A (0:00)

Good morning. I suppose it's the morning. Good morning, early afternoon, and welcome to Avio's Journey and Vivo's Journey podcast. It's wonderful to be coming to you guys today. Listen, we did. I did a video earlier today for Coffee time, and, you know, I called it fail fast, fail often. And, you know, that's a. I'm trying to think where that quote comes from. I'm not sure whether it's Drucker or whoever it is, but it's a great quote, and I want to talk to it today because I think it really does go to the core of getting success quickly or faster than we would playing it safe, if you will, with our voice, our voiceover business. Okay? So we're gonna. We're gonna dive into this and maybe how to do this and what I'm even talking about, you know, because no one wants to fail. I mean, failing. You know, I mean, we've been kind of taught our whole lives failing is bad. We don't want to fail. Right. So we're gonna talk about that today and see how we can use that to our advantage. Don't forget, we're also, you know, finishing up the VO's Journey Lead Academy special, as well as a 30% off of all of the courses. And, of course, the mentorship program is open and at a discount. So if you are looking to be mentored one on one basis, on a weekly basis and grow your business, take it to the next level. Check us out on Avivo's Journey.com and, you know, I'm excited to hopefully work with you. Okay, so let's go ahead and dive into this. I think that a lot of times when we are kicking off our voiceover business, business, any business in general, or we're trying to ramp things up, we're always looking for the silver bullet. The answer. The what? You know, what is the right path to take? You know, what is the correct way to do something? What is exactly, you know, what is it that people are looking for so they will buy from me? What do I have to do? What is the least amount I have to do? I think that's a natural thing, you know, to search out, to be, especially with the crazy schedules that we have to be more efficient. But I think, again, most of us are always looking for that silver bullet, that one thing that's going to work. And, you know, a lot of times by doing that, I believe we skip over a big opportunity to get ourselves out there and fail. So, I know this sounds crazy and counterintuitive But I want to talk about, you know, what, what, what it is I'm actually saying when I say fail. Sometimes I think a lot of the words that we use as a society now, we often use them. I mean, look at the way younger people speak these days with different, you know, and when we were young, the way we spoke, we use words in ways, right, that have multiple meanings, not just the hard meaning that they have, right? They. They can mean a variety of things. And I think in this sense, the word fail and fail fast, fail, often the idea here is because failing has that connotation that we've made a mistake, we've done something wrong, we've paid the price for it by not having a good outcome or not have the desired outcome. However, I think if we take the fail idea away and we say something, remember, fail fast, fail often. I love it. It's a catchy phrase and it's going to make sense here in a second. But if we kind of take that away and go back to what I just said, which was, you know what I mean, Attempting something and not producing the desired outcome, okay. However, if you think of what we're trying to accomplish in a different way, like we're trying to reach a certain goal of, in our case, getting hired to do a voiceover job. Okay? Well, if we are trying things to get hired, right? Not getting hired is a part of that outcome, right? Because we're going to have to try a variety of things that will, for all intents purposes, not work until we find the things that do work. We know that there are so many variables when it comes to marketing and it comes to advertising and selling, of all the things that we go through to try to find work, whether you are trying to reach out to people, finding the right people, finding the people who make the decisions to hire a voiceover artist, but then it's the time, timing is the time, right? Are they actually looking to hire someone at that exact moment? You have all these things, and then on top of that, did those people then end up hearing you? Did you actually fit the mold that they're looking for? Did they have a bad day and you just didn't strike them as someone they want to work with that day? There's so many variables and what we do, right. That it becomes one of those things where we have to use statistics, numbers, attempts, right? To have the desired outcome, to get the voiceover work. So. And of course, this is voiceover. I mean, this is any business, right? And you have to continue to try and Attempt, whether it is auditioning. I mean, let's use auditioning because I think auditioning is probably one of the easiest and clearest paths to understanding this fail fast, fail often thing with an audition. It's very simple because we know that the people who are putting up the audition, they are the right, they are the people hiring the voice actor. They are actively at that moment looking for a voice actor, right? And they are open to considering you. Okay? So right there you've, you solved a great deal of challenges when you're auditioning for something, okay? Because all those other things are challenges, right? Is finding the right person that's, you know, hiring a voice actor or looking for voice actors. Then, you know, find a person who is actively searching for a voice actor through an audition process, right? And you know that you have that chance at that given time to do it. So you've gotten to this place, right, where you're in the audition. And I see this a lot. I think people