Stupid Tax

One of the shows I used to catch every once in a while was The Dave Ramsey Show on the Fox Business Network.  Dave is a financial guru who helps people get out of debt and stay out of debt.  I’ve read a few of his books and was saddened to see that FBN cancelled the program a few weeks back.  He had a great way of putting things that were no-nonsense and full of common sense tips to help one and all get their financial houses in order.  He was ardently opposed to credit cards and their use as a tool for cash flow.  He called the interest they charged a “stupid tax”.  This just made me giggle.  He applied the term to several other areas of finances, basically saying that to use or lose your money for silly and unnecessary reasons was just plain stupid.

I think the phrase can be extended to other areas of life and not just financially.  And I have a perfect example of how I paid the stupid tax the other day when traveling.  Let’s just start with the premise that traveling these days includes a certain amount of hassle, annoyances and endless supplies of patience.  The days of travel being a pleasant and luxurious pastime are long gone-alas!  Anywho, I was going to LA for a voiceover conference and had booked the first flight out so I could be in LA early enough to do a little sightseeing.  I wanted to do an official studio tour as I’d been on a lot but wanted to hear the history of studio.  So I was going to take the Paramount tour at noon LA time.  I get to the airport at 545am in plenty of time for my 735am flight and I’ve already printed my boarding pass.  No problem right?  Well for some reason I decide at the last minute to go to the bathroom and then oooo, wouldn’t a banana be good for the flight?  So I toodle down the concourse in search of a banana.  As I return to the gate, I notice the door is closed so I wait outside as the gate agents sometimes step away to take care of some business.  Someone finally showed up and asked if they could help me.  I said “I’m on this flight” and hand her my boarding pass.  “I’m sorry, the flight is closed”.  “But there’s 10 minutes until you leave, they plane’s still right there”  “But the flight is full”  wherein we got to the root of issue.  They’d given away my seat and they’d have to compensate someone in order to honor my seat.  So instead I paid the stupid tax of having to wait for the next flight and potentially missing my tour.

Fortunately I made the tour but the entire episode highlighted for me some of the ways that I short change my career and my life by paying this tax that I don’t need to pay.  Sure getting a banana was innocent enough but the result of my loss of focus could have been a lot worse than it was.  Staying focused is very important and not letting myself get sidetracked.  If I don’t, I may end up holding a boarding pass going nowhere instead of continuing forward progress.

Fruits of Labor

A green thumb is something I think I have.  Not the most prolific green thumb but more things live under my care than die.  But I’ve always been challenged when it comes to growing tomatoes.  I have enough sun on top of my deck as it sits on the roof so that’s not an issue.  I’ve tried for years to grow tomatoes to no avail.   They grow in the pots but never really bear fruit.  Last year I started them too late in the season as I’d been traveling throughout the month of June so they didn’t get planted until July.  Not enough growing time as our summer is short enough to begin with.  Add to that the lateness of the planting and you get whole lotta nuttin’.  This year however, I planted in late May.  Instead of pots I used the Topsy-Turvy you see advertised on TV.  Well actually I’m doing an experiment, one plant is in a pot and a duplicate is in the Topsy-Turvy.  This way I can see if their television claims really do hold up.  So far, the Topsy is winning.  I also planted one with cucumbers and one with red peppers.  They seem to be flourishing as well.

The other evening I was grilling my  dinner and I thought I’d check to see if any of the red tomatoes were ready to be picked.  Lo and behold, 2 were.  They weren’t big by any stretch, about the size of large racquetballs, but boy were they good.  I was so excited to finally be tasting my tomatoes, the ones I’d grown and watered every day religiously and almost even burned out with too much fertilizer.  After all if some fertilizer was good, lots should be ever better right?  Maybe I should go back and read that children’s book by Helen Palmer called A Fish Out Of Water, just so I actually learn the lesson she’s teaching.  But they survived my efforts and I am starting to enjoy them.

I thought about this when 2 things happened the next day.  I got a call from something I’d submitted to over 2 months ago and had completely forgotten about.  Delightful lady.  She wanted to talk further and have me do some more specific auditioning for her.   Turns out we might actually do some business together.  Then later I received an email from another piece of business I’d submitted on over a month ago with some additional information and a request for a more refined bid.  I didn’t get the job but both of these contacts were from submissions I’d done weeks ago that I’d long forgotten.  Made me realize the work I’m doing today may not bear fruit for quite a while.  Gave me the energy to pick up the phone and continue cold calling.  Who knows what’s germinating out there?  I’ve got more tomatoes on the vine ripening every day.

