“Your book changed my life.” I was at a WordPress conference in 2014, about a year after my first “real, live, on the bookshelves” book, Responsive Design with WordPress, came out, when an attendee came up to me and told me this. I had never spoken to them — in-fact, they weren’t even from the…
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I love shuffling poker chips at my desk.
It helps me think. It helps me focus. It calms me.
I probably shuffle poker chips 100 times each day.
Did you know it takes 6 perfect shuffles to get your chips back in the original order?
The best way to check is to take 2 piles of different color chips and shuffle them.
Do it perfectly 6 times, and they are neatly organized by color once again.
Shuffling 100x a day means that 16 times per day, I get my chips back in the right order.
But that’s not the case.
It happens maybe 4 times a day unless I’m really focusing.
Sometimes a chip sticks and doesn’t shuffle. Sometimes, I don’t make even stacks of chips.
Sometimes I completely mess up and the chips fall.
Perfection is uncommon. It doesn’t happen every time.
It doesn’t even happen most of the time.
I get perfect shuffles not because I’m the best chip-shuffler.
It’s because I take a lot of shots.
If I were only striving for perfect, I would have given up the first time I tried to shuffle chips.
When you’re creating your podcast, strive for doing. Not for perfect.
Perfection is uncommon. But the more you do something, the more likely it is to happen.
I know we’re all looking for that ONE thing that’s gonna grow our podcast. I know this because when I first started in this industry, I was searching for it too. Far and wide. I asked everyone. I thought that if I asked the question the right way, the answer would be revealed to me. But with time, I came to understand that there’s no one thing. There’s many things. And we need to try all of them — constantly — in order to figure out which levers we should continue pulling to eventually find growth.
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It’s been two years since ChatGPT went mainstream, and AI has completely transformed how we work. While I maintain some hesitancy and skepticism in using AI, it has made it’s way into my daily life for certain tasks. While I’ll tell you all about that, I also talk about why the human touch will always matter, no matter how advanced these tools get.
So strap in (yes, I wrote these words without any intervention from AI) for a look into how I’ve been using AI as a solopreneur. And don’t worry — I’ve mostly edited out the rambling rants.
You may or may not be familiar with British technology journalist Ian Betteridge, and his law of headlines. If you’re not, Betteridge’s Law of Headlines states, very simply: Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered with the word ‘no.’ The idea is that if the writer had enough evidence to make…
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“The drums are the easiest instrument to play.” A friend in high school said that to me—a drummer—to my face! “Why do you say that?” I asked, trying not to lose my cool. “All you do is hit drums.” To someone who’s never sat down at a drum set and actually tried to sound good,…
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I really wasn’t going to write another, “I’m leaving Twitter/X,” post. I was going to quiet quit. I think announcements that you’re leaving a thing are mostly self aggrandizing, as if life won’t possibly go on once you’re gone.
It feels weird to say that about a platform that I’ve been on for 17 years, 8 months and 5 days. That’s over 45% of my life, after all.
But I’ve greatly disliked Twitter for a long time — even before Elon bought it and renamed it X. I think most social networks straddle this weird middle ground between parasocial and reciprocal relationships, and that’s more unhealthy than healthy.
But that’s neither here nor there. The main reason I’m leaving Twitter is that the posts I made get very little visibility, and I’m aggravated by it most of the time.
It’s an incredible time suck, and I see things I don’t care to see, despite spending 17 years, 8 months and 5 days carefully curating my muted words, follow lists, and block words.
So I’m jumping ship for Bluesky, which currently has the winning combination of enough people I care to interact with + no algorithm. I only see the people and topics I follow, and that’s swell.
Still, I would rather not deactivate my account for 2 reasons:
So how do I make sure those two things stay intact while also ensuring I can never log in again? Here’s what I’m doing.
You can’t make people want what they don’t already want. Accept it, or accept a long, hard, frustrating future of marketing your show.
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I’ve been using the Shure SM7B as my main mic for the better part of a decade now, and I don’t foresee that changing anytime soon. However, when I bought that mic, there wasn’t the dearth of affordable, purpose-built podcasting mics there are now. And while I love the SM7B, I’m not ready to recommend…
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“Build your authority” feels like advice that’s often given without a solution attached. And it’s SO important to solopreneurs, especially since social media is no longer the best place to build a proper audience.
That’s why I sat down with Jessica Lackey, a business and operations strategist who’s all about helping solopreneurs like us build real authority. We talked all about what you actually need to do to build authority – from understanding who you’re talking to, to the medium you use to get your message out.
(and use it to your advantage instead)
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