https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-dazh4-15ab698
Pounding my local streets thinking about navigating a decade of ‘getting good’ at our craft. In this episode, I mention this chat between Dr. Cal Newport and Rich Roll: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ofkz5RXSdEc&t=3089s

Episode transcript

Hello and welcome to Walk the Pod, your daily walking show, where I take my podcast for a walk because I don’t have a dog.

You’re very welcome along. This is Series 45, Episode 3.

Walking around my local streets, pounding a furrow into the pavement by circumnavigating a couple of roads every week, round and round and round, until there’s a big dent where my feet have trodden.

And talking about uncertainty, this series, which I’m enjoying enormously, I couldn’t really be in a more relevant place in my own life to talk about uncertainty. I feel like a lot is up in the air at the moment.

But this series is helping me to navigate my own uncertain situation at work, whilst simultaneously talking to you about uncertainty and what it means.

And if there’s a sensible or at least a sort of physiological, no, psychologically, possibly even philosophically sensible way to think about it.

You’re very welcome, along. This is series 45. This is episode 3.

We’re going to be talking about uncertainty and grind today because I just watched an excellent YouTube video by Dr. Cal Newport about, well, I mean, it’s basically about honing a craft.

And I think that there’s an enormous amount to be said with regard to uncertainty on the topic of honing a craft. and I also find the idea of honing a craft fascinating and hugely compelling. So that’s what we’re going to talk about today.

Welcome to Walk the Pod.

[02:15]

Do you like my new music? Music by Lawrence Owen. I’m learning how to manually put it on the show whilst walking around my local streets, which is not easy.

I realise also that the vagaries of my new system mean that my actual voice tracks have been clipping recently. Now, as a former BBC sound engineer that brings me enormous irritation—I’m absolutely furious about it—but I am working on it dear friends what you will find is that as we go on I will work out how to make the whole thing so that it is up to scratch may not be up to scratch by the end of this series but by the end of next series will have nailed it.

I’ve got some new music by Laurence Owen and I absolutely love it. Very excited to sort of play around with it and see how to use it. So just bear with dear friends while I sort things out.

I’ve also got various support tickets in with Podbean to ask them to have a look into why some of the things on their app don’t work properly. And we will wrangle it into where I need it to be eventually, somehow, you know, via support tickets and trying new platforms and fiddling around and iterative tweaking and so on.

And in a sense, that’s what I want to talk about today, which is uncertainty and honing a craft and getting better at what we’re trying to do slowly and gradually and putting the work out there anyway, way even though it’s not how we want it to be hey pussycat hey there’s a cat friends it’s a bit like the cat we’ve got at home except i think it’s a girl it’s black and white so it’s a bit like our hooper cat who’s black and white hey sweetie and it’s very skittish it’s not coming to play it’s It’s a bit like, oh, my God, it’s a person. What do they want? Hey. Hey. Oh, it’s come to say hello. Yay. Hey. Oh, it’s super cute. Super cute. Okay, I’m not going to get a photo of it because what I can’t cope with at the moment is trying to record whilst taking photographs. That is completely outside the scope of what I can do at the moment.

But what was I talking about? I was talking about uncertainty and when we’re trying to get better at a creative endeavour, when we’re trying to build our skills in a particular artistic area, when we’re trying to learn how to be the best in the world at something, to be hugely ambitious, but why not about it?

What we need to do is create a huge volume of work. Ira Glass told us that. Keep putting it out there. Keep publishing it. Do not succumb to the imposter syndrome or the shame of this isn’t good enough and I’m not happy with it to the point where I’m not going to publish the thing.

Do not succumb to that, dear friends. We have got to put it out there anyway, and just think to ourselves, well, this is actually an excellent way of finding out not who our friends are, because when you start making creative work and putting it into the world, you discover that some people are ashamed of your work for you and go, well, this isn’t very good. I’m not sure I can support this and drift off and never mention it to you again, because it’s not good enough in their view.

And then there are other people, the stone cold legends, who go, yeah, I see what you’re trying to do there. And whilst that might seem like faint praise, ease. What they’re actually saying is, you got this. You’re going to keep working on it until it’s brilliant. And I believe that you are going to make it brilliant. And those people are the ones to be held on to with both hands and your legs. Don’t let them get away.

I’m lucky enough to have several of those types of brilliant people in my life and I’m not letting them out of my sight accordingly.

So anyway, what does all of this have to do with, I feel like I’m not quite on topic at the moment, what does all this have to do with uncertainty and grind?

Well, the thing about uncertainty is that in a sense what social media offers is instant gratification. So if I put out a tweet or a TikTok video or a Instagram post, within 20 minutes of releasing that into the world, I know whether it was any good or not. People respond to it and like it or don’t like it.

And that instant gratification means that it’s harder in 2024 to make creative work which is based on honing a skill set that takes a decade to perfect than it is to do something quick and easy on Canva, which everybody can agree looks professional and excellent.

