start this podcast? There are
[00:12:44.880] people who have heard an episode that touched them in some way that they reached out, let me know,
[00:12:52.560] pass that forward to somebody else, you know, shared an episode, said, hey, this was something
[00:12:58.080] that I think this person could really get a hold of. You know, you told this really well, so get
[00:13:03.760] a hold of it. So there's all those people of that message. You know, I'm not thinking about the
[00:13:08.740] 10,000 people that I haven't reached yet. I'm thinking about the people who have connected,
[00:13:14.160] the people who tell me that means the world to them. They're looking forward to Mondays when
[00:13:18.280] I'm dropping a new episode and they make sure during the week they're going to get to my episode
[00:13:23.220] along with their other content. So, wow, man, like that's that means the world to me. That's
[00:13:29.700] awesome so if you're thinking of getting into podcasting now's the time you know there's people
[00:13:35.400] 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
[00:13:44.270] be able to put stuff out there to the world so if you think that somebody else is better than you
[00:13:50.170] maybe they just put more of the time in what they don't tell you is that person had a ton of fun
[00:13:55.470] along the time. I mean, you just, if you don't love what you're doing, you're not going to grind
[00:14:00.370] to the point where you hit those 10,000 hours. You're going to give up way beforehand. So people
[00:14:05.910] who say, I want to get into podcasting because there's a ton of money in it or because they see
[00:14:10.430] fame or notoriety, you know, you're looking at the top 1% of podcasts. You know, I look into
[00:14:17.450] the statistics. I know what money is available and what was there. And so that was never the
[00:14:22.810] reason why I got into podcasting and I'll be doing it for a lot longer because of that.
[00:14:29.690] If you're worried about just you being the only person and trying to get someone,
[00:14:34.090] I wouldn't say. And one thing I didn't want to do was get into it with a co-host. And that's
[00:14:40.230] no dig to anybody that has co-hosts. There's people putting out great content with co-hosts.
[00:14:45.530] But I know that I wanted to be able to match my own work ethic and I wanted to be able to rely
[00:14:52.290] on myself. At the end of the day, if an episode doesn't drop, it's my fault. So if you're thinking
[00:14:58.230] about relying on somebody or needing somebody else in order to put it out, I've read a ton of
[00:15:04.330] stories about people who got into it, even did it for a year, and then something happened with one
[00:15:09.810] of the co-hosts and they weren't able to continue to do it on their own. So if you're worried about
[00:15:16.490] too much work to do it on your own, there's AI tools. Nowadays, there's AI that can help you
[00:15:24.170] leverage everything. ChatGPT, I put out an episode about it and I talked about how the
[00:15:31.030] gravy train was going to end. And like three weeks later, it was a paid service. You can still access
[00:15:36.970] ChatGPT, but they have a paid tier to it if you want to really get the good stuff and the new
[00:15:44.030] algorithms that they're putting out, but you cannot use it for headlines. You can use it for
[00:15:49.510] episode ideas. Uh, they have AI that you can literally, I tried it out this weekend. You can
[00:15:55.310] upload a video and it will cut. It uses chat GPT to transcribe your episode and takes the
[00:16:02.690] best highlights out, makes little viral cuts. Um, if you're watching the cut of Lawrence,
[00:16:09.590] the barbers episode uh that was completely generated by ai the captions everything so i'm
[00:16:16.710] completely blown away by that i'm excited to live in a a world um inspired i don't want to say
[00:16:23.930] inspired by a ai but um influenced by ai see people don't realize how much ai is already
[00:16:33.970] influencing you know chat gpt was one of the big things that made it that said hey here's a real
[00:16:39.110] world application of what tons of data sets and a language model can do in terms of speaking to a
[00:16:46.130] human. But AI has been involved in all sorts of things. When you call your Uber, it was actually
[00:16:54.430] interesting. Happy April Fool's. This Saturday I woke up, last Saturday I woke up, and I'm listening
[00:17:01.330] to Spotify's AI DJ. They have a little DJ that talks to you and suggests different songs based
[00:17:08.310] on your listening preferences. Super cool. I'm listening to it and it says, so here's some
[00:17:15.030] hits that were charting 1100 years ago. And it's playing some like Gregorian chant, like an Ave
[00:17:21.070] Maria. And I'm in the shower. I'm like, what's going on? And then it finishes and it's like,
[00:17:25.730] oh, April Fool's, I got you. I thought, oh man, that's freaking nuts. So my AI is talking to me,
[00:17:33.090] suggesting my types of music, I can understand how this scares people. I can understand how this
[00:17:39.790] would be completely scary and people would say, I wouldn't let an AI do that. But it's already
[00:17:46.370] involved in so much of the ads that you see, Amazon, your shopping recommendations. I mean,
[00:17:54.900] machine learning and AI has been building up for a while. So I'm excited to see where it goes.
