Below is a transcript I’ve prepared to supplement my blog post, which is a commentary on ‘Work to Publish,’ a presentation given by Jack Conte, Patreon co-founder and CEO. Here is a link to the video.
Enjoy!
‘Work to Publish’ by Jack Conte
Early on in my music career, I realized I had a problem.
I would export a final version of a song. I’d call it “TickTock-Final.” Right before uploading it to Disc Makers, I’d give it another listen and I’d realize that cymbals were a little bit too bright. And I’d do another mix and I’d export the real final version this time when I was done, and I’d call it “TickTock-FinalFINAL.” And then I’d second guess myself and I’d send the new mix to a friend who would tell me that lowering the cymbals made the Juno stick way out too much. So I’d fix that, and then this process would repeat over and over and over again until my exports folder would look like this. And that’s when I started thinking about the concept, really, of finishing a piece of art. Like James was saying, hanging it on the wall.
What was so infuriating about this is that so many of my heroes seem to be able to finish so many things:
FreddieW: 231 videos.
Irving Berlin: 1500 songs.
Ella Fitzgerald: 84 albums.
Zach Weinersmith, 3000 comics.
Rob Has A Podcast: over 1300 podcasts.
J.K. Rolling: 7 novels in 10 years.
Woody Allen: 49 movies.
Peter Hollins: 27 music videos. 35 songs. An album. In 2014!
Hank Green: 6868 videos.
How do they finish so many things? It was mind boggling to me. And 8 years later, after spending a few years in tech, I’ve seen engineers and designers and product managers and anyone who puts things into the world struggle with this. The key realization for me was that I think this is a vocabulary problem. We have a vocabulary problem. When I think of things that finish, I think of meals or vacations or sports matches.
The end of a sports match feels final and a number of things contribute to this feeling. There’s a binary outcome and a state change. One contender becomes a winner. The other contender becomes a loser. There’s a quantitative measure of the end state literally called the final score. And there’s literally a clock that counts down to zero. Finishing a sports match feels like finality, feels like relief. There’s a simple emotion, either total elation or total disappointment. There’s complete clarity.
But when I finish song, I get none of these things. There’s no state change or binary outcome. The song is neither good nor bad; it’s a totally qualitative spectrum. There’s no countdown that hits zero. Finishing a sports match feels totally different. The finality of the sports match is replaced with a feeling of deficiency when publishing a song. The feeling of relief at the end of a sports match is replaced with a feeling of stress. Is it ready? Should I make a few more tweaks? The simple emotion at the end of a sports match, total elation or total disappointment, is replaced by complex, conflicting emotions and indecision about what to do next. The sense of clarity is replaced by a deep uncertainty. Finishing a song doesn’t feel like finishing at all.
We have a vocabulary problem. It’s silly to use the same word to describe the conclusion of a sports match and the trailing fade-out of the creative process. Publishing is not finishing. All the emotions are different. Publishing is something else. Publishing is what John Lennon did to wrap up Revolver.
The following excerpt is from a book called Here, There and Everywhere by Jeff Emmerich, the recording engineer for most of the Beatles records. He writes:
“It wasn’t till the very end when most of revolver was mixed and ready to be mastered that someone realized the album was a song short. So on the next-to-last night, the group began frantically rehearsing John’s new song “She Said She Said.” John had always been the basher in the group—his attitude was ‘Let’s just get it done’—so it was no big surprise that we got the entire song recorded and mixed in nine hours, as opposed to the more than three days we spent on “Here, There and Everywhere”… It still sounds scrappy and rough to me. It’s got that ragged feel of a track that was done in the middle of the night under pressure. The next day we staggered in for another five hours of mixing and sequencing and the album was done. Incredibly, Revolver had been completed in just over ten weeks, with many songs only taking a few hours to get down on tape.”
That’s publishing.
Publishing is how Woody Allen thinks about his catalogue of films, which I got from a book called Woody Allen on Woody Allen, a series of conversations with the filmmaker. What he says is “I make so many films that I don’t care about individual successes and failures… I’ve tried very hard to make my films into a non-event. I just want to work, that’s all. Just put the film out for people to see, just keep grinding them out. I hope I’ll have a long and healthy life, that I can keep working all the time, and that I can look back in old age and say, “I made fifty movies, and some of them were excellent and some of them were not so good, and some of them were funny.” I just don’t want to get into that situation so many of my contemporaries are in, where they make one film every few years and it’s a Big Event.”
That’s publishing.
Publishing is deciding to stop when you want to keep working, and it’s super painful. Some people can’t do it and some people can. People like Freddie W and Ella Fitzgerald and Zac Weener Smith and Rob Has a Podcast and Woody Allen and Hank Green and Peter Hollins and J.K. Rolling. How do they finish so many things?
