The Transcript

How Our Obsession with Greatness Kills the Ability to Do Good Work

Robert Bruce: This is Rainmaker.FM, the digital marketing podcast network. It’s built on the Rainmaker Platform, which empowers you to build your own digital marketing and sales platform. Start your free 14-day trial at RainmakerPlatform.com.

Brian Gardner: There is sound advice from Robert Bruce.

Robert Bruce: And that’s the end of the podcast right there. We’re done.

Brian Gardner: The 30-second podcast.

No Sidebar the podcast is brought to you by an event called Authority Rainmaker. This is a carefully designed live educational experience that presents a complete and effective online marketing strategy to help you immediately accelerate your business. Get all the details right now at Rainmaker.FM/Event, and we look forward to seeing you in Denver, Colorado, this May.

Welcome back to No Sidebar. This is Brian Gardner, your host, and today is going to be a completely different day than any other in No Sidebar podcast history. For the first time ever, I am going to go completely unscripted, and I’m trying something new, partly because I’ve gained a little bit of confidence with my ability to speak elegantly, but also because I’ve gotten some feedback from the listeners that while the content of the show is great, at times it sounds and feels scripted. Trust me, I am the first one to admit that and to say, “Yes, you are right.”

So joining me today to help me cut my teeth is Robert Bruce, who — if you don’t know — is the golden voice of Copyblogger. He’s also the Vice President of Marketing for the Rainmaker Platform and the guy who’s completely in charge of Rainmaker.FM, the podcast network.

Audio Vérité and the Blair Witch Project

Robert Bruce: Good morning, Mr. Gardner. Good morning, No Sidebar listeners. I was thinking, you wanted to just start recording and start talking. In film, it’s cinema vérité, I think, where they just grab the camera and try to make a movie out of everyday occurrences. So this is a bit of audio vérité, I think.

Brian Gardner: You know, it’s funny. The Blair Witch Project, back in our day, was almost the first reality TV or reality something, even though it totally was scripted — but it totally wasn’t. It was so good and actually better than reality TV, because I’m an advocate of the fact that reality TV is anything but. But The Blair Witch Project, as I watched that and watch it again, even to this day, I’m like, “Was that real, or was it not?”

Robert Bruce: The great thing about Blair Witch is that it’s the ultimate demonstration of creating within constraints. They had no budget. I don’t know, maybe there’s some secret budget that they had, but the cameras they were using, the way they filmed it, absolutely. Anybody who thinks they can’t get anything done because of certain constraints, financial or otherwise, go watch Blair Witch.

To be fair, Brian, the scripting thing is an interesting idea because the idea of writing a script is that you want the thing to be good. You want it to be focused. You want it to be interesting. But it’s one of the hardest things to do naturally. You’ve done a very, very good job of it. It’s a difficult task, but this is interesting today.

Brian Gardner: I love the idea of a script, and it is a crutch. The problem is that in most cases, when things get overused, they’re perceived as being overused. Women and makeup are a perfect example of this. When people put on makeup, they use it to look beautiful, but sometimes they go so over the top and put on so much makeup, it becomes a turnoff.

We’re overproduced by nature. We build for consumption, which immediately sets ourselves up for people-pleasing tendencies, and that’s what I’ve done with the podcast. I’m trying to address that by being more natural. I think there’s a lot of beauty in natural. And podcasts I hear, when I hear people scripted, I’m the first one to say, “Huh, that’s scripted.” Then I’m like, “That’s calling the kettle black, because look in the mirror. That’s exactly what I’m doing.”

So this is my opportunity to try something new, and I will admit that having you on the show to do it with me is bittersweet. Here’s the thing — and this is part of what I want to talk about — before we get started, I just want to set the tone and say that Robert and I are going to talk about being confidently creative.

That is the focus of today’s show because in our own ways, both he and I struggle. Ironically, it’s with each other’s skills, actually. I want to be a better podcaster, so I look at you as the golden voice of podcasting, which at times cripples me, but it also motivates me. I think, from a design perspective, it goes the other way. We’ve had conversations where you hate me for my ability to just hop on and design something very quickly.

