The arrogance to ask
The history, and for that matter the prehistory of this project are sketched out in Episode 1, “Just start.” Here’s the digest version: Mat and I started working on the show last December. (I thought it was January until this morning, when I scrolled back our Slack to find the earliest entry, on December 15, in the #general channel: Hey, let’s come up with a name for this series. Among other good things, that’ll let me retitle this workspace. “Barol/Ricardo Podcast” leaves something to be desired.
I have on my to do list for tomorrow "Think of names for podcast," Mat replied. I've already got a few in a list, but they're all terrible.)
Anyway. January or December, the point is, it was a long haul to get to our launch in late June. I tell you this because it has some bearing on the monster I’ve turned into this week.
I’m pretty sure that anybody who knows me well would tell you that among my least favorite things to do is ask someone for a favor or an accommodation. My father, who was in all respects a small-town baby doctor straight out of the 1940s except that he happened to practice in downtown Philadelphia in the ‘70s and ‘80s, was all square-jawed rectitude, the only one among his peers who habitually refused to accept dinners, trips and other lavish handouts from drug company reps. In fact, he bum-rushed them right out of his office. Why? Because they were asking for something, which he felt was undignified and vaguely sneaky. I believe if you’d pressed him on it, he would have finally said it was unmanly. I inherited this belief, soaked it in osmotically, the way boys do with their fathers. What I’m saying is, I hate asking people for things.
And yet, this week I’ve been needy, clingy and beseeching. I’ve cajoled. I’ve wheedled. I’ve charmed, or tried to. I’ve literally sat up nights scheming. All to get people — people like you — to pay attention to this podcast.
Partly this is the Sunk Cost Fallacy, which Lifehack explains here in a piece helpfully titled “How The Sunk Cost Fallacy Makes You Act Stupid.” The SCF, in this case, whispers: Look, we’ve worked on this thing for six, no wait, seven months, and that expenditure of time and effort will be lost if people don’t listen, preferably in gigantic, Joe Rogan-sized numbers.
So: Production being done (we made a decision to have all of Season 1 in the can before launching), we were free to shift fully into promotion mode. There’s no getting around it: This is an undignified place to be. It’s all ask. We’ve been reasonably imaginative about the ask, I think; I mean, we’re creative people, and this is a podcast about creativity, so we both feel like we need to bring the heat a little bit. But it’s still not a place — I’m not going to speak for Mat here, just myself — it’s not a place I inhabit comfortably.
So why inhabit it at all? Because what lies behind the wheedling isn’t just the Sunk Cost Fallacy. It’s also this: a conviction that over those months we made something that’s worth your time and attention, and those commodities are precious, and we want you to spend them on us. This is a lot to ask in a world where there are, as I’ve noted elsewhere, two million podcasts listed in the Apple directory. (At the end of 2015, when I launched HOME: Stories From L.A., there were about 350,000.) It’s a noisy landscape, and we’re a quiet show. It’s easy for a show like ours to get drowned out. And although we don’t really expect Roganesque numbers, we do want Imagination & Junk to have the best possible shot at finding its audience.
So if I’ve been uncharacteristically pushy this week, and have I ever, that’s why. In one of our later episodes Mat and I talk about a trait that’s something close to arrogance, a trait creators shouldn’t feel ashamed about employing to protect and advance what they’ve created. Is art Art if no one ever sees it, or hears it? Sure, but that’s not what we’re after here. We have ideas on offer, an interplay of them; it’s a conversation, for goodness sake. And we want people to hear it. So we’re asking them — we’re asking you — to listen.
The arrogance to ask is a necessary part of the creative process, or at least of ours, in this case. It’s a kind of propulsion. You can launch your little boat out onto the water, but that doesn’t mean you’re home yet. You also have to get it past the breakers. Even if, man oh man, you really hate to row.
/BB
Image: Nils Söderman, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
