It's been four years since I last posted on this forum, four years of failing nearly constantly, with a different flavor of failure in the time before that.
This will be a progress thread that gets into the nitty-gritty of the execution of starting out as a voice actor. With the goal of reaching a level that allows me to use my freelance work as a launch pad and base of support to grow the business that is my end goal on a business and personal level.
Yet I want to use this first post to reflect on some lessons learned in the hopes that they might help somebody else on their road.
Little of what I'm about to say is bound to be original, yet I have found that I sometimes read something a second or third time and suddenly it resonates with me. The message hasn't changed, but I have and the words take on a deeper meaning, that was previously hidden to me.
Failure is often times seen as a good thing since you can learn and adapt, grow stronger, and improve for your next or current venture.
I would argue there are two types of failure, the public one, that is brought into the lime-light, felt, experienced, maybe painful but that is ultimately used to learn from. This is the type of failure people often look back on fondly, the one they see as integral to their journey.
The second one is the hidden kind, the shameful one, the kind of failure, that you refuse to acknowledge or engage with, the kind of failure that is very often simply the failure to show up.
A couple of years ago I started a business for a monthly subscription box. The basic idea was that if you talk to any person, most will tell you how much they love traveling, yet most people can live their dream maybe for a week or two every year since money and vacation days are just too scarce.
So I would pick a different target destination every month and try to capture the essence of what people are looking to experience there. Send them food, photos, stories, memorabilia. Let them taste the foods of the tuscany, feel the sand, imagine the breeze, be in awe at the ancientness of Incan temples or the beauty of an untouched piece of forest.
I started calculating what I would need to craft the experience I wanted to provide to people and arrived at a price point of 45€ per month and box. I thought to myself: "If people are paying that much, the presentation and packaging should look the part" which is where one of my two major mistakes with the business started.
I looked for a design agency that would build me a "proper looking" website and take care of the packaging design. I was looking to have it built in two weeks, which the agency assured me, they could meet, and which we never put in writing. The whole thing ended up taking six months and eating up the majority of the 8000€ fund I had for getting the business off the ground.
During the whole time, I had running costs due to legal responsibilities since I had already registered the business. During any point of that progress, I could have secured extra commitments from the agency (or just never spent that much money on something fundamentally not necessary in the first place) but I didn't. Results felt always just around the corner "as soon as he's back from vacation, it will basically be finished"
The end result was beautiful, but also too late. I had enough money left to ship exactly one month's boxes (from Tuscany) to a couple of reviewers, which resulted in some sales, that I ended up refunding because I didn't have the means to finance the second month.
As weird as it may sound after describing blowing that much of my budget on something non-essential, I would say my second mistake was operating from a mindset of scarcity. I read MJs book, I knew about the importance of Need, I told people how important it is to test the market. Yet I didn't do it myself. I had a budget in my mind, with no extra income at the time and it felt more justified to spend thousands "on the product" than 100 bucks on some ad campaigns to see if I could secure some actual commitment before the fact, instead of just the encouraging words of the people I was talking to.
Something I liked about the experience was that, despite some pretty big F*ckups, the first attempt at building a business, made by some kid with no notable background and just some experience reselling, was pretty close to actually being viable. I enjoyed the thought of how much I could better the odds, each time I reflected and learned.
Unfortunately, the time of failing publicly was over and I started to fail silently.
I had run out of money for the business and refunded the sales, yet the bills kept coming. It was painful, a reminder of my failures and I pushed the thoughts and the letters aside. The bills kept racking up, many of which could have been avoided with a simple phone call, yet as the pile kept mounting so did my apprehension to deal with it all.
I just wanted to escape it all and it took somebody actually showing up to my house to foreclose on some my stuff to get my a$$ up, close the business, and try to salvage what was salvageable.
