In episode #126 of The Writing Coach podcast, I discuss the concept of “waiting for perfect” in podcasting, writing, and life. During the episode, you’ll discover:
- What iMacs, Roombas, and audio interfaces have to do with writing
- The problem with waiting for perfect to come find you
- Why resiliency is both a good AND bad trait
- The challenge of making big purchases
- How life is about solving one program after another
- Why the punk rock DIY mentality is hugely helpful
- And much more!
Listen to the full episode now or read the transcript below.
The Writing Coach Episode #126 Show Notes
Get Kevin’s FREE book: NOVEL ADVICE: MOTIVATION, INSPIRATION, AND CREATIVE WRITING TIPS FOR ASPIRING AUTHORS.
The Writing Coach Episode #126 Transcript
Hello beloved listeners, and welcome back to The Writing Coach podcast. It is your host, as always, Writing coach Kevin T. Johns here.
Can you hear it? Can you hear the sultry sounds of this awesome microphone and sound interface I am currently using? All right. The, why am I <laugh> why am I getting horny about my microphone here? All right. Well, that is actually what we’re gonna talk about on today’s call . . . on today’s call? I’m so used to my coaching calls. On today’s podcast episode. All right. Here’s the deal. If you have listened to the last few episodes of the podcast, you might, or you might not have noticed the sound quality was not the best. It did not sound beautiful, radio quality or whatever, you know, better than radio quality podcast, quality. Awesome sound. The type of sound that you’re hearing right now, and there’s a little story behind that. And what it is that over the last six months, my computer has been slowly dying.
And for someone who works online all day long, that’s a pretty big deal at what happened was it was just getting slower and slower. And on a lot of my coaching calls, what we do is we share the screen. So my clients send me their material and I review it. I spend a couple of hours before each coaching call going over the material, editing it, using track changes, adding comments, and eventually we meet. And then I use the share screen feature in zoom, and we look at the material together, but increasingly any time I try to do anything during a zoom call, the computer was freezing up and it was taking forever to share the screen, you know, kind of a vital component of what I do with my clients. And then in addition, I was on a windows computer, and I started getting the blue screen of death.
I don’t know if you know about the blue screen of death, but what it is every once in a while, a PC, the screen will just instantly go blue and shut down within like five seconds. It’s insane. It, they have like a little QR code and they’re like, if you want to know what happened, scan this, but it’s like that co code is gone. Like the only chance you could possibly have is maybe do a screen capture in like the seconds before it’s gone. But anyway my computer was old. It was at a point where it was taking a good 10, 15 minutes to boot up. So I’d be in the middle of a coaching call. Suddenly I get the blue screen of death and I’d have to text my client and say, Hey, it’s going to be 15 minutes before my computer’s back up and running again, horrible, horrible stuff.
But this is the thing humans <laugh> can adjust to anything we’re so resilient. And that’s a great, great feature. Most of the time resiliency is amazing, but also I, what it can also do is you can kind of get used to horrible circumstances. I think sometimes this is how people get stuck in bad relationships. My computer was basically not doing what I needed it to do anymore. And I was just kind of like, well, I guess this is my life now. <Laugh>, you know, I, so finally it reached to a point where it was actually genuine impacting my business. I was like, this is ridiculous. I got to bite the bullet, go buy a new computer. So I met with some of my clients on a call and across the board, they were all saying, just go buy a Mac, just go buy a Mac. And like, anyone else who’s used APC windows, their whole life.
It was intimidating someone anyway, but I I’ve been using an iPhone for years. And I thought, you know what? Let’s just do this. Let’s go buy an iMac to use for business for my job. And so I did it. I went out, I went to the apple store, I bought the iMac and I got to tell you folks, I absolutely love it in the past. What I do with my coaching calls is I work with my clients and we record the call. And then we end the zoom call and my computer processes, the video and the audio from that call. And I send the audio to my clients because a lot of the time we’re brainstorming or perhaps I’m going over some somewhat complicated material that they might want to take a look at. And so I send them those audio files, but the thing was on my computer.
When I finished a zoom call, it would take about 45 minutes to process the video in the audio. And so that was 45 minutes. I could not use my main computer. That was huge chunks of the day where my computer was just done. Couldn’t do anything else. It was processing the audio in the video. I get the Zac. It literally takes less than five minutes to process the audio and video. After these calls like 40 minutes quicker than the windows I was using. So I got to tell you, I couldn’t be happier with this computer. I’m not some crazy Mac person. As I said, this is my first Mac, but as someone whose livelihood depends on a computer working properly, I’m blown away by how much quicker, smoother, better. Everything is about this computer than my old thing that was following the pieces. Big purchases are, are difficult, really difficult.
I work with the federal government here in Canada and my home was about 45 minutes from the office that I needed to go to, to do my government work. And so in December of 2020, I bought a new car. I bought this car to get to the office, to do my government work. No, what did I say? 2020? No, December, 2019. Okay. Difference. Right. So here’s what happened? I don’t know anything about cars. I’m terrible at math. I just went and bought a car and I’m sure I got ripped off. It cost a lot, but I needed to get to the office. Well guess what? Two, three months after I buy this vehicle, the pandemic happens and I never have to go to the government office again. So there’s an example of a super expensive purchase that I regret. Every time I look at that stupid car, I’m like, Ugh.
