What’s the immutable law of the road for Voice Actors?

Clients you haven’t heard from for months appear from nowhere and want it yesterday.

Yup, it happened to me again.  But luckily, I had my VocalBoothToGo, and a trusty Zoom H6n recorder with me.

So there’s my first lesson: don’t look a gift horse in the mouth…even when it’s on vakay.  I still made my Kayaking appointment.  🙂

Second lesson:  less is more.  The less you HAVE to do, the less you ACTUALLY do, so what you DO do is efficient.  Email that normally takes me all day to wade through when I’m in my Las Vegas home office, took me, like, 30 mins to do on the farm.  So much of it just seemed superfluous in the total scheme of things. That’s an attitude I need to explore now that I’m back in the office.

And oddly enough, my blog got just as many or more hits as usual posting only a few words and a pretty picture from my travels every day.  What’s up with that?  Should I just forgo all the voiceover stuff and be a photography blogger?

Finally, there’s no way to overstate the value of time off/time away/time wasted. It’s reverse logic.  Work harder…get more done, make more progress…right?  Only the third lesson from the road is: that’s only true to a certain point, and then the law of diminishing returns takes over, and you end up spinning your wheels.  Doing (relatively) nothing is cathartic for most humans (me too), and gives you space for true reflection, evaluation of important priorities, and resets your gauges for goals in life and work.

Can’t get away?  Then do it from home.  Only LEAVE home.  Have someone watch the kids, tell your spouse you need a coupla hours, and go do something aimless.  I guarantee it will be worth your while.

Honorable mention for lessons on the road: The newcomer wannabe’s come out of the woodwork:  Phone calls, FB messenger, texts, and emails from total strangers with that age-old line:  “…all my friends tell me I have a great voice, and I found you on the internet, so I thought I’d call to see if you can help me get into voiceover…”  Why when I’m on vacation?  It’s happening so much lately, that for a split second there, I had a thought that maybe I should just chuck it all, and be a VO coach.  

Nah.

As I’ve said before on the pages of this blog; coaching would just end up taking time from what I really want to do:  voice work.  That’s my opinion anyway.

Oh, and you won’t wanna miss tomorrow’s blog.  A real treat!  While I was on vacation another total stranger enthusiastically sent me a full-blown studio recording of a song about voice actors.

I kid you not.

CourVO