340: 8 Lessons Learned from 8 Years of Hosting the Pivot Podcast

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Long ago I realized I don't do well. When I try to be the best, I just try to express myself the best. And if that doesn't lead to the number one best career show of all time ever, that's okay with me. There's still so much value that I get out of producing this show again, connecting with my guests, even try to come up with solo episodes like this one. It pushes me, it challenges me, it holds me accountable to my own ongoing public. Original Thinking what's next? This is a question we're all having to ask and answer more frequently. I'm Jenny Blake, your host of the Pivot Podcast and author of Pivot. The only move that matters is your next one.

For show notes from this episode, visit pivotmethod.com podcast if Change is the only constant, then let's get better at it. Here we go.

Welcome back Pivoters. We are celebrating a very special milestone today that is the Pivot podcast's eighth birthday. It's a veritable third grader by now. This podcast first launched in September 2015 as a teeny tiny side project. I had just gotten the book deal for pivot in 2014 and I figured if I'm going to be interviewing experts, I might as well hit record. I didn't know the first thing about audio editing, how to get the fancy intro and outro music I would record. Back when we didn't have AirPods, we had the iPhone, headphones with the white string that goes all the way down. That's what I would use to record. And in the beginning I just uploaded conference call files to SoundCloud basically and I was very self conscious. I would even say we don't have fancy intro or outro music yet, but one day I'll figure that out. So it was definitely, as I say in Pivot, a scrappy initiative launch and iterate as we used to say at Google. And what surprised me most was that I had so much fun interviewing people and hitting record and reaching out to my next guest that by the time the Pivot Book launched in the fall of 2016 one year later, the podcast had almost eclipsed it as the favorite thing that I would do on a day to day basis at this point. Now, after eight years and about 2 million downloads, we have 340 episodes, which doesn't include another 250 since I started the free time podcast. And there have been many ups and downs along the way. There have been many points where I wondered if I should stop doing this podcast. Today I'm going to share the eight things that do keep me going and the reminders that I share to myself that keep me in the game and that keep me running this show in addition to free time, because there's really two different audiences. Pivot is about navigating what's next and embracing intuition and even insecurity and uncertainty as the superpowers that they are, whereas free time is for small business owners. Another thing I want to say is that this show, it never really cracked the charts. I mean, every now and then it will make the top 100 or the top 250, the careers category. But it's not necessarily this gangbusters project that, oh, okay, it's eight years to an overnight success and now it's the number one career show. It's not like that. And in fact, even the advertising that goes with the podcast, it doesn't quite pay for the expense of producing it. So I think that's why I need these reminders to myself, because there's so much value here that goes beyond the metrics and beyond the money. But sometimes when I'm in a dip or I'm at a plateau, I need to check in and say, is this something that I should keep doing time and time again. The answer to that question is yes, because this, my friends, is a labor of love. I'm so happy to be here. I'm so grateful and lucky to get to do this and have it be any part of my job in my delightfully tiny media company. And I'm so thankful that you're here listening. So let's get into these eight lessons learned in eight years of podcasting.

Number one, ride out the inevitable dips and plateaus as my friend Leanne taught me to do. Ask how can I fall in love with this again? The dips and plateaus are inevitable with any creative project, especially one that is going on for a long time. I'm a broken record by now, but I first started my blog 18 years ago. My first website, Life After College. The podcast has been going for eight years. I've had a newsletter for 13 and a half years. These are long term things and energy and interest are going to wax and wane. So it's not a question of when you hit a dip or a plateau. Is something wrong? It's like, oh, hi friend, here you are, here. I'm hitting a wall where I don't have the motivation to move forward, at least not in the way that I was working. That's what's so helpful about this question. How can I fall in love with podcasting again? How can I fall in love with writing my newsletter again? It's an open ended inquiry that you can really feel into. So, for example, sometimes when I've hit a plateau, even with interviewing, it's not necessarily the production or what happens after an episode goes live, but it's the time invested in, in creating those episodes. I remember there was one month a couple years ago where I looked at my calendar, I looked at the week ahead and I was just not excited. I really wasn't looking forward to the interviews that I had scheduled and I had to reverse engineer. Why is this happening? Why am I dreading interviews? This is an optional project. Nobody's making me do this. And I realized the mistake that I had made was that I said yes to too many incoming guest pitches rather than following my intuition and my own curiosity and excitement. So there was a big difference between when I knew I was going to hop on a well, it's not really Zoom Call or Riverside FM Call with a guest that I was totally geeking out over. Like an author who I couldn't believe I could get on the virtual horn with, like Kevin Kelly or Danielle Lindemann who wrote a book on an academic take on reality tv. I mean, those are the ones where I was like pinching myself. I can't believe I get to talk to this person today. And then there were other ones where, oh, okay, intellectually the topic or the book sounded good at the time, but it was in the incoming pitch. So I wasn't following my natural energy. And I just had too many of those on the calendar. And so I had to make a rule to be stricter with myself about who was going to make the cut and about not accepting so many inbound guest pitches unless the book and the subject matter and the person had me leaping out of my chair with glee. That has happened sometimes. So, for example, Mark Lesser was an author who I first read when I was just starting out my career. I read his book the Zen of Business Administration, and I couldn't believe that his team was reaching out to me at the Pivot podcast to say, would you like to have him on the show for his new book? That was an example of an inbound pitch. That was a Hell yes was jumping out of my chair with glee. But when they just sound good, not great, not sizzling with joy and enthusiasm and energy, I learned I need to say no.

