Lafın Gelişi and the White Whales

Until I find the time to tell the whole story in more detail, here are some excerpts from an essay I wrote back in 2022 for the Patreon page of Lafın Gelişi, the essay was originally written in Turkish and translated;

Ten Years of Chasing White Whales

[…]

When we had just started high school, we got interested in internet radio. We used to broadcast under the name 5555 through a website I can no longer remember, mostly playing rap music and talking between songs. What started as this little bit of pirate internet radio somehow continued through short films, blogs, attempts at animation, YouTube channels, and, eventually, podcasts. Whenever we came across a new way of making things, we wanted to try it. Whenever we saw something that impressed us, we wanted to build on it. Our interests shifted over time, but we never really managed to stay away from media for very long.

[…]

I eventually realized that it was probably no coincidence that nearly every creative person we respect has earlier work they are embarrassed by, or at least not entirely happy with. I don’t think we would have minded making ten things we were dissatisfied with if, somewhere among them, there had been one finished project we could look back on with pride. Somehow, though, we became so obsessed with hunting the whale that we ignored an entire ocean.

Podcasting was only one of the many things we tried over the years. Our interest in new forms of media, and our urge to build on the things that inspired us, led us to podcasts in 2018. I had been following the format as it grew abroad, and we believed it could work in Turkey as well. So Berker and I started recording with Burak Aktaş, who turned up at our place with a condenser microphone under his arm.

Like most things we tried, it wasn’t exactly a carefully planned or organized venture. We made a cover in Paint, went in with whatever ideas came to mind, and started recording. Being one of the early podcasts in Turkey certainly helped. Over the years, our audience grew, we climbed the charts, and iTunes featured us prominently for quite a while. That may sound like a modest success, but the more important question was why, despite all of that, we were never able to maintain any real consistency.

As Lafın Gelişi gained momentum, we gradually built up an unrealistic idea of what its perfect version was supposed to be. We tried different ways of recording the show almost every week, changed the logo five times in five years, rerecorded the intro perhaps ten times, experimented with different guests and contributors, and constantly searched for new ideas. Somewhere in the endless pursuit of the best episode, the best sound, the best visuals, and the best way to promote it, we lost sight of the thing itself. Perhaps the most ironic part was that we did all of this in the name of keeping the show natural and sincere.

Aside from the improvements that naturally come with experience and technical knowledge, we either never realized or somehow forgot that Lafın Gelişi already had what it needed from the beginning: storytelling and the desire to make things. From the very first recording, we had something that, aside from the details, did not really need to be changed or reinvented. Despite the people around us and the listeners who reached out to us over the years, we could never quite convince ourselves of that.

Unfortunately, I am not enough of a perfectionist to blame our failure to realize our ambitions entirely on perfectionism. There were, of course, plenty of internal and external reasons that I have no need to go into here. Still, it is obvious that we wore ourselves down over the years by chasing an imaginary best version instead of making the most of what we already had.

It should probably be clear by now that none of this applies only to Lafın Gelişi. If anyone reading this is involved in creative work, already making things, or thinking about starting, perhaps this can serve as a reminder not to make the same mistake. Sometimes the healthiest approach is the one we followed without realizing it when we first started the podcast: stop obsessing over the details and simply make the thing.

[…]