[00:18:01.900] but give me a second. So the fact that AI is already ruling our life, I realized that
[00:18:15.300] technology adapts a lot faster than people adapt to it. You know, rest in peace to Gordon E. Moore.
[00:18:24.080] He was the founder of, or one of the co-founders at Intel. He actually was the definer of Moore's
[00:18:31.620] law, which essentially says that it was the principle that the speed and the capability
[00:18:36.420] of computers can be expected to double every two years as a result of the increased number
[00:18:41.800] of transistors a microchip can contain.
[00:18:45.420] So if you're in tech, you're familiar with Moore's law.
[00:18:49.780] Whether or not it was a prediction that just happened to be true or whether or not the
[00:18:54.640] tech industry just completely developed breakneck speeds in order to keep up with this at the
[00:19:00.780] pace. His prediction in the 1960s about rapid advances charted the course for the age of high
[00:19:08.140] tech. So we are either, I think Moore's law went up to, and I'm going to shoot myself in the foot
[00:19:15.910] if I try to get into this, but we're reaching the end of Moore's law based on physics. So it was
[00:19:23.130] only supposed to go for so long. And he didn't predict AI and this sort of stuff, this machine
[00:19:30.250] learning, this new form of computing that we're going to see. But it's going to be affecting your
[00:19:37.450] everyday life before you choose to say, hey, I want you to do this for me. I think back to
[00:19:44.390] around 2010-ish, I was pushing everybody to get onto Google Hangouts. I just thought of it as a
[00:19:50.670] much better way, not better, it's a different way to communicate. It's faster in some instances.
[00:19:56.710] and the resistance was crazy.
[00:20:01.030] I mean, I have to click something
[00:20:02.390] and download software to my computer.
[00:20:04.550] I don't know if I trust that.
[00:20:06.490] Nothing beats an in-person meeting.
[00:20:08.550] And I agree, nothing beats an in-person meeting.
[00:20:11.490] But when you're billing by the hour and for travel,
[00:20:14.370] people are like, well, why are you doing this?
[00:20:16.050] Well, we have the option for a Zoom meeting.
[00:20:18.270] If I'm gonna drive 30 minutes to you,
[00:20:20.670] spend an hour and 15 minutes
[00:20:22.210] with something that could have been emailed digitally,
[00:20:24.270] somebody has to pay for the the travel you know but that was 2010 it took a global pandemic
[00:20:32.010] and corona for people to finally catch on to zoom and there's people now here there's people now who
[00:20:39.950] are still trying to get used to zoom but for the most part just about everybody is familiar with
[00:20:47.030] that. I say Hangouts, Zoom, Uvu. There was tons of FaceTime. There was tons of video
[00:20:53.310] conferencing software, but it just took so long for it to take. I don't know why, but people are
[00:21:02.090] very slow to adapt for stuff. The thing with this AI is it's going to be adapting faster than we
[00:21:08.990] can um chat gpt and chatbots things like it are going to be as mundane as excel you know when
[00:21:19.090] excel spreadsheets came out and everybody was like oh this is going to be the new thing
[00:21:23.470] everybody's like no now we send spreadsheets with uh everything it's just a way to send
[00:21:29.890] information there's whole databases built off of spreadsheets so i say that to say this man
[00:21:36.490] ai is not going anywhere um it's going to be able to do some pretty amazing things in the next year
[00:21:43.070] or two and in the next five years gonna be damn near unrecognizable so yeah man we hit a good 20
[00:21:52.570] minutes i think we about did it for the day um announcements there is a podcasting black effect
[00:22:00.230] podcast event. Charlemagne, the God is throwing. It's in Atlanta, Georgia, April. It's in like
[00:22:08.590] three or four weeks from now. I know tickets are going to sell out, but I think I'm going to try
[00:22:12.630] to get some tickets. If I'm really going to be about this, I should go and travel to where there's
[00:22:19.610] going to be people teaching the business of podcasts. There's going to be famous podcasters.
[00:22:24.310] and you know um it's really about connecting with other content creators and that's not just
[00:22:31.710] with podcasting photographers should connect with other photographers graphic designers should
[00:22:36.730] connect with other graphic designers you never know what you learn in the industry with other
[00:22:41.590] 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
[00:22:49.400] pod about it and check some things out hell i might even not drop an episode and miss the first
[00:22:54.760] week and four months just to go to that event. But we'll see how it goes. That's all I got.
[00:23:02.170] This is I Will Not Lose podcast, where we set out to prove everything is learned from failure,
[00:23:06.610] and we must persevere and recognize it as one step closer to success. To support the show,
[00:23:12.150] visit the website shows.acast.com slash I Will Not Lose and subscribe on your favorite podcast
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[00:23:23.790] Thank you for listening.