will do a couple of auditions, maybe one or two or three, and they, and they put their heart and soul into it. I mean, they take, they get an audition. It takes them 30 minutes, 45 minutes, an hour to do a minute or two auditions. Especially even for a 30 second commercial possibly, or a book or whatever they're doing auditioning for. I've seen people take a long time to, like I said, 30 minutes, 40 minutes, an hour. And after an audition or two or three, you're exhausted and you've put all this effort, you've put all this time into the performance, into the editing, into the mixing and mastering and submitting. You've crafted a amazing little message to the hiring casting director or whoever is hiring from the audition. And you sent that off and you wait and the inevitable happens. Nothing. Not only nothing, but you don't even hear back from the people who put the audition out. You get zero feedback. You get nothing. And at this point, we're faced with a decision, right? We're faced with a decision. The decision is, do we do another couple of auditions or do we stop and reflect and see what went wrong? Why didn't we get any sort of feedback? And then when that happens, the inevitable happens. The little imposters on our shoulders pop out. You're an imposter, right? You shouldn't be doing this. You're no good at this. I mean, they didn't even get back to you. You suck so bad. You know, you need to rethink what you're doing. Don't, you know, don't do that again, right? We get, you know, they. That website sucks. It's no good. You were no good. The people there are no good. Everyone's no good. You get, you know, it spirals quickly because so much of what we do here we are like, it feels as if we're throwing, you know, pebbles into an ocean, hoping, right, that it drops into this little bucket that we can't even see. We know it's out there in the ocean, but we can't really see it. I don't know if that's a good analogy or not. But. But. But the idea, it feels like that sometimes you're just putting stuff out there. You're just doing audition. We're just talking about auditions at this moment because we're not even getting to the endless oceans of social media and email marketing and, oh, my gosh, and your website, I mean, that's a whole nother thing, right? We're talking about just, you know, the audition process itself. So if I was to say, just to keep with that simple analogy, right. If I knew, right. That there was a bucket out there, so we know people are hiring. I knew there was a bucket out there in the ocean. And the more pebbles I threw out there, I knew eventually, with the more pebbles I throw, I have a lot better chance of getting work. But I'm going to fail a bunch. I mean, I'm going to miss it a lot. Okay. But the more I throw out there, the more likely I'm going to get my pebble into the bucket. Again, crazy analogy, but it seems to be kind of working a little bit. But same thing with audition auditions, right? We're just in time. Auditions. The. The more that you get out there, the more that. And using, again, this. This catchy phrase, this idea that, you know, it's okay to fail, right? You know what they say about Barry Bonds, you know, in the hall of Fame? Get to the hall of fame. All you have. Yeah. All you have to do is strike out 7 out of 10 times. I think that's Barry Bonds. But the whole point. Right, right. Because if you strike out seven times, you're going to hit three home runs. But you still struck out seven out of 10 times. But those three times that you didn't strike out, you knocked it out of the part in that case, literally. But for us, figuratively. But it's the truth, right? You know, I mean, if you audition 100 times and that one job you get could be a client that ends up working with you for the rest of your life, it could Be you don't know. And the idea, then again, is that what was that worth? Was it worth those hundred auditions to possibly have someone who works with you for years, even if it's not the rest of your life, even if it's a couple of jobs where they come back to you because they liked your work so much? Yes, of course. But you won't know that unless you continue to put yourself out there over and over and over again. Now, I want to say that this isn't easy. I think we create phrases like this, fail, fast, fail often we create this strike out 7 out of 10 times we say these things so that we can put complex ideas in simplistic form to help our brains through the mess that it causes. And I think a lot of reasons why it's a mess is because of school. I really do. And what I mean by that is, I think when we think about it, when we were younger, school was like all the time, you study, you take a test, you either pass or fail, you pass or fail. And once you fail, it's done, right, you failed it, you lost, you lose, you got a bad grade. Right. You know, I think as time has gone on, they've, you know, like my kids and stuff. And as, you know, if you have children. And so, I mean, education's changed somewhat in the sense that there's a lot more remediation. A lot of teachers try to give, you know, ways for you to make it up, but it's still the same sort of programming. You take a test, you pass, you fail, you pass or you fail. That's it. There's not a lot out there where, you know, hey, we're giving you an opportunity. You're here to try something, you try it, you fail, no problem. This is, let's do it again, do it again, do it again, do it again, do it again, do it again. Here's some new information. Try it again, here's some new information. Try it again, try it again, try it again, try it again. We don't do that now. There's reasons for that. I mean, as an educator, we have to continue to move forward. I mean, I taught for many years. It's, you know, it's. But, but