I’ve been thinking about starting a podcast recently.
It wouldn’t be the first time. I’ve started and stopped a podcast twice. One while I was in business school, the other right after I started my first business. The audio artifacts of those interviews live somewhere on soundcloud now.
The podcast bug is lurking again.
Recently, I’ve been thinking about what I’d name it, who I’ll interview, how many episodes a month?
Do I do it continuously or do I batch it, release it as seasons?
Should it be about writing, entrepreneurship, maybe some technology, creativity?
What type of topics? How long should each episode be?
Questions. Questions. Questions!
With every thought I’m further away from taking action to start.
Then it dawned on me that I was making the same mistake I made when I was thinking about my newsletter.
I was overthinking again.
The main thing that helped with my newsletter was actually starting and learning along the way.
Trying to get it right from the beginning hardly ever works for me.
It hardly works for anyone in general.
Clarity Shmarity
Most people want to get it right from the onset.
Finding clarity is a special skill in an age of constant information bombardment.
There’s so much noise out there.
When you do find clarity, it’s fleeting because new information will throw you off your clarity podium.
“But I thought I knew exactly what I wanted last week?”
“Why don’t I feel that way anymore?”
Good questions.
The reality is:
We are in a time where the previous way of thinking can only take you so far. In a time of rapid change, you have to find a balance of staying dynamic while being centered.
You have to be rooted with an internal anchor while you extend your branches to the swaying winds of the world.
You have to be able to go to both extremes. Finding internal silence while parsing through the noise.
The people that will thrive are those that can discern the signal from the noise in a sustainable way.
This requires patience.
Those people root themselves in the process because they know that the journey is the outcome.
4 Steps to create your own path:
I was told to go to school.
I did.
I was told to get a job.
I did.
I was told to advance my career.
I did.
With each step there was always something to strive for. A clear ring in the ladder to stretch and grasp.
When I started making music, I noticed something different. There was no long-term striving. You either made something that sounded nice or not. You’d get the feedback right away.
Some days it took hours and the results were trash.
Some days it took minutes and I’d amaze myself.
From that process, I started to learn to let go of the end goal and be in the moment. I started applying this to other parts of my life.
When you begin to detach from the outcome, you will find that the process itself is the more important thing.
You’ll spend more time prioritizing what you learn in the process of transformation, shrink the gap between your expectations and reality, and inherently live a more self-directed and enjoyable life.
Here are 4 basic steps to get on your way.
1. Follow your interests
You don’t know until you know.
The easiest place to start is with your interests. What do you do when you aren’t forced to do anything? What do you prioritize when you have no obligations? What type of content do you watch when you have downtime?
It’s easier to do something when you find it interesting.
For instance I enjoy marketing, technology, music, business, and basketball. No one has to make me enjoy them. If you check my YouTube watching history, it will probably be about those topics.
When in doubt, just follow your interests.
2. Practice
If your interests are the seeds.
Then practice is the soil.
You have to nurture and develop your interests through practice. This involves taking a systematic approach to developing your knowledge and experience in a particular topic.
Writing a weekly newsletter is a practice.
It forces me to create a system of distilling my thoughts in an ordered fashion. Each week, there’s the back and forth. Some weeks are better than the others.
But in general, the hope is to trend in a positive direction, and improve month-to-month, year after year.
Develop through practice.
3. Contribute your knowledge stack
What’s the meaning of life anyways?
Trying to find meaning is a daily exercise. I remember in my 20s, I thought I’d find it written in some book. So I read a lot of books. Each completed chapter generated a lot more questions than answers.
I finally realized that I wouldn’t find meaning in what someone else has written down.
I can only find it by experiencing life itself. The further I go down, I realize that life is more meaningful when you feel you’re making a contribution. This is where the expertise you build from practicing in your field of interest becomes useful.
Whether you’re creating a business or developing a technology or sharing your art, when you develop a skill that you can contribute to others, life becomes more meaningful.
Like Peter Tosh said:
Live for yourself, you’ll live in vain.
Live for others, you’ll live again.
We are social creatures.
Develop ways to contribute and find meaning.
4. Use storytelling as leverage
It’s not all going to happen overnight.
It takes time to nurture your interests.
It takes time to develop that interest.
It takes time to make impactful contributions.
Most of us want it right away, but most times it doesn’t happen that way.
Even when you make a contribution, your work might not be recognized and you have to be fine with that too. More important is the story that you tell yourself about why you do what you do.
No one came here with a blueprint on how to live a perfect life.
Be patient.
Be hopeful that tomorrow will be better than today.
Keep fanning your internal story of hope.
The journey is the outcome…
There isn’t a perfect plan to start with.
You find yourself in the process. Follow your interests, nurture them, cultivate a habit of deliberate practice, find a way to contribute what you have to the world, and be patiently hopeful.
There’s no sprint to the finish line.
It’s all one step after the other.
Perhaps I need to listen to my own advice.
Yours truly,
Nifemi
P.S. If you read this far, can you reply with one topic you would be interested in hearing about from me if I decided to create a podcast next year?