A Clarification from Mr. Franklin

Ben Franklin was a man of many wise saying that still have relevancy today.  You know, “A penny saved is a penny earned”, “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail”, “He that is good at making excuses is seldom good for making anything else” and of course every hostesses favorite “Guests, like fish, begin to smell after 3 days”.  One of my favorites is “Never confuse motion with action”.  This one has really resonated with me, especially recently and has led to a slight change in how I’ve been evaluating opportunities.  I’m a big proponent of taking workshops and classes even if I’ve had to travel to take them.  Let’s just say I’ve never met a workshop I didn’t turn down.  I’m not that bad about it but I do take a lot of them.  I do believe there is something to be learned from any situation and of course there are contacts to be made.  I am pretty choosy about who I take classes from so I’ve been able to avoid most of the shysters that prey on the acting and voiceover community.

Recently though, my thought has turned away from learning and more towards doing.  I realized that all this traveling to take workshops really threw a monkey wrench in my schedule.  There was a gearing down and gearing up time that took energy and attention away from my progress.  And because I was out of the studio and wasn’t in town, it was affecting my ability to audition both on the mic and on camera.  I realized that while I was learning from each opportunity, what I was giving up wasn’t being paid back in kind.  I was confusing motion with actually taking action and making progress.

As a result of this, I’ve said no to several recent workshop opportunities.  I realized I needed to practice what I’d learned at all the other ones I’ve taken.  So my suitcase remains in the closet.  I’ll be attending workshops again in the future but for the time being, I’ve got my feet planted right here at home and I’m no longer confusing motion with action.  Besides, the heat finally broke and it’s heavenly here.

The American Idol Effect

American Idol is a show I’ve never really followed.  Sure I’m aware of the show, the participants and the judges.  The qualifying shows have provided a few moments of laughter but once it gets into the actual competition, my channel changer goes into action.  My niece however is a huge fan.  She watches the show religiously and loves singing along with the contestants.  I have a picture she colored for me that shows last seasons winner with the 4 judges on stage.  She’s going to be crushed when the show goes off the air.

When I was visiting her house the other night, she wanted to sing me a song she learned from the show.  And she did a great job with all the words.  I was amazed.  But she threw in a twist I hadn’t expected.  It seems she’d been not just learning the songs but studying the mannerisms of the singers as well.  As she started singing, her facial expressions and vocalization became something other than her normal manner.  In her quest to be like the stars she emulated, she’d lost the essence that was her unique voice and her wonderful personality.

Talk about a 2 X 4 between the eyes.  Standing in front of me was someone doing the exact same thing I’d done  to my voice.  Watching my niece sing was like watching myself in a mirror trying to find my vocal placement.  I really wanted to sound like the sultry voices I was hearing and in pursuing this goal, completely messed up my unique voice.  I really wanted to get my niece to understand this but she couldn’t wrap her brain around the idea.  She just saw the people she admired and thought if she mimicked them, she would be successful like them.

Hopefully this is just a stage for my niece.  She’ll find something else that will pique her interest and she’ll goes back to her awesomeness.  Me, I’ve been trying to find my natural placement again.  I’m getting closer.  But I realize how many of us think that someone else’s way of doing something is so much better than our own natural way.  So there’s comfort in numbers but I’d rather be somewhere else.

The Art of Coloring

Recently I was able to do one of my favorite things in the world.  I got to spend some time with my nieces and nephews.  It’s always a blast and the energy just blows away any bad juju you have going on in your world.  I would never say dinner was a relaxing experience-more like a food triage system of trying to get nutrients into ever moving mouths and keeping butts in the seats.  But it is enormously entertaining.

After dinner one  nephew, who has recently discovered he likes coloring, brought out a huge Star Wars cartoon coloring book, you know the kind that is about 18 inches by 30 inches.  We had our choice between a box of markers, thankfully washable, and a bucket of crayons.  He and I started coloring together, mostly him, but soon his sister had to get in on the action and the attention (I have no idea where she gets that from) and I was nosed out of the picture, literally.  It was kind of hard to get my southpaw in to do any work with 2 kids sitting on my lap and the third one trying to climb up and join them.  There was much jostling for real estate between the two.  Eventually it settled down, the toddler moved off to another flight of fancy and I was able to get in a few strokes of color.  We were staying in the lines but the cool thing was we were also drawing new lines within the bigger spaces.  Colors weren’t locked into specific parts but instead were all over the board.  The big gloved hand had about 20 different colors and patterns on it.  He was promptly christened Rainbow Plo Koon.  It was beautiful in its own uniqueness.

Kids have such an amazing way of seeing things.  They don’t see the rules, the way we’ve always done something, the way it should be done or the logical progression of a picture.  They just put the color down without a thought and are quite happy with the result.  They enjoy the process of coloring and really don’t care about the outcome at all.  Auditioning and performance should be this way and it’s something I strive for every time I step in front of the camera or the mic.  Letting go of all the thoughts and the head drama seems like it would be an easy thing to accomplish but this isn’t always the case.  Next time I’ll thing of Mr. Rainbow, enjoy the process and not worry about the end result.