Now, Now, there’s nothing wrong with creating things that look professional and excellent on Canva. And even that takes skill. Of course it does.

But the point I’m making is, if I’m trying to become a writer, for example, I should put my work out there, but I can’t expect to get good at it quickly. It takes time. It takes studying the form. It takes real concentration. It takes a lot of self-editing. It takes a lot of self-confidence. It takes a lot of self-trust.

And the same goes for podcasting or anything else. and so what we have to do I think is decide that we’re going to concentrate on becoming, better and better and better at something even when there’s very little to show for it and that has not got to do with grind in that I don’t think it’s the same as saying you’ve got to, stick your head down and get on with something you hate for years because because that’s the only way to get good

I’m not saying go into a forest and kill loads of boar I’m just saying. It’s got to do with constancy as we spoke about in series 44 it’s got to do with deciding this is the thing i want to do this is the creative pursuit i’m interested in and i’m going to spend 10 solid years for example i mean it might be double that doing it creating the enormous volume of work putting it out into the world and the putting it out into the world bit is important because, as we put it out into the world it gives us feedback on how we’re doing and and the fact that we’re learning it it confirms that we’re learning and uh uh some interesting advice i received recently was to do something a hundred times to number all of the times so say you’re trying to draw a cat for example draw a cat a hundred times and number the drawings if nothing else simply to look through the stack at your first attempts and see how far you’ve come in just 100 times have tried to do something.

Now that I don’t think is, it’s not saying to grind and to just, you know, miserably copy something. It’s not like doing lines when we’re in Victorian primary school, as we all are.

It’s got to do with simply observing the power of practice and repetition. And practice and repetition means that a huge amount of what we’re doing becomes comes absolutely within our wheelhouse of expertise. We can do that bit with our eyes closed. And that then gives us bandwidth, to use a rather silly phrase used by the Silicon Valley tech pros, bandwidth to think about how to do the bit that we can’t do so well, how to do the difficult bit.

And this is why I’m grateful to Spotify because they did put an app out there which made it possible for me to make two solid years of this podcast easily without having to do the tech myself so that now I know how to make the podcast now what I’m trying to learn is how to do the tech myself now that Spotify are changing everything and stopping it from being easy easy to make on a mobile phone, which is what I’ve decided to do.

So I now have the slightly easier task, not of trying to work out how to podcast as well as how to make a podcast, but simply how to make a podcast, having already learned how to deliver one, if that makes sense.

So the more we can put into muscle memory, the more we can make absolutely straightforward, the more space we’ve got to think about how to push it to the next level, how to take it to the the next level, or how to do the surrounding peripheral work that needs doing to get the thing out there into the world, for example.

[10.57]

What can I see directly in front of me? Well, I’m going to have to keep it quite brief because I seem to have ramble chatted extensively about uncertainty today.

Have I even covered what the point is of uncertainty? I think what I haven’t spelled out, I’ve just realized, in all of that ramble chat was the fact that we have to exist within uncertainty for the time where we’re putting all the work in to become excellent at the thing we want to learn how to do and navigating uncertainty is absolutely essential for creatives because they’ve got to go from here a place where they can see how it’s going and what they’ve got and what skills they’ve got to a point that is unknown in the distance which they have no evidence they’re going to reach which they are the artists they wish to be so navigating uncertainty Uncertainty is an absolute crucial part of that, as well as actually improving the skill itself. Thank you. Right. Yes. Thanks for asking.

Even less time to tell you what I can see directly in front of me now. But actually, that’s not a bad thing because it is another grey and miz UK day in March, where really the weather should have perked up a bit by now, but it hasn’t.

The clocks are still to go forward. And thank you to Sam for pointing out that I spoke yesterday about the clocks going, springing back. They don’t spring back, they fall back in the autumn they spring forward so the clocks are going forward quite soon in the uk because we still do that time time shifting nonsense in the in the spring and the autumn it feels like nonsense to office workers if you’re a farmer it probably makes a hell of a lot more sense or if you’re an allotment owner probably makes a hell of a lot more sense too which i now I am, excitingly.

Anyway, so look, I’m not going to focus on what I can see directly in front of me today because I’ve spent so long talking about uncertainty, but I’m walking under some white cherry blossom, which is absolutely beautiful, even though the sun isn’t highlighting it or showing it off to any great extent.

Thank you so much for walking with me, dear friends. It is such a tonic to make this podcast for you. I cannot tell you how helpful it is, how good it is for my mental health. No doubt my physical health as well.

So thank you for coming with me wherever you are in the world. Thank you for bearing with as I sort out the technical aspects of what I’m making and expect it to improve as we go along significantly.

It may take a while, but we will get there. take care of your beautiful mind yourselves and each other and i wish you glimmers of joy in this imperfect day i’ll be back with episode four tomorrow.