The whole point of listening to an audiobook for me is to experience a book when my hands are otherwise occupied—when they’re on the steering wheel, carrying totes to work, or holding onto the subway pole. As I listen, I feel intimate with the reader, as if the words are being spoken just for my ears. It’s especially thrilling to hear authors read their own books.
I bonded with Elizabeth Gilbert as she read her memoir Eat, Pray, Love. In that memoir, she took me along as she escaped the end of a relationship. I followed her through her culinary escapades in Italy, blissful silences in India, and return to love in Indonesia. And it felt like an old friend and I were back in conversation when I listened to her read the first line in Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear: “Once upon a time there was a man named Jack Gilbert...” With Big Magic she was going to guide me headlong into a magical creative life. My experience with her two audiobooks, however, couldn’t have been more different.
Listening to Eat, Pray, Love was a long, delicious ride of emotional highs and lows over two days. In contrast, after only 10 minutes into Big Magic, I pressed pause. “Stop! Don’t go on,” I said out loud to my car’s odometer. “I need to remember this: ‘A creative life is an amplified life.’ How am I going to remember that?”
After choosing the acronym CLAL as a potential memory trigger, I pushed play. Seven minutes later, when Gilbert asked, “Why would I want to keep my limitations?” I hit pause.
That’s quite a profound question; I needed to pause again to think about it. What are my beliefs that lead to my limitations? Do I pay attention to the possibility that the belief may not be real? You can imagine how I turned these questions over and over in my mind for the rest of my drive. Now, can you guess how long it took me to listen to the whole book?
Let’s just say that it was exponentially longer than listening to the memoir. Another difference between my experiences with Gilbert’s two audiobooks was how I felt at the end of the recording. After the memoir I felt teary but deeply satisfied. After Big Magic, I felt unsettled and restless. I was sure that I had forgotten the most important tips. I couldn’t even remember the acronyms. I felt tired and guilty about the fact that I hadn’t stopped at the side of the road to write everything down.
Listening to Simon Sinek’s book Start with Why was a similar experience. I knew that his passionate reading would keep me riveted and inspired. I was right. Sinek’s voice is so compelling that I listened to the entire book driving round-trip from Connecticut to New Jersey.
Sadly, however, after just a few days, I couldn’t remember what I was supposed to do to articulate my why. And what was that about amplify? Wait, was that from Big Magic?
The details of everything I had learned were gone—vanished. All that was left was the voice, the urgency, the way each message was delivered, which I couldn’t clearly remember.
In the end, the audiobooks proved to be only inspirational. I couldn’t retain the details to create the big magic and transform my why into how and what. Which is when I started thinking about an audiobook that would come bundled with an app or mobile coach to remind me what to do and would also track my progress. If I had a tool like that, I could simply enjoy the audiobook without worrying about acronyms. I had found my mission.
Susannah Bailin is the founder and CEO of AdviceCoach, which creates mobile technology to connect authors with readers and gives readers easy ways to act on authors’ advice.
