Just saw this on season 2 of Love:
This is turning into a journal of ideas that I’m enthusiastic about that changes every week. I was talking to a friend about that and was reminded that it’s completely okay. I want to be a special snowflake but bouncing from idea to idea is not a problem unique to me. Writing about it is good because there’s a chance that someone else can relate.
So what am I enthusiastic about this week?
Starting a podcast, this time with a friend —
I’m more excited for this than any of the other projects I’ve done on this blog. I’ve been recording a lot of audio notes for the past couple months. It was my way of doing active recall for different things I was reading, watching, or listening to.
Here’s a link to the episode: 001 — Walter & Francis: Autotelic Exotelic
Which sounds like some kind of science podcast. I can promise it’s dumber than that.
There are posts on this blog that I’m happy with, mostly going by how often I share each with other people:
- Book notes for What if We’re Wrong?: I tried to develop a few of my own ideas instead of simply writing down reactions to different excerpts.
- Book notes for Tools of Titans: I was probably just happy that I read the book so quickly.
- Make Show Learn: Issue 4: One of my favorite posts to go back to. If I could bang these out every week I’d love that, but I remind myself that it probably took at least 8 hours counting the for all drawings.
Creating the first episode of the podcast took less effort and I’m as happy with it as I am with some of those posts above. Recency bias plays into that but I think that will remain true as we record more episodes.
I often think about what this blog’s content would look like in a year if I stayed with this or that approach. We plan to post every week so in a year we’d have a few dozen hours of recorded conversation. Even if we don’t hit 50 listeners, that’ll still be really fun for me to go back and listen to.
I’m grateful I can have balance and that I’m in no way trying to make this my main gig. This podcast was by far the most fun I’ve had creating content for this blog. Recording Test episode was also fun. That’s enough reason to keep doing it.
The format we have in mind: Talk about a book and write an accompanying post —
This might change. I might even bet on it changing. But it seemed to work well with the first one so we’re going to give it another shot next week. We’re trying to figure out possible segments and we’re starting broad and trying to figure out which ones work and which don’t.
I read a lot of books in the past year or two and I’ve written about some of them. I know a lot of the content well enough to talk about it.
The plan: each week I’ll review my highlights for a book I’ve already read. Wally will listen to it or read it for the first time. Then we’ll discuss it.
This week we talked about Creativity by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and the concept that stuck out was autotelic and exotelic activities. Next week we’ll talk about Grit, by Angela Duckworth.
Books often have activities to run through so we’re going to try to pull some of those out to talk through while recording. For example, this week we did the 5 Whys.
We’re hoping one or two concepts will stick out. I’ll write an accompanying post that goes a little deeper on that topic. (Along with the usual links you’d expect in show notes.)
Goals: Record one podcast a week with the 12th podcast having 1,000 downloads —
Our goal is to post one podcast each week and get to 1,000 downloads for the 12th episode.
I’m embarrassed because I looked back to a post where I wrote about 12-week goals. That was 8 weeks ago when I said my goal was to get, guess what, 1000 mailing list subscribers.
Let’s just say I probably won’t get to 1000. My main lesson? At the time, I realized I was just creating content without sharing it. I had a plan to share on other outlets but mostly just created more content that I didn’t share.
This is another opportunity to steer things in the right direction. I’ll keep sharing the process. Thanks for following along!