The experience stuck with me for a long time and I would say remnants are still there. I still wanted to believe I could do anything I set my mind to, but somewhere deep within there was doubt. I still had goals I wanted to achieve, but they moved to someday instead of today. The past four years have mostly been inactive, some time spent doing jobs that I hated, some time unemployed, because I knew I didn't want to stay in a standard job, yet lacked the confidence in myself, to actually stay consistent with self-managed ventures. And even though I spent four years "failing" in a way, little more was learned than had I sulked for a month, put the ego aside, and truly started up back from the bottom.
This brings me to F*ck-This-Events, when I read about them I often imagined a situation much like my own, somebody who can't take it anymore and who, as a result, just bursts into a flurry of activity to reforge their life. I thought I experienced the start of that several times, yet it never stuck. As much as I wanted to escape my misery, in my mind I was still acting out of desperation and not allowing myself the time to actually develop, to be in the process of continuously changing instead of already having changed that instant. Slow and steady didn't feel enough.
What actually helped me in the end was to humble myself, getting to a point where my basic needs were met and where I could slowly apply myself to building up the kind of character I need to accomplish everything I set out to do.
I'm still working my way through 7 Habits of Highly Effective People which is greatly helping in that regard and I'd say it's having a similarly large effect on me as TMF had when I first read it.
I'm step by step gaining momentum and getting better, but most of all, I'm enjoying every step of the process. My weekly tasks are in line with my goals and dreams, I'm not floundering, but feeling in control, and every day I'm building something, helping someone, while at the same time taking time to build my capacity to do even better in the future.
It's only been a couple of weeks of seemingly tiny improvements, yet if I look back to the beginning of October, I'm already living an entirely different live.
I've recently returned to reading forum posts while reading The Great Rat Race Escape . The feeling of seeing many of the same people from years ago, still being in the comments, adding their thoughts and experiences left and right is hard to describe. It's humbling, awe-inspiring, and is at the same time exactly what I expected after previously experiencing their commitment to adding something to the world.
While many of you are further along your journey than I am, I do still hope that at least one person will be able to take something from this.
Tomorrow I'll post about what I've done and what's yet to come in regard to freelance voice-over work
This will be a progress thread that gets into the nitty-gritty of the execution of starting out as a voice actor. With the goal of reaching a level that allows me to use my freelance work as a launch pad and base of support to grow the business that is my end goal on a business and personal level.
Yet I want to use this first post to reflect on some lessons learned in the hopes that they might help somebody else on their road.
Little of what I'm about to say is bound to be original, yet I have found that I sometimes read something a second or third time and suddenly it resonates with me. The message hasn't changed, but I have and the words take on a deeper meaning, that was previously hidden to me.
Failure is often times seen as a good thing since you can learn and adapt, grow stronger, and improve for your next or current venture.
I would argue there are two types of failure, the public one, that is brought into the lime-light, felt, experienced, maybe painful but that is ultimately used to learn from. This is the type of failure people often look back on fondly, the one they see as integral to their journey.
The second one is the hidden kind, the shameful one, the kind of failure, that you refuse to acknowledge or engage with, the kind of failure that is very often simply the failure to show up.
A couple of years ago I started a business for a monthly subscription box. The basic idea was that if you talk to any person, most will tell you how much they love traveling, yet most people can live their dream maybe for a week or two every year since money and vacation days are just too scarce.
So I would pick a different target destination every month and try to capture the essence of what people are looking to experience there. Send them food, photos, stories, memorabilia. Let them taste the foods of the tuscany, feel the sand, imagine the breeze, be in awe at the ancientness of Incan temples or the beauty of an untouched piece of forest.
I started calculating what I would need to craft the experience I wanted to provide to people and arrived at a price point of 45€ per month and box. I thought to myself: "If people are paying that much, the presentation and packaging should look the part" which is where one of my two major mistakes with the business started.
I looked for a design agency that would build me a "proper looking" website and take care of the packaging design. I was looking to have it built in two weeks, which the agency assured me, they could meet, and which we never put in writing. The whole thing ended up taking six months and eating up the majority of the 8000€ fund I had for getting the business off the ground.
