Joe: It was Christmas Eve and I was waiting in line for bagels.
As someone who grew up in New York, now living in Philly or close to
Philly, I'm admittedly a snob about the quality of the bagels I eat.
I am one of those people who would say it's in the water, like the
Hudson River had better water than the rest of the country.
That said, there is a bagel shop not five minutes from my house.
That makes the best bagels I've ever had outside of New York and New Jersey, and
they offer pre-orders for Christmas Eve.
It's become a bit of a tradition in our house to get those bagels
and do a Christmas Eve brunch.
They also have a select stock for people on a first come first serve
basis, and people who pre-order can also buy from this stock.
That many pre-orders combined with the select stock creates a long line
after all these bagels are superb.
So we waited and during that wait, there were some people who complained
about the weight, but no one left the line or canceled their order.
After all, if they wanted bagels.
If all they wanted was bagels, they could have gone to the grocery store just a few
doors down and buy bagels immediately.
But those are not even good bagels, and we wanted great bagels.
See, there's a dirty little secret that no one wants to hear these days.
Great things require time, and that's what I want to talk to you about today.
hey everybody, and welcome to How I Built It, the podcast that helps
busy solopreneurs and creators grow their business without
spending too much time on it.
I'm your host, Joe Casabona, and each week I bring you interviews and case studies
on how to build a better business through smarter processes, time management.
And effective content creation.
It's like getting free coaching calls from successful solopreneurs.
By the end of each episode, you'll have one to three takeaways you can
implement today to stop spending time in your business and more time on
your business or with your friends, your family reading, or however
you choose to spend your free time.
All right, so I am excited to talk to you about this topic.
Uh, if you are listening to this, you might've noticed it came out a day late.
Of course, after the first day, it doesn't matter.
But I think I wanna highlight this because it really lends to the
point I'm trying to make today.
I was away at a conference last week.
Instead of rushing to get something out for today, I wanted to spend
a little extra time on it, get the script right, get the editing
right, and put out something better.
So it required time, but it was worth the wait.
So what does this have to do with podcasting or content creation in general?
I think we see a lot of things today that.
Tell us we don't need to spend a a lot of time creating
content or doing something good.
So last week I was in Orlando for Pod Fest and whenever I'm in Orlando I have to
take advantage of going to Disney World.
My brother works there.
I, it's like my happy place.
And of course, I'm a huge Star Wars fan.
One of the routinely panned lines in the first Star Wars movie is
when Han Solo claims he did the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs.
To most people, it seemed like a Parsec was some in
universe way of measuring time.
A parsec is actually a real world way to measure large distances.
In other words, bragging that you did the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs
is like saying, I traveled from New York to California in less than 2000 miles.
You can't, it's physically impossible.
It, there are 2,500 ish miles.
Between New York and California, but the shortcut sounds impressive.
There are plenty of coaches, gurus, and influencers who are trying to sell
you the ability to do the impossible shortcut because it sounds impressive, and
therefore it's going to be an easier sell.
Let's look at an example of this.
Writing a book.
I was reviewing the many podcasts in my podcast feed when I came
across an episode about how to write a book in seven days with ai, and
there is a lot of content like this.
I came across another article on Medium about how to write
a book in three days with ai.
My immediate reaction to this content is always, yeah, it'll
be a book that no one will read.
My feelings about using AI to write just about anything are well documented.
I'm not a fan.
I've talked about it on LinkedIn and other social networks.
I've talked about it here.
I've debated my friend Alister McDermott on his podcast.
It's a hill I will die on.
I've even equated it to using a car to run a marathon.
The problem with the very premise of writing a book in a week at all is
that anyone who's written a book know that this is BSS to write a book.
You can't just say, I'm gonna write a bunch of words and put them together.
I.
You need a good premise, an outline.
You need to flesh out that outline more fully before you start writing.
You need lots of research to support your claims.
You need case studies, especially if it's a non-fiction.
This will help you kind of book.
You need personal stories to support your claims.
You can't just say, this is a thing that I believe, and then not back that up.
Podcast swaps will grow your podcast.
If I just say that, no one will believe me.
I need personal stories and I need case studies, and I need data.
If you're writing a fiction book, you need character development.
Heck, even if you're not writing a fiction book, you need
character development, right?
You need a a story arc where the reader is the hero.
After you have all that, then.
You can start writing each chapter.
You need an editor to review for grammar, clarity and accuracy.
Not to call out specific authors, but $100 million offers by Alex Hormoze.
Might have great advice and it's a nightmare to read.
There are so many grammatical errors and maybe it doesn't matter to most
people, but that immediately cut against his credibility for me.
This guy's teaching me how to make nine figures, and he couldn't be bothered to
hire an editor for a thousand bucks to read this book and proof it a little bit.
After that, you need a round of rewrites for the editing and
then another round of edits.
And that's just to get a manuscript that you can put into production.
And again, this is if you want people to read your book, and yeah, maybe
if you're famous like Hormoz or Joe Rogan or whoever, maybe you don't
need to do all this, but the vast majority of us are not those people.
We need to put actual effort into what we're doing.
It's taken me longer than a week to write articles.
In fact, I wrote an article for rss.com that was published last week that is
over 5,000 words, and it took me eight days from when I started to when I said
it was ready for review from my editor.
For my editor.
Took me eight days.
Anyone who is telling you a shortcut to writing a book has
never written a book worth reading.