Robert Bruce: Yes.

Brian Gardner: As long as those things are kept in check, I think they’re positive.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, I do hate you for that, and at some point, you were going to give me 10 hours free training with Illustrator and Photoshop or something like that. Is that the deal?

Brian Gardner: Yes, we have Authority Rainmaker in May. I think we sit down in Denver at a coffee shop at 11 o’clock one night and close it down, and we will podcast and design on the fly and teach each other stuff.

Robert Bruce: All right, this is on the record. Real quick, on the natural thing, it’s an interesting point you bring up because this entire thing is wholly unnatural — hitting ‘record,’ talking into a microphone. Even though we’re having a relatively casual conversation here, it’s completely unnatural, and I think that’s something that people should keep in mind, even when they are trying to be ‘authentic’ or ‘natural.’

One of the best things I ever heard about this was when John Gruber over at Daring Fireball told a story about the early days of his site. I think he was testing out advertising. He was looking at how to start to make some revenue with the site early on. I don’t know if he came up with it or if he read it somewhere, but it was this idea of matching advertising with your audience’s interests, which is a very difficult thing to do if you’re going to try and do it. He said it’s kind of like a toupee as well. You brought up the makeup issue, but for men, a lot of men have hair troubles, you and I included, right?

Brian Gardner: Yes.

Robert Bruce: But he says a lot of guys will go full-bore with the plugs or the toupee or whatever, and I get it. You want to have what you once had, but he says the way to look at it is the Bruce Willis school of hair restoration. He says what Bruce Willis did was not try to recreate his original hairline, but just fill in the basics of what was there. He’s still balding. He’s still receding. But it’s a more natural approach to it. Totally unnatural, but somehow it works better, and you’d never know it.

Brian Gardner: That’s definitely interesting.

Robert Bruce: No Sidebar, the hair restoration podcast.

Brian Gardner: Yes, and the funny thing with toupees is that most people who wear toupees look like they’re wearing toupees. So in their mind, they think, “I have hair.” In our minds, it s,”You’re wearing a toupee, and I can clearly see that.”

Here’s the thing, though. Yesterday I was having some internal conversations with myself and trying to identify where I’m at currently with what I’m doing, and I came up with this thought which really started to spell things out for me. The thought I had was that the more I focus on being great, the less I succeed at being good.

In our society, everybody wants to be the elite, and we all aim for the top. There really isn’t anything wrong with that. For example, I try to write the epic post, and because I can’t write the epic post, I don’t write at all. That’s kind of symptomatic of the good-versus-great thing, where we feel like if we can’t be the best, we shouldn’t do it at all. I think that is absolutely wrong. I think by working on being good, you become great.

Robert Bruce: I was told once by a coach years ago when I did sports stuff — it’s been a long time — about being nervous before a race or whatever. Coach says, “You know why you’re nervous?” He says, “Because you want to win.” In other words, “You want to be perfect. You want to be great, to your point. He says, “If you approach it.”

I think being nervous about something is tough to get rid of altogether because you care about this thing. You care about this show and your listeners, and we all do, but the idea of somehow finding a way to approach it with the idea of being good, of mastering the fundamentals — which I think, if I’m not wrong, we’ll get into a little bit later — rather than, like you say, trying to be great.

Keira Knightley in Begin Again and Anna Kendrick in The Last Five Years

Brian Gardner: Anybody who follows me knows that I talk about the things that I go through, the things that I think and listen and hear, read and watch. Lately I’ve been kind of on this Anna Kendrick and The Last Five Years spiel, which is piggybacking off a phase I went through with the movie Begin Again and Keira Knightley — which, both movies and both actresses and both characters in those movies, I fell completely in love with. Not because they’re pretty girls, but what I found was there was relatability in their characters because in both cases, they were presented as sort of normal people.

In Begin Again, Keira Knightley was the girlfriend of Adam Levine, who in the show was the movie star. And Anna Kendrick, sort of in the same fashion, was married to this guy Jamie, who was this bestselling book author. So in both cases, they were the shadow. In both cases, they were presented as kind of normal people, and in both cases, those actresses sang the songs that are in the movies. Neither of them sang them in Hollywood fashion, but that was the appealing part. I was like, “Wow, Keira Knightley actually has a good voice,” but I think it kind of — what’s the word I’m looking for?

