0059: Can’t You Just Leave Well Enough Alone?

Raw transcript:

i used to live in washington dc
and
i worked in radio there i worked in
television i worked in tech there
and one of the things that i used to
hear all the time while i was working
for a government contractor was eh it’s
good enough for government work
and i used to think of that as a joke
until i kind of understood what they
meant by that
and i wonder
if
it might have some benefit for you too
so let’s talk about that in this episode
of the vo heroes podcast
[Music]
i love
getting my hands on new gear new
hardware new software
playing with new stuff that
potentially could be better in terms of
sound or in terms of look
and
i’ve also learned that that can become
uh something that holds us back
now as we speak we’re in the middle of a
series of free lessons
uh in service of audiobook narration we
do the acx master class
every year and we’re about to do it
again and so we give these free lessons
mostly on
things that people think they know about
audiobook narration and may or may not
be true
and in particular the fears that they
have around things like the tech like
the gear like how to set things up and
make things quiet in their space and
what gear to use what microphone to use
what digital audio workstation to use
and so on
and one of the questions that i get all
the time from them is how do i make my
sound better i already have some stuff
but how do i make it better
and i always ask well how does it sound
now and sometimes they’ll say oh it’s
it’s fine i i just you know it’s never
going to be perfect and i always want to
keep working striving to make it better
and i think to myself when does that end
when
do we get to the point where
quote it’s good enough for government
work that actually
doesn’t mean what you think it means it
doesn’t mean the government has low
standards
and so
you know it’s good enough
it means the government is using your
tax dollars
and it doesn’t want to overuse your tax
dollars and so it finds things that it
can purchase
that don’t overspend but do the job get
the job done
and
i love that actually i don’t think
that’s a joke um but i do know a lot of
people maybe you’re one of them i used
to be one of them i’m a reformed
inveterate tinkerer
who are just that inveterate tinkerers
they can’t leave well enough alone
they worry that
they need to always constantly be
improving
even when something is at the point
where it’s working really really well
and doesn’t really need to be adjusted
anymore in fact it’s something you can
now rely on and here’s a test for you if
you’re not quite sure
does what you have
set up whatever you’re considering
changing making better tinkering with
does what you have set up work for you
are you getting jobs from it are you
making money with it are you
getting the results that you like from
it or are you sitting there and saying
to yourself i’m an artist
i will never be perfect i need to strive
to be perfect i need to change things
you know i
i got to tell you i’ve been using the
same microphone
for
12 years now maybe more i don’t even
remember when the at2020 came out
but what i tell myself all the time
whenever i see a really cool looking
microphone or a really expensive
microphone is you know what you’ve got
is working for you
look at the money you made this year
last year the year before and all the
years before that
do you really need
to spend that money on something new or
the time
on changing things to try and make it
better
and then i hear things where people have
adjusted things so many times that it’s
actually not as good as it would have
been had they just left it alone so
here’s my question for you
can’t you just leave well enough alone
or do you find yourself
just
irresistibly drawn
to making things better to changing
things for the better to to to tweaking
and adjusting and honing and refining
now i’m not talking about fixing things
that are broke
i’m talking about
not messing with things that aren’t
broke
and that’s another way of saying do more
of what works and less of what doesn’t
but i won’t i won’t bore you with that
let me know in the comments below and by
below i mean on voheros.com
where the conversation is nice and safe
and sane and you can you can subscribe
to this podcast if you want to i’d love
for that to be the case let me know what
your what your life is like when it
comes to leaving well enough alone i’m
david h lawrence the 17th i thank you so
much for watching and for listening
and i will see you
in the next episode of the vo heroes
podcast
[Music]

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