You know what?
They've probably never written a book period.
And I know I've written five books.
You have people who are saying, I'm gonna write eight books this year.
They're not putting any real effort into writing their books.
They are claiming to do the Kessel run in less than 12 Parex.
So what's my point in all this?
Well, let's get into that after a break from our sponsors.
My point in all of this is you need to spend time on the important stuff.
All of these examples illustrate the same thing.
People are trying to take shortcuts for things that will and should take time.
They want the best bagels without waiting for them.
They want to get to a destination without traveling the distance.
They want to write a book without putting the proper effort to write the book.
And the key word there is effort.
These shortcuts make it seem like you can do great things with
minimal effort, but here's a nice cold bucket of water for you.
That's not going to happen.
People take the same approach with podcasting.
They wanna take shortcuts on research, the script, the edit, and
the content because it's easier.
But these are the things you need to spend the time on.
Listeners don't want to hear the raw interview.
That's a thing lazy podcasters tell themselves.
And if we look outside of podcasting, the same thing goes for writing
or videos or artwork or whatever.
The stuff that stands out is the stuff that took time.
There was a guy a few years ago who took a picture of himself.
Every day for a number of years, and he put that collage together.
It showed him growing up.
You can't rush that.
You can't take 365 pictures in one day and say, I got it.
You actually have to live each day and take a picture.
Walt Disney would spend years on movies, making sure the script
was right and the animation was right, and everything looked good.
But people don't want to do that these days.
They want to rush content out the door, and I think it's
because we've been trained by the internet by two day delivery.
Buy a whole bunch of other stuff that we can get things instantly
and we can do things instantly, but the best stuff still takes time.
And you can tell the difference.
You can tell the difference between a YouTube video where someone just
turned on a camera and talked and turned it off and uploaded it, versus
something like what M-K-B-H-D or Mr.
Beast does.
Where they put a ton of time and effort into their videos and it pays off spending
time, crafting the story, doing research to support your claims, finding the right
stories to drive your point home, or extract great answers from your guests.
Editing with care.
This is the stuff that turns content from.
Okay.
To great.
It's what separates a song like Love Story by Taylor Swift from a song like Friday by
whoever wrote that song for Rebecca Black.
But that doesn't mean you need to do everything manually.
You can still save time, you can still leverage the shortcuts.
After all, if you wanna go to California from New York.
You can walk, drive, or fly.
You still have to do the full distance, but each of those will get you
there in different amounts of time.
Save time in other parts of your process.
Use AI instead of actually writing the content to help you come up with
ideas that you may not have thought of.
Again, don't use AI to write the script or the questions.
Don't skimp on guest research.
Instead, make booking and scheduling easier.
That way you send your guest one link and you can spend the rest of
that back and forth time on research.
Don't release the raw interview.
Use DSS script to edit through text, or even better.
Hire an editor, use social media software, leverage AI to create the initial social
media assets for sharing tools like Cast Magic will at least pinpoint some areas
that you could highlight even if you don't use exactly what they give you.
You have 10 timestamped quotes to use.
Maybe there was something better that.
The AI prompts you to think about.
If you want to create a great podcast or YouTube video or article or book,
you need to spend time on the tasks worth spending time on, the ones that
will lead you to create great content.
If you wanna write a book, you need to spend weeks, likely months crafting
something that's worth reading.
That is the only way it will be great.
After all.
If AI can write a book for you, what's the benefit of hiring you over ai?
If all you're doing is having a raw conversation, what's the benefit
of listening to your podcast over the thousands of other podcasts?
All you're doing is turning the camera on talking at it for a
while and uploading it to YouTube.
What's the benefit of watching your video over someone else's video?
These are the things that you need to consider.
Yes, 80% is good enough most of the time, but you make standout content.
You make standout anything when you get it to 100%.
Cheating by using AI or some other tool is never going to
get you to a hundred percent.
Thanks so much for listening to this podcast.
I hope you enjoyed it.
If you do, let me know.
I wanna do more solo episodes this year because I want to create great
content and writing out the script and allowing me to tell a better story.
Helps me do that.
And the shortcut there is that I'm not scripting with another guest or doing
raw interviews with guests and then creating documentary style episodes.
That's something that I can't do right now, so I'm taking the shortcut I need
to take to create great content, and I'd love to hear what you think about that.
Now all of these thoughts kind of came to me, uh, over the time
between Christmas Eve and last week when I was at the conference.
This was like a, this, uh, topic was a long time brewing for me
and in the Pro show for members.
I do want to talk a little bit about my conference going process and some
things I've been thinking about there.
I.
So if you do want to hear that as well as some more things I'm trying, uh,
a, a conference focus mode and how I'm finding inspiration, you can become a
member over@howibuilt.it slash join.
Uh, if you're listening right in Apple Podcasts, you can
subscribe right in Apple Podcasts.
It's very easy.
For you to do that, you'll get ad free extended episodes and bonus episodes
as well as a weekly newsletter.
So again, that's over at How I Built Diet slash Join.
Today I'll be talking about going to conferences, my plan, uh, my
approach, and how I still managed to find some inspiration there.
But that's it for this episode.
Thanks so much for listening.
I really appreciate it.
There will be a written to be read article of what you heard
today over@podcastworkflows.com.
I'll link that in the description, but thank you, thank you, thank you.
Thanks to our sponsors and until next time, get out there and build something.