Five downloads.
That's it.
That is all episode one had when
I checked on Wednesday morning
and my first thought was perfect.
No one's going to even
notice if I rerecord it.
Actually, no.
My first thought was, this must mean
the universe wants me to rerecord it.
Welcome back to the bet.
Every journey starts with a
choice, and mine is a bet.
For one year, I'm gambling
on energy over strategy.
No more forcing and no pushing.
Just the courage to show up.
And see what happens when
reality becomes my playground.
This isn't a podcast.
It's a real time experiment
in the lab of my life.
Welcome to the bet.
The BET officially launched out into the
podcast world last Tuesday, September 2nd.
Wednesday morning, I wake up at 5:00 AM
in what I can only describe as a hell.
No moment I can't go back to
sleep, so I decide to listen
to episode one on Spotify.
You know, experience it
like a listener would.
Two minutes in and I want to die.
I'm thinking, this is so damn boring.
Who is gonna wanna listen to this?
Who wants to sit here
and listen to a woman?
Just talk to herself like this?
And then the really fun
thoughts start to show up.
Who does she think she is
putting this out there?
There's millions of podcasts.
The last thing this world needs
is another podcast, especially
one with a woman droning on about
her personal life experiments.
Then boom, cue the arrival
of the childhood memory
being told I talk too much.
All these little voices from the
past just flooding in at 5:00 AM.
But here's what really
made my stomach turn.
It wasn't that the episode was boring.
It was that I kept hearing myself say
over and over, this is either gonna be my
greatest success or my biggest failure.
I must have said it five different ways.
Throughout that episode, I was
hedging, I was apologizing in
advance for potentially failing.
I was giving myself an
out before I even began.
As I was listening to it over again,
my energy was screaming at me.
Fuck that.
That is not who you are.
You are supposed to be building a million
dollar business using pure energy.
Why are you even entertaining
the thought of failure?
Why are you highlighting it and
why the hell are you giving it
airtime in your very first episode?
I was pissed at myself, pissed that what
was supposed to be this grand initiation
of my year long experiment started
out with entirely the wrong energy.
So by 7:00 AM I am in full fix it mode.
This was recording attempt number 1111.
I had already rerecorded episode
one 10 times before releasing it,
and here I am ready to do it again.
This time, I'm in my mode, right?
I'm gonna do it right.
I'm going to be uber professional.
I've got foam panels all over
my desk because I keep hearing
this reverb in my voice.
I am deep in tutorials
about editing software.
I'm downloading trials of Adobe Audition.
I am learning about noise gates
and compression and EQ curves.
I'm adding filter after filter, trying
to engineer away every imperfection.
There's this clicking noise I keep hearing
in the episode, so I add another filter.
My voice sounds echo-y.
Need another filter.
Too much breathing going on.
Let's try this filter.
I'm literally trying to engineer
my way out of vulnerability.
The whole time, I'm telling
myself this is necessary.
This is what professional podcasters do.
If I'm going to put something out
publicly, it needs to be perfect.
It needs to be my best work, the
very best work I'm capable of.
Because somewhere in my mind, I'm still
thinking that this podcast itself.
Is the thing that's tied to my success.
Like if the audio isn't pristine,
the whole experiment fails.
If there's clicking or popping
noises, then I'm clearly
playing around in amateur hour.
So did I re-record episode
one for the 11th time?
No, I ran out of time.
I had to go into the university, but
Thursday morning when it was time to
record episode three, I was back at it
with my phone panels, with my new Adobe
audition software ready to add all my
filters, and this thought drops in.
What am I doing?
This is my pattern.
Anytime I feel insecure,
I get hypercritical and
obsessive about perfection.
I try to professionalize
my way out of being seen.
I add layers and filters and
processes thinking that if I can
just make it good enough, polished
enough, professional enough, then
it will have been worth my time.
And more importantly, then
I'll be worthy of success.
But that is so backwards.
The same thing happened with Instagram.
, I'm just now returning to Instagram
after a summer break because things
were feeling very transactional to me.
Before I took that break, I had highlight
reels that took hours to organize.
I was messing around with Canva templates
that were taking me 45 minutes to
customize the font and get the spacing and
try to make everything visually perfect.
I was making everything so complex that it
became a job I didn't wanna show up for.
Now I'm back on Instagram
doing my September experiment.
I'm just screenshotting thoughts directly
from my notes app and posting them.
No design, no filters, just my raw
thoughts on a plain background.
And they're working.
Meanwhile here I am trying to turn this
podcast into some pristine production,
just like I did with my Instagram posts.
So the pattern is clear.
I turn everything into a job that
needs to be perfectly performed.
Instead of building a business that
needs to be authentically managed, I
love to take a process and complicate it.
It gives me something to fixate on.
So Thursday morning, recording
episode three, I made a decision.
I stripped away all the filters.
Every single one, just my raw voice,
whatever comes through, comes through.
And you know what happened?
All those clicking noises that I
could not figure out how to eliminate,
they were gone, like totally gone.
