Every Path Forward Will Have Obstacles

During a recent summertime hike we approached the bridge. A recent storm had blown through and knocked down a tree that fell across the bridge. Not a big deal. We just stepped over it carefully. Thankfully the bridge didn't suffer any major damage. Neither did we. It was an obstacle that wasn't there the last time we trekked through the area. It only slowed us down slightly. Some obstacles are like that. At first glance we may exclaim, "Oh no!" --- only to realize, it's not that bad. Or tough. Some obstacles are worse. That tree could have collapsed the entire bridge forcing us to improvise by adjusting our course over the creek below. The trek would have been slightly more difficult. The path wouldn't have been as straight-forward or smooth, but we could have followed the path forward. Mostly, it would have been an inconvenience. Life has shown me that's how most obstacles are. An inconvenience. We often make them out to be worse than they really are because they're unexpected. They make us spend more time lamenting their existence than we may in figuring out how to effectively navigate past them. Other obstacles are different and those are the ones I'm most focused on today. The obstacles that present themselves because we're intentionally forging a new path. A better path. One we believe will take us further. Or faster. And because it's a new path things appear like obstacles, but we really have no way to know because we've never ventured this way before. I wonder if we're seeing things correctly. For the past year plus I've spent considerable time analyzing a podcast that I began in June 2021 - Hot Springs Village Inside Out. I started the show with a co-host, but a year in we both got COVID and I had a whole lot going on. I remained very active behind the scene doing all the production work, including posting the shows and all that mundane but necessary work required to get a podcast out in the ether. I lost interest in co-hosting for a variety of reasons - mostly because it was a podcast about a specific community and I wasn't there as much as I wanted to be. My co-host lived their full-time. It just made sense to me to step away, clear my head - and my deck of all the stuff going on and figure out a path forward. A different, new path. In March 2023 I moved forward from The Yellow Studio v2.0 to v3.0. Then by May I moved forward some more by going to The Yellow Studio v3.1. You should know that when I built/assembled The Yellow Studio, I'd never done anything like that before. I started from scratch and had to learn. A lot! Over 20 years ago things were much more difficult and complicated. The technology for podcasting didn't easily exist. For a podcaster to do what I most wanted to do - operate using a broadcast workflow - it was hard and expensive because it required hardware. I wanted to hit RECORD and have my sound be as good as being on a Skype call. Yes, Virginia, we were once relegated to making Skype calls because all these other services like Zoom didn't exist. This meant lots of hardware and even more cabling. Routing those cables was a major obstacle when once conquered left you staring in the face of yet another monster, adjusting the hardware so it'd sound just right. No sooner had I hurdled one obstacle, then I'd be facing a higher hurdle. Or so it seemed. Mostly because the learning curve was steep. But... Once the obstacles were overcome - and they all were - then it was easy. I simply fired up the machinery, got behind the mic and hit RECORD. Only if a cable or connector failed - or forbid, a piece of equipment failed (yes, it happened a few times), I had a very predictable workflow that...well, it just worked. Every path forward will most certainly have obstacles, if only your need to learn something new. Usually, there'll be other obstacles brought about by the result of traveling an unknown path. It's why forward progress is such an individual and personal journey. I can benefit somewhat from somebody else who took a similar path, but it's not going to be the same. We're different people. We're on the path at different times. We've entered the path at a different spot. We've got different people in our traveling party who are helping or hindering us. We're going to believe different things about the path. We're going to see the path and the obstacles through a different perspective. Similar paths can result in extraordinarily different experiences and outcomes. It may explain, in part, why so many people don't dare to venture out into unknown territory. It's filled with risks. Rewards, too perhaps, but it's just so easy to think about what might go wrong. Look and listen to the news media if you dare to challenge that idea. Remove fear mongering from the media and you'll be left with very little. "Be afraid. Be very afraid."    - line from the movie, The Fly No. Don't. Instead, be thoughtful, purposeful and intentional. Believe in things that are true. Believe in your ability to figure it out. Permit me to use the evolution of The Yellow Studio to illustrate.  I went from not even thinking about having a podcasting studio to saving, investing and creating one. Prior to 1997 I wasn't thinking of using the Internet for much except email. The novelty of the Internet was captivating, but I wasn't visionary enough to see what it would or could become. It was magical, but cumbersome. Nothing was easy, including connecting. Slow modems. Slower loading times where we'd anxiously watch a web page appear from the top down, often taking many seconds before we could see the entire page. It was all new! Unknown to me and most people. The path forward had a ton of obstacles. Each of those obstacles created an industry - a solution. Sometimes a number of solutions. Thinking back to 1997 and the industries that didn't even exist startle me back to reality as I hear people today pine about how A.I. is going to eliminate jobs. It'll change 'em, that's for sure...but if it follows the obstacles and problems of the early Internet, it'll spawn a boatload of things we've yet to experience. Innovations do that. It was true with the printing press, cars, planes, electricity, telephones, tractors, and most everything else that has come along to change life. Thoughts of creating a setup where I could engage in live Skype calls - which I could easily record - and where I could record audio for documenting things for the future of my kids (and family) sparked me to figure it out. I was starting from scratch. Nothing was easy. It was all problematic. But doable. Time was wasting so it never dawned on me that I might be better off just waiting until the tech got easier. One obstacle is not knowing the present or the future. I never thought, "You know, one day this won't be so hard." Somebody else may have been thinking like that, but not me. I just knew what I wanted to do and how I wanted to do it. My path forward focused on a workflow that I knew needed to fit how I life. I was disinterested in making major adjustments to the way I most enjoy working. Being creative was at the heart of it all. I wanted to communicate. Mostly, I wanted to document thoughts, ideas, feelings, beliefs, experiences and insights. I didn't want to spend hours cobbling things together after the fact. I didn't want to edit after I recorded. I wanted to edit as part of the preparation because for me, that happens during creation. A friend put language to it by asking me, "Do you want the recording workflow or the broadcasting workflow?" Recording is like musicians making a record. They lay down tracks, add things...add more things, then some engineer puts it all together to produce the final product. There's a lot of live recording followed by intense editing to get it just right. Broadcasting is like radio talk shows. The hosts prepare their show and go on the air. It's live and there is no editing. If their show airs from 6 am to 10 am, then it goes out during those 4 hours and it's over. Done. I was familiar with both workflows because I was always into music and I had gone through broadcast journalism in college. Broadcasting workflow was my only consideration. Again, I wanted to spend time creating before recording, not afterward. It wasn't about the tech for me. It was about what I wanted to say and document. The message always took priority, but the tech was the obstacle. How could I do what I most wanted and do it in a way where it didn't dampen my enthusiasm? My biggest hurdle was fear that if I didn't get it right, I'd wreck what I most wanted to do. The details of the broadcast workflow tech don't matter except to reiterate that the tech required hardware, which required dollars. Recording workflow was much, much cheaper, but I knew that was a dealbreaker for my purposes. So the obstacle of money was apparent and couldn't be overcome unless I was willing to compromise what I most wanted. I wasn't willing so I began to save and save and save some more. Patience was a virtue. While I was saving I was scouring the universe for the best deals. The heart of The Yellow Studio were microphone preamps that were $1,000 each (I wanted 2 because I wanted a 2 microphone set up so I could have a guest, even though I knew that wouldn't happen regularly). I found 2 brand new units, from an authorized retailer for $499 each. Turns out it was below dealer cost, but I snagged two of them because it afforded me to literally have 2 for the price of 1. Months and months of saving, preparing and diagraming how this would all be assembled started paying off. It was slow and arduous. When the gear was in place it got even more daunting because the signal chain - the way to connect all this stuff - was confusing. I just thought the money was the hurdle. Paying for all this stuff was only the beginning. During this time I was helping a young married couple....