the point I'm trying to make though is still, if you think about it, we were programmed to think like that. So it's counterintuitive to our program to say, programming to say, oh, I need to keep failing. I need to keep putting stuff out there and make it and not. And not getting the desired outcome. I need to keep doing it. Like we are hardwired from training throughout. I mean, think about how long we go to school and how long that process, especially if you go to college and then you, you know, you. I mean, so, you know, right. You know, so I have my masters. So, like that, you know, I mean, gosh. I mean, you know, just. Even. Even just going from, you know, kindergarten to 12th grade, right? I mean, you're talking 13 years of programming, right? Then you go to college, it's another four years. You get your masters, it's another couple years. I mean, it happened. You get your doctorate, that's another four to six years. Two years. It depends what doctorate you're getting. Could be two years. But the point is, is that, you know, you're really programmed to think failing is wrong. So we avoided at all costs. I think the problem with that in business is that it is one of the only ways to figure out what will actually work or what is working. And here's the thing, you have to also figure out what's working for you, because what you do is not going to be the same as me. I've. I've learned that. Learned at least that much. There are certain things that are universal. Okay. And I think that, that because, you know, I've been doing this for. For around eight years now. Voice, just voiceover, right. And, you know, running the business, running my business. I've. I've had, like I said, the. The blessing, I call it, of working with so many voice actors and helping them grow their business. And I've had a lot of voice actors have a lot of success, but each one of them, through kind of proven practices of where to go, what to do, talking about this right now kind of thing that never quit attitude, never give up attitude, fail fast, fail often type of attitude. Each one of their paths was slightly different, though. Some gathered, gained success through audiobooks, some gained success through commercial work. Some gain success through a variety of different ways. But the thing is that it still will be a path that you have to find. And there are parameters that you can find it in, but it's still going to be your path. So because it's your path, you can't take what everyone like this, like, God, Joe's being so successful. What am I doing wrong? Okay, well, I mean, great for Joe. I mean, Joe's having great success. That's great. And we should be happy for Joe. I mean, really, you know, we should be happy for the people who are succeeding. And a lot of times that challenges us because no matter what we try to do, I think we are also, as human beings, we think about ourselves. And that's not selfish. It's just true. I don't mean we think about ourselves in a bad way. Like, you know, I'm more important than everyone else. No, I mean, we think about ourselves as, like, we need to push ourselves forward. This is our business. This is our time. This is what we're doing. You know what I mean? Of course we're thinking about ourselves. We think about success in the light of that person succeeding. And I'm not. But this idea today about failing fast, failing often, putting yourself out there as much as you can, throwing as many of those pebbles out there, auditioning as much as you can, and you might hate auditioning. I know I don't enjoy it very much. Okay. You know, and some people will say, learn to love it. Learn to do this and that. I mean, you know, I don't subscribe to that. I mean, I do a lot of things I don't love. I love what they produce, but I don't love doing them in order, you know, in order to get there. But I know that they. I need to do them. I mean, we probably can think of a million things that we. We know that we don't like to do, but we like what it produces. All right. So anyways, I want to tackle one more part to this whole thing, and that is the challenge of the unknown. And so what do I mean by that? So, I mean, like, I, you know, and on this channel, I talk a lot about productivity, talk a lot about, you know, what we're talking about today, and motivation. Because I've learned that, for example, VO's Journey, Lead Academy, we teach so much of what you can do, a path that works and a variety of ways within that path that you can choose and that you can choose your path. And we've proven it over and over again with a lot of different voice actors that it works. However, it still is confusing individually because all of our paths, the way we look at the world, the way we look at everything, is different because they come from through the lens of our eyes. What am I saying? I'm saying that there will be a lot of times that you are like, Anthony, I'd love to fail often and fail fast. I just don't know what to fail on. I don't know. I don't know what the next exact step is. So hold on to that, because I think that's really important, too. A lot of times people don't know what the next step is. But I will challenge you on this. I often think that the majority of us, we do know what the next step is. Our brains tell us we don't want to do the next step because the next step could be we have to learn something. We have to rethink, restructure, reshape the way we're doing something. Let's say, perfect case in point here we were talking about auditioning 30 minutes, 40 minutes, an hour. So let's say you do an audition and it takes you 30 minutes, right, to get the audition. Do it, edit it, rework it, submit it. 30 minutes. Well, clearly, if you've got two hours that you can spare, all right, you probably will