Talking Elephants

One of the cool things about radio is Chicago is several of the stations are owned by the major networks.  So are the big four TV stations.  In the vernacular of the business, these stations are called O & O’s, owned and operated, because that is exactly how they are owned and run, by the networks.  And sometimes the programming crosses over.  So the CBS radio station here, WBBM-AM, will run programming from the TV station, WBBM-TV.  They mostly run news shows like the Face the Nation and CBS Sunday Morning but they also run 60 Minutes every Sunday night.  WBBM-AM is one of the oldest stations in the country and they have a special type of broadcast license thats let’s them broadcast at 50,000 watts.  That means the signal travels pretty far.  I can listen to them all the way home to my folks house only getting static the last 20 minutes or so of the drive when the corn is high and blocks the signal.  On Sunday nights, I try to time my trip back so I can listen to 60 Minutes at some point when the signal is clear.  It sounds strange, listening to a TV show on the radio, but with a show like this, the whole theatre of the mind thing takes over.

Last Sunday I was driving down to my parents house (holiday weekend and all) and I tuned into the show.  One of the segments was about a researcher in Africa who’s been studying elephants for 20 years for Cornell University.  Actually she’s been listening to elephants.  Turns out they have a very complex language that we are only beginning to understand.  The really cool thing is they say a lot of things in a pitch we humans can’t hear.  They’re having these entire conversations right in front of our nose and we don’t even know they’re talking.  Makes you wonder about the commentary on the people they see gawking at them at the zoo – look at that guys haircut…what was she thinking wearing those shoes with that outfit?…will someone please find that kids pacifier?!!

In a weird way, I suddenly felt proud of the industry I’d chosen to be in.  Not that I’m ever going to be figuring out what a species is communicating.  But voiceover is all about communicating.  Sure I may be voicing an on-hold phone message or a commercial about the newest juice box, but I also voice e-learning projects so people can learn about new aspects of their fields, documentaries that inspire and inform, and audiobooks that transport the listener to another reality.  In communicating with my voice, I connect someone to something important.  Every species communicates in some form or another.  I’m just jazzed to be one of the communicators in my species.

Helicopters

We had quite a bit of rain in June.  I think it was one of the rainiest, if not the rainiest, June on record.  Before I left for my sister’s wedding I wanted to get the flowers planted in the front yard and get a really good weeding done.  So around the second week in June I got all the flats of Impatiens and spent the afternoon planting and weeding.  I don’t have a huge front yard, at least by suburban standards, but it’s pretty big by city standards.  Some yards are 4 feet deep by about 12 feet wide.  Because we have a wider lot and the house is set back, my front yard is about 18 x 20.  Massive.  In the parkway, there’s a huge oak tree that’s been there forever.  It’s about 60 feet tall and really shades the front of the house which is why I need to plant shade flowers.  I love how the sun dapples the light through the leaves when I’m in my office working.  The tree seems pretty healthy which is good.  I can’t imagine what it would be like not to have this tree outside my window.

Every spring though, in nature’s unyielding cycle, the tree in it’s quest to maintain the species showers the front yard and every other surface area with helicopter shaped seeds.  They thwap down seeking a place to germinate and put down roots.  This year we had more than I’ve ever seen.  I think that means we are going to have a long cold winter.  Great.  I spent the better part of the afternoon plucking the seedlings out of the ground where they’d rooted underneath the mulch.  I cut short the future of about a dozen dozen little oaklings.  It’s was cold hearted but I got over it.  I got the flowers planted just in time for the week of rain that followed before I went out of town.  When I returned and resumed my walks 10 days later, I was astonished at all the seedlings that were now popping out of the ground.  I thought I’d removed all of them!

It made me realize that you can’t see all that’s germinating whether it’s planted deliberately or not.  I also learned not everything pops up at the same time.  I’m hoping this is what will happen with my new business efforts.  Lots of helicopters going out from me at the moment, hopefully reaching fertile ground to sprout at a later date.  As for the actual helicopters, they’ll meet their fate this weekend.

A subtle, but important, distinction

Today was an office day.  No auditions or appointments were scheduled so I was able to spend a substantial amount of time working in the office.  Now I will admit there was a bit of faffing about.  And by faffing, I mean goofing.  It’s a VO term that’s currently in vogue and is the name of an unconference being put together by a wonderful group of VO professionals.  All the details can be found here.  Faffcon isn’t the purpose of this post but didn’t I work it in nicely?

