Great Things Require Time
It was Christmas Eve, and I was waiting in line for bagels.
As someone who grew up in New York now living close to Philly, I’m admittedly a snob about the quality of the bagels I eat. But there’s a bagel shop not 5 minutes from my house that makes the best bagels I’ve ever had outside of NY/NJ.
And they offer preorders 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. People who preorder can buy from this stock. The many preorders 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 wait1.
But no one left the line or cancelled their order. After all, if all they wanted was bagels, they could have gone to the grocery store 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 they’re worth the wait.
What does this have to do with podcasting? Or content creation in general?
Doing the Kessel Run in less than 12 Parsecs
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. But a parsec is actually a real-world way to measure large distances.
In other words, bragging you did the Kessel Run is less than 12 parsecs is like saying, “I traveled from New York to California in less than 2,000 miles.”
You can’t. It’s physically impossible. 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.
Example: Writing a Book
I was reviewing the many podcasts in my podcast feed and I came across an episode about how to write a book in 7 days with AI.
There is lots of content like this. Here’s one claiming to write a book with AI in 3 days.
My immediate reaction was, “Yeah — that no one will read.”
My feelings about “using” AI to write just about anything are well-recorded. I’m not a fan. I’ve even equated it to using a car to run a marathon.
The problem with the very premise of writing a book in at week at all is that anyone who’s written a book knows this is bullshit. To write a book, you need:
- A good premise
- An outline
- To flesh out that outline more fully
- Lots of research to support your claims
- Case studies (if it’s a non-fiction, “this will help” you book)
- Personal stories to support your claims
- Character development (especially if it’s fiction)
- To write each chapter
- An editor to review for grammar, clarity, and accuracy
- A round of rewrites
- Another round of edits
…and that’s just to get a manuscript that you can put into production.
It’s taken me longer to write articles. Anyone who is telling you a shortcut to writing a book has never written a book worth reading period. And I know. I’ve written 5 books.
They are claiming to do the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs.
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 in the proper effort to write the book.
And the key word there: 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 want to take shortcuts on the research, the script, the edit, and the content because it’s easier.
Those are the things you need to spend time on. Listeners don’t just want to hear the raw interview. That’s a thing lazy podcasters tell themselves.
Spending time crafting the story, doing research to support your claims or extract great answers from your guests, editing it with care. This is the stuff that turns content from “OK” to “great.” It’s what separates Love Story from Friday.
Where do You Save Time, Then?
That doesn’t mean you need to do everything manually — you can still leverage shortcuts.
After all, if you want to go to California from New York, you can walk, drive, or fly. Which one sounds best?
Save time in other parts of your process. Use AI to help come up with ideas that you may not have thought of, but don’t outsource the script writing or questions.
Don’t skimp on guest research. Instead, make booking and scheduling easier. Don’t release the raw interview. Use Descript 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.
If you want to create a great podcast, you need to spend time on the tasks worth spending time on — the ones that will lead to you creating great content.
If you want to write a book, you need to spend weeks, likely months, crafting something that’s worth reading.
That’s 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?
- One of my least favorite things to hear from impatient people is, “You know what they should do?” As if you, a person who’s in a rush came up with the solution to a problem that they couldn’t work out after doing this for years. ↩
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