By Perry Michael Simon From All Access

As with a lot of things in life, radio people live with an undercurrent of fear. We fear losing our jobs. We fear making that one mistake on the air or on social media that can end a career. We fear getting hotlined. We fear being blamed for trainwreck segues (“it was the computer! Honest!”). We fear, as I wrote about last week, trying something new and different, lest it not work out. Sales people fear missing their goals, which in turn makes them fear their sales managers, who also fear missing their goals and angering their market managers, who fear missing their goals and thus fear corporate, which fears missing their goals and upsetting the private equity firms, made up of people who fear… okay, they don’t have a lot of fear, other than not being able to completely and swiftly strip-mine the companies in which they invested, but everyone else lives with fear.

The other night, I was watching the Sixers game — no, this is not about my fear that Joel Embiid won’t be able to play in the next series, or will be hobbled by that meniscus tear; that’s another column — and a Nike commercial came on. (A Nike commercial on an NBA playoff game! How unusual!) Yes, it was one of the usual Nike spots urging people to get out and do athletic stuff, but this one, the lead spot in a new campaign called “Play New,” was a little different: It showed failure. In rapid-fire succession, the spot — you can see it here — shows a bunch of people who mostly happen to be world-class athletes failing at sports that aren’t their specialties. Sabrina Ionescu, the WNBA superstar, hits a tennis ball into the net. Paralympic medalist runner Blake Leeper gets into a batting cage and his swing is… not good. Champion sprinter Dina Asher-Smith tries golf and it does not go well. There are bowling gutter bowls, skateboard and surfing wipeouts, soccer kicks going very wide-right, weight lifting mishaps, bad archery (by singer Rosalia). The narration starts with “You know what? Here’s to going for it… and being terrible.” And it goes on to celebrate “giving it your all, even though you kind of suck.” You get the idea.

The spot resonated with me, because as an athlete, I sucked, too. My dad was an athlete, a good enough baseball player to get major league tryouts; I was not good enough to be more than a benchwarmer in Little League. At some point, frustrated, I gave up on the whole ball-playing thing, and since intramural basketball in college and a 10K race about 30 years ago, I haven’t competed in any sports since. A lot of it is that fear of sucking; I embarrass easily, too easily, and I know it. I don’t want to look awkward on a tennis court, or playing basketball, or trying golf. The commercial didn’t inspire me to do any of that again, but it did remind me that allowing fear to keep you from doing things you want to do is not always wise. (Unless you really want to go into cliff diving or sword swallowing.)

Back to radio, and I recognize that this is very much similar to what I wrote last week, but this time, it’s more about motivation, about WHY we don’t take chances than HOW to take chances. Besides, it was a long holiday weekend, and I bet you didn’t read that one. So…

Our fears of making mistakes and paying dearly for them has unfortunate consequences, namely that if you don’t even try to do something, you won’t innovate, you won’t create new things that might succeed, you, and in turn, the industry, won’t grow and rise above radio’s present stasis. Part of that is also based on the idea that we aren’t given time to suck. The industry demands instant success, and if it doesn’t happen, heads will roll. And so we get format flips to the same old formats we’ve been doing all along, the same “best of the ’80s, ’90s and today,” the same talk shows hosted by generic angry guys, the same music in every market, the same everything. We get hosts who stick to reading the cards, lest a slip into something more creative draw a complaint comment on the station Facebook page. We do the same things that got us to the point of limited or no growth, fearing that someone will think we suck. You can argue that in fearing sucking, we end up sucking anyway.

And maybe we do suck at times, but you don’t get better at something unless you try it and keep trying. Practice makes something a lot closer to perfect. We used to have that option in the “farm system,” which let new talent work things out before, if that’s what they were aiming for, climbing the ladder to a larger market. That’s become less of an option, of course, and while it means small towns are getting the same voice tracks as big cities, it also means new talent isn’t working out the kinks, not in radio, at least. That has to change. Last week’s column included suggestions that might address this issue, in case you’re interested.

Let’s also address striving for perfection, nothing out of place, no slip-ups. That’s fine, but it underestimates the audience’s tolerance for anything less than perfection. Perfection — tightly programmed stations, slickly edited imaging and bits, every element of the formatics nailed down — can be sterile and boring. Humans screw up, and while I wouldn’t advise deliberately screwing up, the occasional stumble or weird segue or glitch can also be endearing to the audience, a reminder that they’re listening to a person and not a computer (even if, ultimately, they ARE listening to a computer). And they’re increasingly exposed to podcasts hosted by humans who don’t have perfect “radio voices” and don’t follow radio formatics, so perhaps we can leave the fear of “not doing it right” behind now.

We — radio — have to get past the fear of failing, the fear of not being perfect, the fear of something just not working. We can’t continue to hold back due to fear. It’s a universal feature of life that you don’t really know if you can’t do something, or can’t do it well, until you try. Unless we all get past the fear of sucking, we aren’t going to know for sure what we’re capable of achieving.

See? This column kinda sucked, but at least I took a shot. I’ve only been doing this for a couple of decades. A few more and I might start getting it right.

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You won’t fear going on the air without material if you use All Access’ show prep column Talk Topics. Think of it as a safety net. Just click here and/or follow the Talk Topics Twitter feed at @talktopics with every story individually linked to the appropriate item.

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Podcast Movement announced this week that I’ll be among the speakers again this year, which you knew already, but now it’s official, I’ll be moderating Audioboom’s panel on the pros and cons of being affiliated with a podcast network, alongside Audioboom’s Brendan Regan. So that’s going to be August 3-6 in Nashville and there are early bird discounts and virtual options should you not be able or willing to travel; here’s the registration link. Come on out, why don’t you.

Perry Michael Simon
Vice President/Editor, News-Talk-Sports and Podcast
AllAccess.com
[email protected]
www.facebook.com/pmsimon
Twitter @pmsimon
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