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How one rejection email helped create Speke Podcasting · Your Mic

• 0:00
  When I was a kid, I wanted to be Bo Jackson.
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  Not like Bo Jackson, not inspired by Bo Jackson.
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  Bo Jackson.
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  Running back.
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  Outfielder.
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  The most gifted athlete of a generation.
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  The man who made a Nike commercial feel like a religious experience.
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  The guy who scored one of my all-time favorite touchdowns.
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  Monday night football when I was a kid, watching him play against the Seahawks.
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  He was on the Raiders and he ran 90 plus yards down the sideline and straight into the locker
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  room because he was running that fast and could not stop on the field.
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  That guy, that was the plan.
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  Seventh grade after football practice, Coach Swanson gathers all the boys in the locker
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  room and delivers the speech of a lifetime.
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  I'm the one I've never forgotten.
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  And that was the one that killed any dream I had of ever becoming Bo Jackson.
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  He said, and I'm paraphrasing, but not by much,
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  one in about a million kids will ever play professional football.
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  One in 10,000 or 100,000 or whatever even plays college ball.
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  So do good in school.
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  That was it.
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  That was the talk.
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  That was the talk that, again, changed my life.
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  and somewhere in the back of my 12-year-old brain, something quietly closed.
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  Not dramatically, not with a montage.
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  It just closed.
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  Welcome back to Your Mic.
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  My name is Freddy Cruz, and this episode is all about the things that were never supposed to happen.
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  This podcast.
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  My production company, Speak Podcasting.
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  Me.
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  I never went on to play football past high school.
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  I sat the bench in high school as a matter of fact junior year I hurt my knee six weeks out
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  of commission if I'm being honest if I'm being really really honest and I am I don't think I
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  was really ever all in not in the way you have to be to make that one in however many thousand
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  cut to play college ball Bo Jackson he was all in I was in love with the idea of being all in
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  The idea of scoring a touchdown on Monday Night Football to the sound of a roaring crowd on national TV.
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  The sound of hitting a home run in front of a jam-packed stadium.
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  That's the difference.
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  There is a difference.
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  So, what happened was football faded.
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  I pivoted because that's what I have done ever since I was a kid.
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  I pivot.
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  Couldn't be a pro athlete.
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  Well, I wanted to be on TV.
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  did not end up on TV.
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  So I ended up in radio.
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  And not because radio was the dream, but because radio
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  was the door that opened when the other doors didn't.
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  I stumbled into a career that will consume
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  the next 25 plus years of my life.
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  Middays, afternoons, weekend, overnights, a Sunday morning
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  public affairs show, a whole bunch of production, copywriting, 17,000 plus hours behind a microphone,
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  more than a thousand interviews and none of it was ever the plan.
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  All of it was the education.
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  And then that door closed too.
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  And I went looking for the next one.
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  450 plus job applications after
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  I left radio at the end of 2021.
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  Think about that for a second.
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  More than 450 times I applied for a
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  job.
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  Most of them, silence.
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  The kind of silence that makes you wonder if the email was even sent.
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  Oh, it was sent.
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  The kind of silence that at two in the morning starts to sound like
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  an answer.
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  A few of them got as far as interviews.
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  Interviews that felt promising.
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  Interviews that
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  did not lead anywhere.
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  And then, oh, then there was that one.
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  It led somewhere different.
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  It was a company that shall remain nameless, podcast production, B2B content, a team, an infrastructure, a real operation.
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  I wanted the job really bad.
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  So bad, that job that I wanted paid a quarter of my highest income earning year.
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  In other words, not very much.
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  I did not get the job, but I got something else.
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  A rejection letter that was not a form rejection, a personalized, thoughtful, genuinely kind letter that said, in essence, we see you.
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  This just isn't the right fit right now.
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  And that is the rejection I remember most out of the other 450 plus.
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  Here's what that letter did to me, though.
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  It woke something up.
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  I don't know if it was pride.
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  I don't know if it was spite.
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  I don't know if it was the specific alchemy of being seen and turned down in the same breath,
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  but I remember thinking, I know what to build.
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  I don't want to beat this company, not because I'm bitter and I am capable of having a chip on my shoulder,
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  but because they showed me the category was real.
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  That people were building podcast production companies and they were serious and they mattered.
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  That company that turned me down became the measuring stick I held myself against for years.
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  They still are, actually.
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  They're further ahead.
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  They've been at it way longer.
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  They have a team and an infrastructure that makes speak podcasting look,
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  and I'm going to say this loud because I think you need to hear me say it, cobbled together.
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  Hopes and dreams and a little bit of execution held together with tape ambition
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  and the occasional miracle.
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  Sometimes that's how it feels.
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  And I think that is worth saying.
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  But here is what I've been sitting with lately.
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  I've been thinking about personal branding,
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  what it means,
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  how you build one deliberately versus accidentally.
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  And then I realized something.
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  I've been building a personal brand
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  since before the phrase personal brand
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  was something people said at conferences
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  and put in their LinkedIn bios.
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  Every morning I opened a mic at a radio station, I was building a personal brand.
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  Every interview, every piece of production I wrote and produced,
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  every Sunday morning when that show ran in which I was talking with community leaders
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  and nonprofit directors and survivors of things I could barely comprehend,
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  every single one of those was a deposit.
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  It was a deposit into something, but I just didn't know what to call it.
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  17,000 hours.
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  That is what was in the account by the time the door closed and I started sending out over 450 job applications that mostly went nowhere.
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  And here's the thing about building something without realizing you're building it.
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  The foundation is real even when you don't have the blueprint.
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  I didn't know I was building a personal brand, but I was learning how to be trusted on a microphone, how to make a stranger feel heard, how to say the thing nobody else in the room was willing to say.
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  Those skills do not disappear when the job does.
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  They become the company.
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  And I want to answer the question I asked myself today before this recording.
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  Do I even have credibility?
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  Those 450 plus rejections though
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  They eventually became a company
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  This company, Speak Podcasting
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  Cobbled together as it may feel some days
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  We are producing work that is ranking
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  That is making a difference
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  That is growing
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  That is helping people tell stories
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  They could not tell anywhere else
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  Do I have credibility?
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  I think so
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  Sometimes I forget though
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  Coach Swanson was right, by the way.
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  I was never going to be Bo Jackson.
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  But somewhere between the bench and the detour into radio
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  and the 450 plus applications and the rejection letter
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  and the company that was never supposed to exist,
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  I became something else.
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  Something I could not have named in seventh grade.
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  Hey, podcasting was never even a thing when I was that little.
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  It was something that I'm still trying to figure out, but it's something, something real.
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  And if you're sitting somewhere right now, wondering whether your cobbled together hopes and dreams held together with tape version of the thing you're building is legitimate, it is.
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  The foundation is real even when you cannot see the blueprint.
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  Keep building.
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  My name is Freddy Cruz.
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  This is your mic and happy anniversary.
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  to speak podcasting.
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  If this episode hits somewhere you weren't expecting,
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  please do me a favor and subscribe if you haven't.
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  And as always,
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  I really appreciate you letting me be all up in your ears.