What’s in a Voice? Everything!

Day 39 of 100 Days to 10,000 Copies

Today is day 39 of 100 Days to 10,000 Copies, my project to launch my new book - Easy Discipline (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Audible).

The Wall

Claim your square on the wall by pre-ordering Easy Discipline.

What I Did:

It’s been a bit since my last update. You might be wondering why. The reason is simple: I threw myself into narrating my book for the past two weeks. If you buy the audiobook version of Easy Discipline, you will hear my voice instead of some professional actor’s (more on this later).

Narrating a book is not an easy task, nor is it glamorous. You sit in a little dark room in a studio, wearing headphones, facing nothing but an iPad and a microphone. On the headphones is my director, who sits thousands of miles away, alternating roles of an actor coach who tells me when to speed up or slow down, an English teacher who tells me I’m pronouncing the ‘s’ at the end of “months” wrong, and a therapist who consoles me when I am agonizing over the book I just wrote.

(Danna, you did great.)

And I do it for 6 hours a day for 7-8 days. By the end, I was an exhausted impala, sipping water while staring into the sky.

That said, narrating my own book has been an extremely unique and fulfilling experience. Seeing the words on the screen, pondering the meaning I am trying to convey, then opening my mouth to perform the voice acting, is very therapeutic. It reminds me of telling bedtime stories to my little kids, only in this case to thousands of future listeners.

When I was done, I knew I didn’t just finish a task. I performed an art.

Here is what it looked like.

But this wasn’t the case with my first book.

When I wrote Rejection Proof in 2015, I gently floated the idea of narrating my own audiobook. But the publisher said NO. I don’t blame them. At the time, I had no experience nor confidence for book narration. Moreover, I was very self-conscious about my Chinese accent.

This is the immigrant’s biggest fear: not being able to fit in, and thinking you are different from others. The idea that someone would laugh at my reading bothered me so much that when my publisher pushed back, I agreed with them right away.

But that didn’t mean I didn’t protest in my own way. When my publisher sent their choice of narrator, a fellow Asian American (it’s funny they had to get an Asian guy for fake authenticity, but not the real guy for real authenticity), I said NO. He was a good voice actor, but I didn’t feel his style connected with my emotions.

In the end, I asked the publisher to hire Mike Chamberlain, the voice actor who narrated one of my favorite books, The Power of Habit.

Mike Chamberlain narrated the first version of Rejection Proof. It was great, but not me

That decision bothered me to no end, even years later.

It wasn’t because Mike wasn’t good. In fact, he was great, everything I could have hoped for. His high-pitched voice even resembled mine in some way. And the book was an Audible bestseller, with thousands and thousands of reviews.

It was because I was afraid of my own voice and my own flaws. I let my fear and insecurity overrule my own desire to perform and be authentic.

The Rejection Guy succumbed to his fear of rejection. So ironic.

I have always wondered what could have been. Every time I sold an audiobook, it was a lost chance of someone hearing the real voice of the person who experienced and wrote the story.

But luckily, there was a chance for redemption.

Last year, because Rejection Proof was still selling well ten years after it first came out, the publisher wanted to release a new edition of the audiobook, and asked me if I wanted to narrate the book myself this time.

I said, Hell Yeeeeaaaah!!!!

This time, I had accumulated 2,452 gallons of confidence from ten years of public speaking, plus 7,349 gallons of regret for not pushing harder the first time. I was going to do it, no matter how much I needed to learn, how much work I needed to do, and how imperfect the resulting product would be.

I don’t care if listeners wince at the Chinese guy occasionally mispronouncing “leisure” or forgetting to say the ‘s’ at the end of plural nouns. It’s MY voice! It’s not perfect, but it was also the imperfect guy who experienced and wrote everything that happened in the imperfect book.

And the result?

Not bad! 4.6 stars on Audible. (I did lose over 5,000 ratings gathered over 10 years, though. Oh well.)

And this time around, when the publisher asked me if I wanted to read Easy Discipline, I repeated the same “Hell Yeeeeaaaah!!!!”

EASY DISCIPLINE PRINCIPLE - Your Voice Matters

OK, this sounds like a cheap campaign ad where corrupt politicians ask for your vote and pretend it’s you who matters, not their own ambition. But when it comes to presenting your idea to an audience, your team, or the whole world, your voice really matters.

Don’t strive for perfection. Don’t hide behind representation. Go for authenticity. If the idea is really yours, express it the best way you can, even if it requires training, preparation, and labor.

This is especially true as we enter the age of AI slop. In a world where anyone can generate something polished and logical in seconds, polish is no longer the thing that wins. It’s the crazy, the ugly, the imperfect, the unmistakably human that cuts through.

Your voice doesn’t just matter. It might be the only thing that does.