The myth of the easy ride

“If the easy thing worked, you would have done it already.”

I wrote that down after it jumped out at me while I read Seth Godin’s blog the other day. He was writing about the lure of snake oil — “Send me X dollars, and I’ll send you my guide to how you can Y with just a little effort.”

Pretty much nothing is earned with “just a little effort.” The overnight success is nothing of the kind — she put in thousands of hours of work to reach the point where she succeeded last night, when we finally saw her for the first time.

No doubt for years at a time, she wondered whether it would ever be worth the effort, but she kept on trying because it was the only way to find out.

Some people succeed faster than others, but no one succeeds using shortcuts: If the easy thing worked, you would have done it already.

It’s best to keep that in mind as you slog away learning what you’re trying to learn so you can get where you’re trying to go.

Turn On! syndrome

The market speaks. Sometimes it whispers, and sometimes it shouts with a bullhorn.

I titled the post heralding the return on Uncle Warren’s Attic “A long-awaited momentous announcement no one has been waiting for.” It seems I was prescient.

The download statistics for UWA 81-83 are such that I must conclude there are better uses of my time than reviving my once-legendary podcast, and so I am returning my Friday blog post to, well, blog posts.

I spent the first couple decades of my career generating audio, so I don’t plan to stop working in sound, but I will focus my attention in different directions.

There’s an infamous TV show that was called Turn On! that only ran once, in February 1969, and supposedly was canceled before that first episode was completed. So at least the new show lasted three times as long as Turn On! did.

Thanks to the literal handful of you who checked out the revived UWA, and keep an eye out for my next aural delights project.

Impasse

What if I just did the next thing that presented itself to be done and moved on? Pick up the dog toys, vacuum the dog hair off the carpet — what, again? — finally fill those empty shelves I put up in the living room last month, clear off the kitchen counter again.

In other words, instead of looking around and seeing everything that has to be done and saying, “Woe is me,” just take one of those tasks and do it, and then do the one next to it, and so on.

Just like my slow-moving writing projects — “Write the next sentence, even if it’s the only sentence you write today.” That advice has actually moved me forward a bit lately.

It’s funny — I tend to stall in the writing process after I figure out the ending.

“I already know this story,” my psyche says. “Tell me something new.”

“But I haven’t finished telling the story,” I protest.

“We both know how it ends, don’t we?” my psyche insists. “Ho hum. Move along.”

I wrestle my psyche to the ground, growling, “Now listen you. We know how it ends, but what happened before that? How did everyone get to the end?”

We lock eyes for a minute, maybe two minutes.

“Huh,” my psyche says at last. “How DID they get there? Maybe if …” and we had a nice conversation after that.