Every week, regardless of where I am or why I’m there, I make time to do something I love – podcasting. Hotel rooms, coffee shops, cruise ships, and the passenger seat of a car make great editing spots when I’m not home. Producing the show isn’t some looming obligatory task each week…it’s a healthy obsession.
Releasing a weekly podcast also brings with it a constant struggle with perfectionism. If I just worked on it a little longer, the end product would be higher quality, right? Maybe I could re-record something to make it sound better. It’s the looming deadline that ultimately silences the inner critic.
I came across the following quote from Slow Productivity by Cal Newport that perfectly describes what I experience weekly.
“Obsession requires you to get lost in your head, convinced that you can do just a little bit better given some more time. Greatness requires the ability to subsequently pull yourself out of your self-critical reverie before it’s too late… Progress is what matters. Not perfection.” – Cal Newport
With that thought in mind, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on what I’ve learned over the course of 300 episodes of the Nerd Journey Podcast.
Producing a Weekly Show
My wife and daughter say I have a “podcast voice” that is different than the way I normally talk. But they also aren’t regular listeners to the show. I guess that’s the kind of feedback you tend to get when you take a microphone on a road trip and have to record something in the hotel room in front of a live studio audience.
This past summer we visited a number of US cities on the way to see a friend of mine. If you had ridden with us the whole way, you would have seen me spending every free minute possible editing the interview that needed to be released the following Tuesday or making show notes. Most episodes are interviews with a guest, so I usually record a short intro and outro to go along with it. Since our trip spanned 2 weeks of releases, it made sense to take a microphone along with me and record wherever we happened to be. I’m lucky my family understands and supports this hobby that has become an obsession. It’s an obsession with producing something valuable to share with others. There’s not a need to decide whether I’m going to do it. It’s my weekly routine.
It might seem weird to be so adamant about the weekly release when the podcast isn’t for money. That’s never been the intention. My motivation to keep at it only increased when my podcast partner needed to take a couple of breaks from the show over time. I have been the sole producer of the show since episode 113 (read more on how that happened here), and I think the added responsibility is what increased the importance of consistently producing the content.
Iterating on Themes
When John White asked me to start a podcast with him over 7 years ago, we had some idea of what the show would be about, but I don’t think it really crystalized until we made it to somewhere around 25 – 50 episodes. I remember some of our practice episodes having segments that we later decided to cut because they did not fit with our idea.
In the podcast world, once you have that clear vision of what your show is and who you’re doing it for, these are the guardrails for the type of content that will be part of the show and the guests who will be a good fit. We are a show for the technology professional (regardless of what one’s specialty might be) even if some of the discussion topics might be helpful to people in other professions.
If you visit our show’s site, the show notes for each episode are pretty thorough. They are not AI generated at this point, and it isn’t a transcript. I make the show notes each week, and the level of detail makes it easy to go back and really understand what was discussed in the episode. Over time we’ve had people refer to our site as a blog rather than a podcast (even though there is a link to play the episode at the top of each post with the show notes below that). At first I got a little annoyed at that. Surely they knew we were a podcast, right? After thinking about how something like that could happen, maybe we weren’t clear enough on the main page of our site so visitors would know for sure. I remember adding “A Podcast to Help the Technology Professional Accelerate Career Progression, Increase Job Satisfaction, and Be more Effective in Their Current Role” to the banner of our page in an attempt to make it clear for visitors.
Refinement of the Metadata
But we needed more than just a banner on our website. Those details needed to make it into the show’s title and description too. Though we may have crystalized the show’s guardrails as co-hosts, we needed the metadata to support it. After finding Podcast Marketing Trends Explained with Jeremy Enns and Justin Jackson and then following all of the podcast roasts they did as an offshoot of the show, I became adamant about tweaking our show’s title and description to make them better, and oh how I wish we had done it at the beginning.
Before we made any changes, the show’s name was just “Nerd Journey.” We decided to tweak the way it displays so it shows up as “Nerd Journey: Career Advice for the Technology Professional.” Our show’s description was once “IT Pro Career Progression and General Discussion.” After several iterations, we came up with the following.
Are you a technology professional unsatisfied with your current role? Looking for a resource to help understand changing job functions, changing organizations, or gaining recognition and progression?
This first part is the hook. It tells you who the target audience is up front (technology professionals) and what the podcast is intended to be at a high level.
