0083: The Difference Between “Easy” And “Straightforward”

Raw transcript:

so variation on a theme today in another
episode i talked about the difference
between
something being difficult or seemingly
insurmountable and being
impossible and how to change that how to
reframe that today
i want to talk about the difference
between two other phrases that are in
that same kind of
genre
uh confusing the phrase it’s easy
with the phrase
it’s
straightforward
but can take a lot of time let me let me
explain i’ll do that in this episode of
the vo heroes podcast
[Music]
so i’m sure you’ve asked questions of
people before when you’re looking for
guidance or you’re looking to
learn a new process or get better at a
process uh
learn what the best products are for
something uh you know our mics our
cameras our lights etc um
and you may have been presented with the
answer of
oh yeah yeah just get this it’s easy
or just do this it’s it’s a snap
or uh well for me it you know once i
figured this out everything fell into
place
you know that can really
take you on a bit of a of a of an
anxiety trip because it’s not easy for
you right now even if you figure things
out and know what to do it’s still not
easy
and that is often because
we equate easy with a short time period
like a moment
or
a few minutes or a couple of hours or a
day or whatever when in fact something
that is easy
but takes a lot of time
or takes a lot of
individual steps
doesn’t seem to be so easy
and i’m mentioning this mostly because
we’re all very generous people for the
most part uh i think that our community
of actors and voice talent artists in
general
tend to be
very generous to one another we don’t
tend to hoard
uh knowledge to hoard experience we tend
to be very sharing people
and once we’ve been through something
and we’ve experienced it maybe we’ve
gotten better at it we now look at that
thing as accomplishable
you know capable we’re capable of doing
it so we tend to sometimes overlap that
with the concept of uh it’s easy for me
it’s easy it should be easy for you
and i want you to know that there are
some things that we
encounter in life some things that we
attempt to do
that are easy and quick
and then there are some things that are
easy but they can be
long drawn out mundane
uh repetitious
and to know that that’s a possibility
so when someone says to me oh i would
rather do a short audio book than a long
audio book because it’s a lot easier
i i i really ask them to check that
assumption at the door because it’s not
a lot easier it’s exactly the same
in terms of
easy in in quotes
it’s just longer
and there are advantages to that
it may be easy once you get used to
doing it once you get used to the stair
step method for example or doing pickups
or
managing your mastering getting the
numbers right for acx all of those
things that happen over and over and
over and over again
and as you acquire that experience of
doing them over and over and over again
all of a sudden now they become easy
in addition to that
when you take a short book
and you do a couple of chapters that are
very short or maybe 10 chapters that are
two minutes long
um
it gives you some amount of experience
and it may become easier but if you’ve
got a book
that have
fairly normal or standard lengths you
know 10 15 pages per chapter and i don’t
even know that that’s a reasonable
average because some are very short some
are much some are much longer
you get that
uh lather rinse repeat thing going
where
you’re doing your narration and you’re
going and checking on
uh pronunciations and you make a mistake
and you do a
qw or whatever you’re doing in terms of
the stair step method or whatever
method you happen to be doing now
um the more you do that the more you
walk through those steps the closer
you’re going to be
to turning it easy but again easy does
not mean
short
and sometimes this is why i bring this
up sometimes what we’re looking for
is a time sensitive solution
it’s easy
may not mean
yeah you can get it done in a in an
instant
it may mean once you know what to do
it’s fairly straightforward but it may
take a good deal of time
however it’s not
difficult or
uh
potentially a disaster if you don’t do
it just right you know what i’m saying
so i think we sometimes overlap those
meanings and we do so at our own peril
i’m wondering how you think about things
when you look at a process
and it’s step by step by step but it’s
going to take a long time to get that
project done like an audio book or even
for some people a self-taped audition
i’m gonna talk about that and my my
thoughts on people’s
uh current
complaints about self-taped auditions in
another episode i’ve got that planned
but i wonder what your thoughts are on
this easy versus straightforward
uh thing uh let me know in the comments
below i’d love to figure that out uh if
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that you think might benefit i
personally am not going to stop you
just just putting it out there i’m david
h lawrence 17th i thank you so much for
watching and for listening
and we’ll see you in the next episode of
the vo heroes podcast
[Music]

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