Anyone Can Be Like Joe Rogan And Lainey Wilson
Just be prepared to spend 5,000 hours podcasting and years before you get noticed
My Thanksgiving activities with family concluded. I sunk into the recliner at my parents’ house recovering from a food coma. The NFL Thanksgiving game played on the TV. The game was a snoozer, but my mom’s favorite part of any big football game was upcoming, the halftime show. Lainey Wilson, an American country singer, was performing. I was familiar with her name, but I was unfamiliar with her origins. I am always interested in success stories and their rise to fame.
Lainey Wilson has 9.7 million monthly listeners on Spotify, but it was a slow build. In 2006, at 14, she released her first EP. Throughout high school, she had a job impersonating Hannah Montana that refined her musical talents performing across many states. In 2011, she graduated high school in Baskin, Louisiana, a town of 250 people. She had 24 people in her graduating class. Post graduation, she moved to Nashville, Tennessee to chase her country music dreams.
To make ends meet, she lived in a camper trailer outside of a recording studio. The studio owner paid for the electricity and water. Chasing dreams isn’t for everyone. The trailer wasn’t luxurious. Rain sounded like hail, the trailer could be blown away by the wind from a storm, and she flooded it with a foot of water. The trailer was her home for her first three years in Nashville.
Perseverance and resilience describe those years of her life. She would play small shows and refine her songwriting craft. She released her first album in 2014 to little fanfare. It wasn’t until 2016, five years after landing in Nashville, that she began to garner an audience. Her album Tougher cracked the Billboard Top Country Albums peaking at 44. Work remained.
In 2018, she signed a publishing deal and management deal.
In 2021, the Academy of Country Music Awards named her New Female Artist of the Year and awarded her “Song Of The Year”.
In 2022, the CMAs followed suit and coined her Female Vocalist of the Year and New Artist of the Year.
This year, 13 years after arriving in Nashville, she was nominated for her first Grammy for Best Country Duo/Group Performance.
You can follow a path similar to Lainey Wilson but be prepared to be obsessed with music before you get your start and move to Nashville. Be ready to sacrifice and live in a trailer outside a recording studio for three years to make ends meet to chase a dream. It might take seven years for your country album to sniff a top chart. Ten years later, people have taken notice and nominate you as the new artist of the year, but it doesn’t begin to make sense until 13 years later when you are nominated for a Grammy. Numerous long nights, countless times questioning if you can do this, your resilience constantly tested, but you might get there. The work required shouldn’t go unnoticed. It is easy to romanticize success.
Especially when people think that anyone can be successful like Joe Rogan. We need more like him, they say as if it is easy to do what Joe Rogan does! Behind Joe Rogan is 2,240 episodes ranging from two to three hours. If you assume each episode is 2.5 hours that is 5,600 hours, or 336,00 minutes, spent recording over 15 years. We know a podcast is more than pressing record. Countless hours in production, time to coordinate the guests, and hours spent preparing for the podcast were poured in.
It is easy to analyze the successes and not realize the work required. Yes, you can be like Joe Rogan, but be prepared to spend over 5,000 hours podcasting. Yes, you can be like Lainey Wilson, but be prepared to spend seven years before getting noticed.
These stories exist everywhere, but it is important not to gloss over the finer details of what it entailed to reach the levels they attained.
MrBeast, the most subscribed YouTuber with 330 million subscribers, went on This Past Weekend with Theo Von and talked about how he got where he is now,
“I started making videos when I was 11… No one watched when I was 11, no one watched when I was 12, no one watched when I was 13, no one watched when I was 14, no one watched when I was 15… is anyone ever going to watch these?... and then 16 no one’s watching them, 17 no one’s watching them… Finally, 18 about to graduate high school, still no one watches the videos.”
He later mentions when he began college, his videos finally gained traction, and he was able to profit. It makes sense. In a study, a pattern emerged with scientists and their work.
The best work came later in their career.
Sometimes, I think about my writing. Sure, I have written a few things. Namely, I committed to writing 100 pieces, but it didn’t come without frustration. I am not even two years into writing, but sometimes, my expectations aren’t aligned to a reasonable reality. I expect more success. I see the success of writers I admire but fail to recognize they have written for five, ten, or even, twenty years. It’s easy to get caught in the facade that we should arrive quickly and be a young phenom.
It took Joe Rogan, Lainey Wilson, MrBeast, and everyone else time to get where they were going. I tell myself there will be moments of doubt, little success, frustration, stagnation, and questioning, but I remind myself of a quote from author Julia Cameron,
“It is impossible to get better and look good at the same time. Give yourself permission to be a beginner.”
Give yourself time to fail and to get where you want to go. Only so much is in our control. Success takes time. The best work is yet to come. Here's to being bad and failing as we go along. It takes years to get where we want to be, and understanding that is half of the battle.
-Scantron
Always appreciate you for reading.