Patterns of learning

Published October 17, 2024

I cre­ate a week­ly pod­cast for our lit­tle local news­pa­per — basi­cal­ly giv­ing short sum­maries of the news. The paper asked for it, and I agreed even though I’ve only exper­i­ment­ed with pod­casts. So I jumped into learn­ing how to do it right.

There is a pat­tern to how I get into new projects, and it appeared here, for sure.

Step 1: Learn the basics, try it out, and real­ize it’s not that hard; the first ver­sion turned out well.

Step 2: Realize it’s actu­al­ly pret­ty bad because there are at least three or four things I should have done. (In the case of pod­cast­ing, that involved get­ting a bet­ter mic, doing a bet­ter job mak­ing reduc­ing room echo, using a pop fil­ter, adding qui­et back­ground music, and a few oth­er bits.)

Step 2a: Make the pod­cast with these improve­ments and real­ize it’s much bet­ter. Get kudos from edi­tors. Much pleased.

Step 3: Think “I bet I could do even bet­ter!” Go down rab­bit hole and real­ize there are bet­ter mics, bet­ter pop fil­ters, more I could do with audio pro­duc­tion, and oth­er ways pro­fes­sion­als recommend.

Step 4: Feel overwhelmed.

Step 5: Realize that “experts” are often peo­ple who think any­thing but per­fec­tion is awful. My equip­ment is fine. My set­tings are fine. My space is fine. I’m over­think­ing, and I’m let­ting per­fec­tion be the ene­my of the great. Sure, 2% of lis­ten­ers might find a lot of prob­lems, but every nor­mal per­son is gonna say, “Yeah, that sound­ed great. What’re you wor­ried about?”

Can I improve? Absolutely. But — as with every­thing else, try­ing to fol­low every bit of advice just leads to frus­tra­tion. Lesson: Realize when you’ve got some­thing you’re hap­py with, then cut waaaaay back on the effort to gain incre­men­tal improve­ment and move on with your life.