If I had just, if the other car had lasted three more months, I never would’ve bought this thing. So anyway, when you buy something big and expensive, it’s scary. And sometimes it sucks and you know, you regret it, but this computer, I do not regret the other big expensive thing I bought was a Roomba. I got a Roomba and I just love it so much. I highly, this is a writing podcast, and yet we’re talking about IMAX and Roombas. I know, I know we’re going to get around. You know, there’s a point to all of this. I, I, I’ve got, Kevin’s got a point for you guys, hang with me here. So here’s the deal. I loaded up this new computer everything’s working great, except the microphone I use needs Phantom power, which means I need an audio interface to go from my mic to this audio interface.
And then into a computer. It’s not a USB mic. I can’t just plug it into a microphone. So I plug it into the new computer and I find out it’s not working. And I’m like, oh, I, I probably need to update the drivers. So I look up the drivers on my audio interface. They haven’t been updated in like six years. <Laugh>, there’s no way I’m going to get this thing working on the iMac. And so this is the type of thing that as writers, as artists, such, just as people we face all the time, we just, we run into a problem, right? Like that’s life, life is kind of solving one problem after another. And I, and I mean, it wasn’t even immediately apparent to me that the drivers were the problems, but, you know, with some research, with some YouTubeing, with some Googling, I, I kind of figure out what was going on and with a little more YouTubeing and a little more Googling, I found a decent replacement, a newer audio interface that I could purchase, and that would work on my new iMac.
And so I bought it and, you know, I didn’t even think about going to a store and buying it. I am so still in pandemic mode, I was just like, okay, you know, I got to go to Amazon to buy it. That’s my first instinct. So I went, I bought it and they were like, it’s going to arrive in three weeks. I was like, okay, fine, whatever. All right. And so that is what we’re getting to on the topic from this episode today, it was eight minutes to get to it, but here it is folks, I could have not recorded for four weeks while I waited for this audio mixer to arrive this audio interface. But I had content that I wanted to get out there. I had some thoughts on writing and some things I wanted to podcast about. And so what I did was I got out my old nine year old USB microphone.
I plugged it in and I recorded some podcasts and they didn’t sound great. The last few podcasts, I wasn’t thrilled with the audio quality. Some people probably noticed it. Some people might have even been, it was their first episode of my show ever. And they listened to it and they said, oh, this show sounds like crap. And they never listened again. But I, I kind of hope that the content that I shared over the last few episodes is more useful than the, you know, I hope that information is more memorable than the quality of the audio in which it was shared. I mean, I come from a punk rock background. I grew up playing in punk rock bands, my entire life in punk rock <laugh> we’re not so interested in perfect fidelity of sound. You know, punk rock is kind of a rejection of highly produced, slick, good sounding audio.
We kind of want to sound bad and aggressive and different. And so the fact that I put out some podcast episodes with not the best audio, it doesn’t really bother me. I grew up saying, Hey, we barely know how to play our instruments. The sound we’re using is terrible, but we have a message and we’re having fun and we have passion. So let’s just go out and do this thing. And every day I am so thankful for my punk rock upbringing every day in life. And in art, the punk rock DIY mentality serves me so well because so often I see writers waiting for the perfect moment to create. They’re waiting for inspiration, that lightning bolt that’s going to come out of the sky and inspire them to write a work of genius or those people who are waiting for their lives to perfectly line up.
Oh, that perfect day where you know the job and family and kids sports, and you know, every other responsibility, all lines happen. So everyone’s just there to support you so that you can write. It never happens. It never happens. If you are going to wait for the perfect circumstances to create your art, you’re never going to create anything. If I had been waiting for perfect audio quality for these last few episodes, I wouldn’t have recorded anything. You can’t sit around waiting for life to be perfect because life constantly throws things at you, even when you think it won’t. I, I see so many people. They’re like, well, I’ll finally write my book. When I retire. You know, my kids will be out of my, the house. My day job will be done. I’ll be living off my pension. Things will finally be perfect. Well, guess what happens when you retire, you have grandkids, your kids need help raising their kids.
You like to go on trips. You want to see the world. Now that you’re retired you’re part of clubs, or you do volunteer work, or maybe the industry that you worked in your whole life is now hiring you back as a consultant. There’s so much that happens after you retire just as much as happens before you retire. So you can’t wait your entire life to create. There’s always going to be things going on. Stop waiting to retire, to live your dreams. Stop waiting for everything to be perfect in order for you to create. I didn’t want to wait until I had perfect audio to make some podcast episodes. So I didn’t. And I hope that you enjoyed them. I’m pretty confident somebody out there did. You don’t have to wait for the perfect moment to write your book. Life is not perfect. Life is imperfect, but so is art.
There is no perfect moment other than what you see on a movie screen or in a book, life is flawed. It’s always going to be different. And that’s what makes it interesting, going all the way back to the changing of the seasons. Even just when you’re getting used to winter, spring comes around the corner and everything changes again. There’s no perfect time when the universe is going to align and you are going to be able to do the things that you want to do. Life is short. Life is busy. Take control of your dreams and do the writing that matters to you before it’s too late.
So I welcome you back to the podcast with hopefully higher audio. This week hit that subscribe button and head on over to my website. It is www.kevintjohns.com. I have a free book for you waiting for you there. I have a book called novel advice, motivation, inspiration, and creative writing tips for aspiring authors. Sign up to get that book, just drop your email address into the pop-up, or click the free book tab at the top. And you will get a copy of that book for free, and it will provide you with some inspiration and some writing tips to get you where you want to go tips similar to the types of things we talked about on the podcast today. All right. That is it. For this episode, I will see you on the next excellent audio quality episode of The Writing Coach.
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