I’m planning to launch a new gaming podcast about PlayStation, and I did record the intro part today as I promised myself I would. But I can’t stop second guessing myself and just sitting here wondering if it’s even worth the effort. My plan was/is to record the rest tomorrow and launch, but I’m really not sure if I’m going to go through with it after all. Idk who’s going to see this post or care but I guess I wanted to tell someone how I’m feeling about it. That’s all.
As Wayne Gretzky once said, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.
So we’ll start with the reality check. Probably no one’s gonna like your podcast. If there’s one thing that I’ve learned, it’s at just because you build it doesn’t mean they’ll come. Could be that you put in a whole bunch of work and even spend some money trying to get some production values, and it just doesn’t work out.
But for the other reality check: every other podcast out there had a first episode. A lot of them failed, but a bunch of them succeeded and went on to be relatively successful. One of the top media personalities in the world right now is a guy just sitting down and having discussions with people.
So take the shot. Worst case scenario, it turns out no one listens. Then you can move on with your life knowing that you tried.
Besides, it’s not like you did something crazy like write a novel length book over the course of a year with the philosophies you want to pass down to your son and get it professionally edited and commission artwork for the cover and get a primo ad read during the trial of the decade only to sell like a dozen copies. Now that might be embarrassing. But you can bang out a podcast in a couple of days!
I’m dumb or OOTL. What book?
I wrote and published a book a couple years back called The Graysonian Ethic. That’s the joke.
Do you have a small synopsis of what the book is? Beyond the generic “lessons to tell my child”, it looks like it’s only $7, if it’s something I’m interested in I’ll buy a copy to read while I’m camping.
So it’s a series of essays about things I think are going to be important.
I start off with a reminder that he needs to question everything and everyone including or especially me.
Then I start talking about some basics because, before you start talking about different things that are a little lessons that will make your life a little bit better, you need to be talking about the basics of the big stuff, stuff like staying safe and exercising self-control and so on and so forth.
I told some stories about the history of our family and how those lessons are going to be important throughout his life. The story of his world war 2 veteran great grandfather is shockingly relevant today.
I talk about how to perform miracles – not literal religious things, but there are lots of goals that people have that they would like to accomplish, and they just find that they can’t. Usually, it’s relatively straightforward to do some pretty amazing things; you just need to know how, so I talk a lot about how to do that.
And then the counterpoint to that, I talk about the fact that failure is an option, and that it sucks, that you can learn from it, but you’d really prefer not to. I talk about grit and the need to push through the hard times in your life. I talk about an existential crisis that I once had and the lessons that I learned.
Then come two of the most core essays in the book: one that talks about thinking ahead and details the two lives you could live if you make the right decisions or if you make the wrong decisions. I also tell him that he needs to go out and build something, and I get into quite a bit of detail about what that means.
Then I talk about a couple of the popular political movements of the day, and I talk about how I agree with the fundamental ideas, but that you can’t just let someone lead you around and you have to think for yourself.
I talk about the concept of success since how you define what success is has a fundamental effect on your outcome. I have a small crash course on economics because I think that understanding that is key to understanding the world we live in right now.
I talk about change and the fact that we need to embrace it and the sort of changes that I predict will happen over the next generation. I talk about what to do when you make a mistake in the context of a really dumb mistake that I made at the same time that I was writing the essay.
I talk about the internet a lot, and in particular, the fact that big companies want you to think that the internet is your friend when it isn’t – especially not their websites (haha relevant in the past 30 days!).
I then keep going by talking about shame and guilt and the fact that those negative emotions are something that sometimes you need to embrace because they are telling you something about the way you’re behaving.
Then I have a chapter all about attraction and meeting men or women. I didn’t really know whether I was going to have a son or a daughter when I wrote that one, so I tried to make it applicable to both. Unlike a lot of attraction materials, this would be in the context of a father trying to explain the world to his son. So, rather than just getting out there and meeting women, I talk a lot about the things that I’ve discovered in terms of pitfalls and dangers.
I close out the book by talking about how ultimately nobody owes him anything, not his parents, not the government, not the church, not society. And I give some advice for strategies on how to deal with that fact.
This is a really broad overview, half the fun of each chapter is delving into the different stories about the earth and the human race and my family and myself.
One of the interesting things about writing it is that it really changed my view of the world and helped me realize how important it would be to take the time raising my son (and so I went out and did it).
I’ve been pretty happy with the feedback I’ve gotten, people enjoy the book. It’s just not a focus group market tested premise so it’s tough getting someone to pick it up the first time.
👍 purchased. It doesn’t arrive prior to my camping trip, so I’ll read it after I’m done with the last Malazan book.
Hey! Thanks! Please let me know what you think if you think of it!
Chads more real than you don’t exist.
This is good advice, and I really appreciate the perspective. Thanks