Robert Bruce: She allowed herself to not be perfect, or highly trained, or some great Broadway singer in that moment.

Brian Gardner: Yeah, exactly. And especially in The Last Five Years, Anna Kendrick is very clumsy and awkward with the way she sings. I’m sure technically it’s not, you know, what Mariah Carey would do, but I think that’s what makes it so appealing, that “Hey, non-great people can do non-great things and have it be great actually,” as crazy as that sounds.

The Age of the Golden-Throated Radio Announcer Being Over

Robert Bruce: No, I really like this, and I think you could argue it’s the age of being. All these words are tossed around a lot — ‘authenticity,’ all these things like that. You and I’ve had that conversation. The age of the golden-throated radio announcer is over. They don’t want that polished, perfect production so much anymore. You see this in songwriting. I mean, it comes and goes. We should get somebody else on here to talk about music, because I’m not the one. That’s more your department.

But there are kind of rolling ideas of what is good and what is not. I think we’re in one of those periods where people want the raw and authentic as much as is possible to get there while talking behind a microphone.

Brian Gardner: Yeah, I realize that I am not Ryan Seacrest. I am never going to be Ryan Seacrest, or Robert Bruce for that matter, and what I need to do is be okay in my own body. When I’m okay in my own body, that is when, in a weird way, confidence comes back, and the audience can relate. When they think you’re trying to put yourself out of body and become someone you’re not, A) it comes across that way, and B) there’s just some degree of that “Ehhh, okay, poser,” type of mentality that people have.

When Admiration Becomes Resentment

Brian Gardner: I do it myself, as much as I hate to admit that. I judge others. It’s a fault of mine, but by nature, we try to build ourselves up by knocking others down. So even within our own network, I’ll hear a podcast, and I’ll be like, “Oh, that was awkward. I would have cut that out.” That’s a terrible way to look at it.

I’m also a believer that when we knock people down, it’s because we are envious of them. For example, whether it’s musicians or models or athletes, we all have these people that we look up to and admire, but there comes a point, especially if they’re in the field you’re in, where admiration becomes resentment. That’s a very dangerous spot to be in.

Robert Bruce: Yeah.

Brian Gardner: Look back to the ’80s or ’90s or whenever the whole Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan thing went down. They were teammates, and it got to a point where there was some jealousy and envy, and obviously it led to that whole fiasco. It reminds me of Shawne Merriman. I don’t know if you remember him, but he was a linebacker for the San Diego Chargers way back in the day. In an interview, I heard him say, when asked, “Shawne, why are you in the gym all the time?” He said, “If I’m not in the gym working out, my opponent might be.” I mean are you going to be in the gym 24 hours?

Robert Bruce: Yeah, right. There’s only so much you can do.

Brian Gardner: Speaking of being unfiltered and transparent, Robert’s microphone or something on his end just went out. So I wanted to take a second and say that there’s a bridge in between his audio in case you happen to notice that things are a little bit off moving forward. He still sounds great. He’s in his closet. Even if I had said nothing, you would have ever realized that there was a difference, but in the event that you do, there’s a reason for that. We’re just going to unedit this and let it go because that is, after all, part of podcasting.

Robert Bruce: Audio vérité, right?

Brian Gardner: Yes, this is our ugly, and hey, that’s cool. It’s all good.

Alright, so getting back to where we were. We talked a lot about us personally, me with my fandom of Keira Knightley and Anna Kendrick, and the reality of it is that in some fashion, this needs to get pulled back into business. At least for me, I spend so much time focusing on the personal that I sometimes forget to apply how this all goes down and what it does to me as a business guy. I wrote a post today on BrianGardner.com specifically calling myself out on being unfocused when it comes to work stuff. I’m unfocused anyway, but I have a responsibility as a partner of Copyblogger, as lead design overseer in the company, to make sure that things go down.

One of my...