During the whole time, I had running costs due to legal responsibilities since I had already registered the business. During any point of that progress, I could have secured extra commitments from the agency (or just never spent that much money on something fundamentally not necessary in the first place) but I didn't. Results felt always just around the corner "as soon as he's back from vacation, it will basically be finished"
The end result was beautiful, but also too late. I had enough money left to ship exactly one month's boxes (from Tuscany) to a couple of reviewers, which resulted in some sales, that I ended up refunding because I didn't have the means to finance the second month.
As weird as it may sound after describing blowing that much of my budget on something non-essential, I would say my second mistake was operating from a mindset of scarcity. I read MJs book, I knew about the importance of Need, I told people how important it is to test the market. Yet I didn't do it myself. I had a budget in my mind, with no extra income at the time and it felt more justified to spend thousands "on the product" than 100 bucks on some ad campaigns to see if I could secure some actual commitment before the fact, instead of just the encouraging words of the people I was talking to.
Something I liked about the experience was that, despite some pretty big F*ckups, the first attempt at building a business, made by some kid with no notable background and just some experience reselling, was pretty close to actually being viable. I enjoyed the thought of how much I could better the odds, each time I reflected and learned.
Unfortunately, the time of failing publicly was over and I started to fail silently.
I had run out of money for the business and refunded the sales, yet the bills kept coming. It was painful, a reminder of my failures and I pushed the thoughts and the letters aside. The bills kept racking up, many of which could have been avoided with a simple phone call, yet as the pile kept mounting so did my apprehension to deal with it all.
I just wanted to escape it all and it took somebody actually showing up to my house to foreclose on some my stuff to get my a$$ up, close the business, and try to salvage what was salvageable.
The experience stuck with me for a long time and I would say remnants are still there. I still wanted to believe I could do anything I set my mind to, but somewhere deep within there was doubt. I still had goals I wanted to achieve, but they moved to someday instead of today. The past four years have mostly been inactive, some time spent doing jobs that I hated, some time unemployed, because I knew I didn't want to stay in a standard job, yet lacked the confidence in myself, to actually stay consistent with self-managed ventures. And even though I spent four years "failing" in a way, little more was learned than had I sulked for a month, put the ego aside, and truly started up back from the bottom.
This brings me to F*ck-This-Events, when I read about them I often imagined a situation much like my own, somebody who can't take it anymore and who, as a result, just bursts into a flurry of activity to reforge their life. I thought I experienced the start of that several times, yet it never stuck. As much as I wanted to escape my misery, in my mind I was still acting out of desperation and not allowing myself the time to actually develop, to be in the process of continuously changing instead of already having changed that instant. Slow and steady didn't feel enough.
What actually helped me in the end was to humble myself, getting to a point where my basic needs were met and where I could slowly apply myself to building up the kind of character I need to accomplish everything I set out to do.
I'm still working my way through 7 Habits of Highly Effective People which is greatly helping in that regard and I'd say it's having a similarly large effect on me as TMF had when I first read it.
I'm step by step gaining momentum and getting better, but most of all, I'm enjoying every step of the process. My weekly tasks are in line with my goals and dreams, I'm not floundering, but feeling in control, and every day I'm building something, helping someone, while at the same time taking time to build my capacity to do even better in the future.
It's only been a couple of weeks of seemingly tiny improvements, yet if I look back to the beginning of October, I'm already living an entirely different live.
I've recently returned to reading forum posts while reading The Great Rat Race Escape . The feeling of seeing many of the same people from years ago, still being in the comments, adding their thoughts and experiences left and right is hard to describe. It's humbling, awe-inspiring, and is at the same time exactly what I expected after previously experiencing their commitment to adding something to the world.
While many of you are further along your journey than I am, I do still hope that at least one person will be able to take something from this.
Tomorrow I'll post about what I've done and what's yet to come in regard to freelance voice-over work
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