The problem was never my voice.
The problem was me trying to fix my voice.
It's like this filters for your voice
are like masks for your appearance.
They might smooth things out, but they
are stripping away the full resonance
and the resonance is what carries the
energy, your energy, your personal signal.
That rawness is the signal.
That's when another thought hit me.
Wait a second.
This podcast is not my audience.
The energy is my audience.
I have had to sit with
that one several times.
The podcast is just documentation.
The podcast is just evidence
that I'm doing the work.
It's my weekly check-in with
myself and whoever wants to listen
in, but I had been confusing the
documentation with the thing itself.
Here's what I had to decide this week,
and I had to decide it about 47 times.
The podcast is not the product.
The business I'm building is the product.
The podcast is like when
you work with a coach.
The coaching call isn't the work.
The coaching call is where you
report what happened, you process
what you learned, and then you
declare what you're gonna do next.
But the actual work happens between
the calls, between the check-ins.
I have a longstanding history of trying
to make my coaching check-ins impressive.
Says the same thing was happening here.
I was trying to make sure that you
knew how much effort I was putting
in I was trying to create compelling
podcast instead of just telling
the truth about what's happening.
That's exhausting.
That's the exact opposite of my objective.
I'm done proving myself.
Or let's be real, at least I'm
done with this current layer of
having to prove myself because we
are always uncovering new layers.
I'm sure this will return in
my life in some shape or form.
So the experiment isn't, can
I make a perfect podcast that
people really want to listen to?
The experiment is, can I build
something so undeniable that
reality has to deliver it to me,
the experiment is, can I show
up raw and real and trust that
the energy itself is enough?
The podcast is just the vehicle to capture
the experiment, to capture the process.
So what does this actually
look like going forward?
First, I did not, and I will not
rerecord episode one, even though
only five people have heard it so far.
Even though I hedged my
bets five different ways.
Even though it makes me cringe,
that's the real documentation
of where I was in that moment.
That's the truth of starting.
We all fucking start somewhere.
This is what it looks like.
Second, no more filters.
No more foam panels, no more
midnight Adobe tutorials.
If you hear my air conditioner
in the background, you hear it.
If my voice cracks, it cracks.
If there's a dog snuffling in the
background, that's Lala and she's
contributing her own energetic
support to this whole endeavor,
this is real life, not a production.
Third, I'm treating this podcast
exactly like my notes app on Instagram,
raw thoughts, real time, no polish.
The same energy that makes those
screenshots work is the same energy
that's going to make this work.
So do you wanna know the exact
thought that I decided to program
into my mind to upgrade this pattern?
Here's the ones I tried on for
the best energetic fit I had.
I'm running a fucking
business here, not a podcast.
I had my authority comes from my
truth, not my production value.
I tried the mess is the message.
I hated that one and I tried.
Raw is more powerful
than rehearsed for me.
This week I kept returning to, I'm
running a fucking business here.
That was on repeat.
Every time I started to obsess about
the podcast quality, I reminded
myself business, not podcast.
Business.
So let me be crystal clear
about what's happening here.
I am building a million dollar business,
period, not, maybe not, hopefully not.
If everything goes right, I'm
fucking building it, and this podcast
is documentation of that build.
It's proof that I'm showing up.
It's accountability
that I'm doing the work.
It's the weekly evidence that
I'm not bullshitting myself.
The podcast is not the business.
The podcast is me showing
you the business being built.
I already feel so much lighter
just saying it like that.
People don't need to hear another
perfectly produced podcast.
They need to see someone actually
doing the thing, building the
thing, becoming the thing.
In real time with all the mess, all the
uncertainty, all the course corrections.
They need to see that you
can build something massive.
Even when your first episode only
gets five downloads and you wanna
hide under a rock, they need to see
that success isn't about getting
it right, not the first time, not
the second time, not the 80th time.
It's always about catching yourself in
your patterns and choosing differently.
Over and over 47 times a day if necessary.
So the universe didn't want
me to rerecord episode one.
The universe wanted me to see that I was
about to betray my very own experiment.
The universe wanted me to choose,
are you going to build a business
or are you going to perform success?
I choose building every single
time, even when it's messy, and
especially because it is messy.
Look, I don't know what's
gonna happen next week.
I have no idea what pattern is
gonna pop up, but I'm gonna catch
it and I'm gonna install an upgrade.
That is the whole point
of this experiment.
It's real time, it's
raw, it's unpredictable.
I do know this.
Every week I'm going to get clearer
on what actually matters and what
actually matters is not the polish
or the production or the perfect
delivery, even though it feels like it.
What matters is that I am here building,
documenting, choosing the business
over the performance every single time.
If you're still here after all of
this, after hearing about my foam panel
fortress, after witnessing me, almost
rerecord everything, after watching
me strip away all the filters, then
something is working and thank you.
Thank you.
The energy is finding its people and
we're just getting started next week.
I will tell you what
happened, whatever it is.
Until then, it's time for me to carry
on with running a fucking business here.
Go bet on yourself.