Instead I want to talk about the cold calling I’ve been doing.  I know, exciting stuff.  I’ve been trying to make as many contacts for my Voiceover business so today was a research and cold calling day.  I try to set a goal of so many cold calls each week.  I hit my goal for the week today and I still had several hours of the business day available.  I had a momentary thought that I would stop for the week and save some for next week.  But then I realized, this is exactly what I would have done when I was working in corporate and I no longer wanted to work that way.  I wanted to make as many contacts as I could because there would be more contacts in the pipeline.  Always more people to contact.  Why stop at the week’s goal?  So I didn’t.  I made a few more calls and plan on making some in the morning tomorrow.  I mentioned this to a friend of mine,Bob Souer, who said this was the difference in being an entrepreneur and a corporate drone.  When you work for yourself, you don’t want to leave any stone unturned, any opportunity overlooked.  And just because you hit  your goal, you don’t stop.  You keep the momentum up.  I used to do this when I was selling local television time.  Once I achieved my goal, I wanted to see how much over I could achieve.  It’s a great way to approach the business of finding new business.  And I have tomorrow to add to my number.  It’s all good.

A Sparkle or a Smolder

For a long time now I’ve been struggling with my voice.  I know, it sounds silly.  After all, it’s something that is so intrinsically a part of us that how can it be a problem?  It’s kind of like my struggle with clothes.  I want to be a size 4 but in reality I’m not.  Probably never will be.  GRRRR.  And that’s not easy to accept.  But that’s a topic for another day.  With my voice, I’ve always longed to have that sultry, husky voice that I so admire in many female voice talents.  The kind that envelopes you in texture and feels all cashmere and warm.  And I do have that voice, in the morning before I warm up the vocal cords.  The problem is, I’ve been trying to make that my default voice and it’s not.  Trying to change my voice at this stage of the game isn’t a wise thing to do.  Not only is it like trying to change the hand you sign your name with, awkward at best, it can be dangerous to your vocal cords if try to make them do something you naturally aren’t supposed to do.  But I’ve been dinking around with placement for over a year and all I’ve managed to do it screw it up magnificently!  Any of you who’ve tried changing your golf swing know from whence I speak.  It’s brutal.  I finally came to the realization that I’m not and never will be that voice I so admire.  Sigh.

Just as I was getting used to this idea I was talking with a fellow voice talent, Philip Banks, and recounting this oh-so-tragic realization.  I am not and never will be a sultry voice, my voice is bright.  In his inimitable British way, Philip said “some people are a sparkle and some people are a smolder.  You are a sparkle.”  In those 15 words, Philip managed to take news I’d considered shattering and make it instead a wonderful thing.  I’m a sparkle.  Yes indeed I am.  Just like diamonds and emeralds and rubies.  Who doesn’t like a little glitter in their life?  Pretty dang cool.  All of the sudden I’m kinda happy about my voice, at least the one I used to have.  I just need to find it again.  Maybe it’s in that drawer I’m afraid of opening.  All I know is, I’m a lot more content with the voice I was blessed with that I was 30 minutes ago.  And excited to see where it can take me.  It just took some mental adjustments accompanied by a long distance kick in the pants.  Thanks Philip.

Dirt Sifting

One of my favorite blogs to read is The Simple Dollar by Trent Hamm.  He does a daily blog generally about frugality but he also touches on many other subjects.  He is a prolific writer, churning out 2 postings a day and I don’t think he’s missed a day yet.  At least not since I’ve been following him.  The other day he posted something sort of off the beaten path for him.  The value of doing grunt work, or slog work as he called it.  It’s the necessary but mind numbing work that exists in every job, whatever it is you do.  It can be data entry, invoicing or in his case, dirt sifting.   Really.  He got paid to go through dirt.  One of the most challenging things I am finding about this transition to working for myself is consistently and purposefully attacking the grunt work that exists for me.  In my case, it’s doing things like auditioning on the pay-to-play sites, sending out an invoice, writing a blog post.  Finding the concentration to just get it done isn’t the easiest thing for me.  When I finish a post, it’s a natural ending point so I break off, go out of the office and it’s 45 minutes later before I return.  Goofing off instead of going back to the list of topics I’ve identified I’d like to write about.  I do the same thing when I finish an audition.  I feel like I need a reward for completing something so I head to the fridge, or check my email for the 98th time, or get lost on the interwebs.  All because of a lack of focus and discipline to just get the job done.  I used to have the same problem when it came to doing forecasting reports but I was able to knuckle down and plow through them.  I need to find the same focus I had then and apply it to my work today.  I know I can do it, it’s just a matter of figuring out how I did it before and doing it again.   It’s not fun, but it is necessary.  It’s on the back of diligence that a strong career is forged.  If you can do the dirt sifting well, you will excel at the bigger tasks.