get three auditions in, and if you're lucky, that you'll only take you 30 minutes to get set up and all that other stuff. So you could do three auditions in an hour and a half. Plus, that's an hour and a half of straight concentration. And that's hard in itself. But if you start to play that out right, let's say you have three, four, five days a week. Let's say you have five days a week, and you can spend. You're getting an hour and a half. So you're getting 15 auditions in a week. So a month, you're getting 60 audition, 15, 30. You're getting 60 auditions in a month. That's not enough. It's just not okay. Some people, you might see somebody be like, hey, every four auditions, I get a job. I mean, that's wonderful. I mean, that's fantastic. That's not normal. It's so far outside the range of normal for anybody, for stars, for anyone. I mean, that's just not normal, right? It takes a lot of auditions. Remember talking about the ocean? It takes a lot of pebbles to find that bucket underneath the water. You got to throw a lot. So what is What. What am I saying here, then? So I'm saying that you have to. You have to be like, okay, well, I have to be faster, right? Somehow I have to be faster. So go back into the fail fast, fail often. I would rather you take 7 minutes, 5, 7, 10 minutes max, to do an audition and send it and submit it, whether you feel like it's the perfect audition. You've done everything right. Everything was perfect. And not. And why? Because this is not just. It's not only just about you winning that particular audition. It's about you getting better at this. It's about you getting faster, more concise. It's about you making Acting decisions faster. All right. It's about you being able to perform as voice actors. We have to. We have. We. I mean, our set of skills is very unique, I think, because our performance, you know, is not the same as a stage actor's performance or. Or a person on the. On tv. Because our performance is not. Does not get. We do not get months to train. We do not get, you know, weeks for one with one script or memorize our lines. We don't get that time. We get a few seconds. And we have got to perform immediately on the spot and make it believable, make it interesting. Okay? And so, I mean, it is a different style of acting, even though at the heart of acting, acting is all the same. We've talked about that on this channel, but it's still a unique subsection of it, right? Because it's got to be. That's why I love archetypes. But anyways, the point here is that we need to do it faster. You need to get more auditions in. You've got to. So it's got to be done faster. So you have to fail more. And you're going to inevitably be like, oh, I just don't like the way it sounds. I've got to do more. I didn't like my performance. I didn't like. You're absolutely right about all those things. They might be. Your performance might be crappy. They might not like the way you sound. There might be plosis and all this stuff. And they'd be like, but, Anthony, I shouldn't be submitting work that isn't crap good. It should be good. Yes, it should be good. But that's the whole point of this. And that's why you have to practice at this to get faster and better so that you don't have all these things. So you do a performance, you do one or two, three reads, record it all in the same file. You hit a button, the button does the editing, mixing for you. You're done. Name the file, upload it, move on to the next one. It should be that fast. It should not be. I did something, I go back. I did something, I go back, I do something, I go back. And then you go. Then it takes you 20 minutes to 30 minutes to go through each line of your wav file and remove every breath, every mouth noise. You didn't like the way that sounds. There's something weird over there. We've got to get past all of that. All that has to go faster. So this idea, again, going back to fail fast, fail often. I want you to really adopt this as something I need to put myself out there faster. Right. And failing. Think of failing as just the necessary component of success. Failing is the other linchpin of success. If success was here, all right, and failure was here, and the only way, like. And there's only, like, this. This. This ball of cheese is half. And this ball of cheese is half. And failure and success. And the only way we're going to make it work is if there are a hole. They've got to come together. There's got to be failure without one. You can't think of it that way. That's the simplest way, I think. You think about it, and then I'll shut up. You can't have one without the other. Because if there was no failure, there would be no success, which means avoiding failure means you're avoiding success and vice versa, Right? I mean, you've got to have both, which means that if you court one, you're going to court the other. But if you don't court one, the other one. She ain't gonna dance with you. She's not gonna dance. She's gonna go find someone else. Lord knows I. My silly analogies. Let's end it on that one. I like that one. Listen, thank you so much for watching and listening to Aveo, Journey and moi. I hope you guys have a wonderful weekend. Check out. Don't forget Avivo's Journey Elite Academy. Like I said in the beginning, we're still having our special. It's been amazing. We have a lot of new members in our academy, and it's such a joy. We had an incredible script workout last night. Just amazing talent and working together, giving constructive feedback to those voice actors and helping them grow in performance and marketing and everything. So we'd love to have you over there. Have a wonderful weekend. I'll talk to you soon. Everybody, remember, fail fast, fail often. Bye. Good night. Oh, good night. Good night. Good night.