They don’t. But they publish them anyway. Publishing, though, is more than just a single decisive moment. It’s more than just the art of identifying the point at which additional work yields diminishing marginal returns. For me now, publishing starts the instant I start recording a new song. Publishing, I found, works best if you think of it as a style of working. It’s an attitude that persists throughout the entire creative process, from the moment you begin work to the moment you give it up to the world. Working to publish is about getting shit done. The whole time. Your whole mentality shifts when you’re working to publish. You focus on the stuff that matters and you ignore the stuff that doesn’t. Even the fun stuff, the stuff that calls out to you and begs you to enjoy 30 minutes satisfying your obsessive desire to make something perfect that only you will notice.
You write the next scene, you record the next instrument, you build the next set, you shoot the next take, you colour the next frame, you design the next synth. Working to publish? It’s selfless. It’s outward focused. It’s about results and giving back and contributing to the world. Working for pleasure, on the other hand, how I used to spend most of my time working, is inward focused. It’s slow and enjoyable, but ultimately it’s about giving to oneself. It’s rooted in the ego. It’s fixing details that you, and only you, care about. It’s a luxurious self-indulgence. It’s calm and it’s a great way to unwind and relax. And it’s freaking fun as heck. And there’a time and a place for working for pleasure. But like any luxury, I try my best to use it sparingly.
I feel like a bit of a hypocrite here because working to publish is hard, and for me, it’s more of a North Star than it is like a habit. It’s a framework that I aspire to, not something that I’m great at or figured out.
When I look back at my YouTube catalogue, I’m reminded of a period between October 2011 and March 2013 when I only published one video, and that video is not even mine, so it really shouldn’t even count. Basically, I went for 17 months without publishing anything. I’d been learning how to make electronic music instead of putting out my stuff. I was fretting over the details. I have a memory from that period of working on a song and comparing it to a Skrillex track and feeling like my kick drum was too wimpy. I spent five days tweaking that kick drum, five days tweaking that kick drum from 9:00 in the morning to midnight, locked in my studio, wasting my time nitpicking that fucking kick drum. I got chased by the monster of “your kick drum isn’t good enough, not as good as a professional kick drum.” I forgot about working to publish, and I did that for 17 months. I released nothing.
My heroes are great publishers. My heroes have mastered the art of doing only what matters the whole time and then stopping. I think that’s badass. It’s a great strategy because the world is made of funnels. This is something I learned working at Patreon.
Everything is a funnel. In order for a sales team to be successful, they have to send 10,000 e-mails to get 1000 responses to find 500 people interested to get 100 phone calls to get 20 commitments to get 10 sales. This phenomenon is called a funnel, and it appears everywhere. For websites: 1,000,000 people visit the home page, 100,000 click “Learn More,” 10,000 click “Buy,” 6000 make it to the second page of the payment flow, 2000 enter their credit cards, and 1800 of those credit cards process payments without declining. The world is made of funnels.
I remember realizing how this phenomenon could apply to my everyday life about a year ago. It was Monday and I wanted to see a doctor by the end of the week (I’m not going to tell you why—it’s gross). I ended up using Yelp to find a really promising-sounding doc with good reviews. I called them, the phone rang four times, and the machine picked up, at which point I left a message. Two days went by. I hadn’t gotten a response yet, so I called back and left another message. A day later, I got a phone call from a nurse, and after explaining my symptoms, they informed me that they didn’t treat people with my particular problem and that it would be better to call a different specialist. So now, a week into the process, I was back at square one. A full week had gone by. I wasn’t any closer to seeing a doctor.
Then I remembered that the world is made of funnels. So I went back to Yelp and this time I found 8 doctors that looked promising and determined that 5 of them would work for me and called them all. 3 of them answered their phones, 2 of them had appointments available in the next two weeks, 1 of them could see me right away, which meant that I just funnelled the shit out of doctor’s appointments. Because the world is made of funnels!
That’s why working to publish is a great strategy, because when you work to publish you end up making a lot more stuff for the top of the funnel. At one point I heard some lore that Irving Berlin was said to have written 10 songs for every 1 that he released, and that means that he wrote 15,000 songs in his life and he published 1500 of them. Of those, 25 songs hit #1 on the charts. He was nominated for 12 Tonys and Academy Awards and won 4 of them. Irving Berlin, whether he knew it or not, was a funnel master. But let’s look at his batting average for a second. That’s 15,000 songs and 4 awards. That’s 0.026% conversion through the funnel.
And he had no idea which songs would hit and which ones wouldn’t because you can’t choose what you’re famous for. I learned that lesson the hard way after spending a measly one day making a YouTube video that now has 9 million views and spending 6 months working on a record that sold less than 300 copies. You can’t choose what you’re famous for; that’s up to the funnel. I can’t make a song a hit; that’s up to the funnel. I can’t control how my songs push through the world and are experienced by others; that’s up to the funnel.
But what I can do is be prolific. I can be creative. I can make great stuff. What I can do is work to publish. I can record the next song, and write the next slide, and design the next webpage, and cook the next recipe, paint the next stroke and draw the next comic. And then I can give those things up to the funnel and I can move on and I can go to sleep at night knowing that I did everything I could.