The Nerd Journey podcast helps explore alternative roles, increase job satisfaction, and accelerate career progression. Each week, we uncover patterns of technical career progression by dissecting careers of guests and discussing different job roles they’ve held, or discussing relevant career topics. We’ve interviewed people in IT operations, sales engineering, technical marketing, product management, people management, network engineering, cybersecurity, software development, entrepreneurs, and more. We also discuss improving job satisfaction and accelerating career growth.
Now we get into how and why we are a helpful resource for our listeners. This section describes the show’s purpose at a deeper level, topics we discuss, the type of guest you might encounter, and some of the job roles we’ve explored.
We are John White and Nick Korte, two technologists with experience in IT operations and sales engineering who started this podcast in 2018. We release on Tuesdays, and can be found at https://nerd-journey.com.
The description end with a little bit about who are as co-hosts and how often you will be hearing from us.
Feedback Wanted
One of the things we would like more of as this iteration continues is feedback. If you’ve listened to one or more episodes of the show, please send me your answers to the questions below via e-mail ([email protected]), or DM me on LinkedIn. I’m happy to send Nerd Journey stickers to people who offer constructive feedback as a small token of thanks.
- What is one thing you would like us to keep doing?
- What is one thing you wish we would stop doing?
- Who else needs to be a guest on our show?
- What topics do you wish we would explore in greater depth, and what topics would you like to hear about that we haven’t covered?
- What are your thoughts on the focused discussion formats we’ve had compared to the regular career background we usually do on a guest?
A Creative Outlet
Creative projects by their nature can be creative outlets to process events in your own life (whether you realize it at first or not). I remember Amy Lewis saying on a past episode of The Geek Whisperers that if you listened closely through their catalog, it wasn’t hard to figure out one of the hosts was going through some challenging times at work or in their overall life. But in those challenges, there is a creative fire. I can now say I’ve experienced something similar.
If you listen closely through episodes in the 200s, the topic of layoffs in the tech industry kept coming up as a discussion point with guests. I am thankful we gave many guests the opportunity to share their stories of processing these difficult events and then finding a path forward. I kept asking about it because it’s been a relevant topic for so many and in a lot of ways to prepare myself for the possibility of facing the same challenge.
If you look on my LinkedIn profile, it’s easy to see I work for a company that was acquired. Over the course of the past year or so, there have been many changes. In addition to observing the layoff trends in our industry from afar, those events impacted many of my colleagues and close friends. The podcast allowed me to channel my obsession into constructive action. I wanted to do something to help.
One of the things I’m most proud of in the last year is our Layoff Resources Page. It was born from my obsession with podcasting mixed with a desire to help as many people as possible in the process. It’s an aggregated list of the most impactful conversations we’ve had on the topic of layoffs with HR professionals, recruiters, career coaches, a burnout expert, a business psychologist, and of course…the stories of technologists who’ve been there. My hope is this page can be an encouragement to those who might need it. You’re not alone out there.
A Love for Interviewing
So why should the journey continue after 300 episodes and 6+ years? Why keep producing a weekly show if it’s not for money?
I think the answer is twofold. The first part lies in something Duncan Epping said in Episode 304. He was talking about how his goals for learning are not bound by a job or a company. They are much larger. It’s the intention with which he approached writing blogs that struck me.
“Even if no one reads this, at least I got to learn something.” – Duncan Epping, Nerd Journey Episode 304
Maybe no one will read this post or listen to the podcast. But in every conversation, I got to learn something. And in the editing and producing of the show, those lessons speak to me. I love talking to people about their careers and getting to hear their stories. I really love interviewing people, and I want to continue sharpening my skills as an interviewer. The only way to get better is to keep asking questions from a place of humble curiosity.
And this ties nicely into the second part of the answer. It goes back to one of my favorite books – Seth Godin’s The Practice: Shipping Creative Work. The podcast, every piece of what it takes to ship an episode, has become my practice. In the practice there is a solace. The lessons from conversations with guests continue speak to me because I keep shipping this work. At least for now, I see no reason to stop.
To every guest that took the time to record with us for an episode of Nerd Journey, you taught me something. Thank you for sharing your story and your wisdom. If anyone reading this wants a list of all guests who have appeared on our show, they are listed in this blog post.
To every person who listened to an episode and heard something that was helpful to you, I am thankful it helped. May we continue to produce helpful content. Please consider rating the show 5 stars and sharing something that was helpful with a friend.
And to John White, the friend and mentor who talked me into co-hosting a podcast in 2017, thanks for asking. I’m so glad I said yes.
A Special Thanks
I’d like to say a special thank you to Dale McKay, John White, and Al Rasheed for providing candid feedback on this post before I published it. I appreciate all of you!