Lesson number two Reconnect with the Even more meaningful metrics. Emmm. This is something that I learned from my friend Jay Acunzo. I'll link to his free time episode in the show. Notes that he looks for kind of cheeky metrics. You know, number of times that writing one of his episodes makes him laugh. Or the number of unsolicited replies to an email that goes out about that podcast from readers or listeners saying thank you. So I had to reconnect with the even more meaningful metrics than things like download numbers or even where pivot was in the charts. Because those kind of surface level numbers, the ones that would typically indicate success or not, can be instructive, but they don't have to be the one and only indicator of whether or not to continue. This show has not really grown too much over eight years. It often stays at the same range of downloads. Maybe minimum a thousand downloads for an episode, maximum 3,000. That number has not really changed since 2016. Now, I could take that as a bad sign I'm doing something wrong. The show isn't growing, it's at a plateau, and it has been for ages. Shut it down. On the other hand, that does not need to be my indicator of whether this is worth doing. For starters, 1,000 listeners or 3,000 is a lot of people. I'm so grateful for you if you're one of those one or 3,000 listeners in any given episode. Second of all, one of my meaningful metrics is just the number of people that I'm meeting, author friends I'm connecting with, friends I'm catching up with. Now Adrienne Clapack and I have 10 episodes together. He was my very first career coach. He had such an influence on my life. He did the COVID blurb for Life After College, and it has been such a joy to connect with him for these 10 episodes in our conversation. And we happen to get great feedback from many of you who say thank you so much. These episodes have been so helpful and so I don't really care. Does it matter to me that those episodes go viral? No, it doesn't. There's so much value in creating them, regardless of what the official numbers say.

Number three 5149. This is my own mantra, my own antidote to the inexplicable nerves and overthinking that will come with any new project or creative endeavor. And I'll link to an article I wrote for my new personal essays on running a business called Rolling in Dough. I'll link to that article in the show notes 5149 is a reminder that I give myself. So even when I'm feeling 49% fear, anxiety, awkwardness, not wanting to continue, I try to remind myself, just tip the scales ever so slightly to 51%. Take one tiny step forward. 51 49. My job is not to make the 49% go away. I just need to soften my focus around precise measures of success so that I can see the surrounding constellation. That's something my dad taught me, that when you're looking at the stars, you actually have to soften your gaze so that you can see more of the stars. Whereas if you hone in on just one, you're kind of missing the bigger view. So for me, if I'm worried about what people think or how I might put my foot into my mouth or disappoint others or disappoint you Listening if I'm afraid that a podcast isn't as good as it could have been where I was at peak awkwardness, or everyone's going to just Unsubscribe in droves, 51 49, just keep going. Now some of you may say, well, why am I even here listening to you in these eight lessons? Your podcast is okay, you know. It's not a chart topper. It's not the best. Well, this article talks about how long ago I realized I don't do well. When I try to be the best, I just try to express myself the best. And if that doesn't lead to the number one best career show of all time ever, that's okay with me. There's still so much value that I get out of producing this show. Again, connecting with my guests, even try to come up with solo episodes like this one. It pushes me, it challenges me, it holds me accountable to my own ongoing public original thinking. I'll link to that episode in the show notes too.

We'll be right back, just after this.

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Lesson number four Eyes on your own paper. This is a reminder that I share in a sidebar in my third book, free Lose the Busy Work, Love youe Business. And it's that whenever I fall into compare and despair even, there was a moment where I was very despairing when in 2018, another large media company launched a Pivot podcast. You're probably familiar. In fact, you all probably subscribe like I do to that one with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway. It's a great show, but when I saw that they were launching and they were calling their show Pivot and that mine had already existed for three years, but it was kind of like a quiet podcast tree in a forest that I don't know whether they knew it existed or not. They didn't care. They trademarked the phrase Pivot as the name of a podcast. I felt so discouraged. I felt like these big fancy people just came and took over the sandbox that I was playing in and I didn't know what to do. I didn't know if I should shut it down. In fact, part of that led me to say, well, what can I do next? Maybe it is a sign that I need to expand what I'm doing. And that is part of what got me thinking about free time in a whole nother direction to branch out into while keeping Pivot going. Eventually, though, I came to realize that, okay, their show is good. I do like it because I love, you know, hearing hot takes. Even if I don't always agree with them, I do appreciate the content that they cover. I like hearing about the tech industry and I realized, well, maybe I am getting new listeners because they're downwind of the other Pivot podcast. So on the one hand, it was deeply frustrating to show up at conferences and people would say, what do you do? And I say, oh, I have a Pivot podcast. And they're like, oh, the one with Kara and Scott no, not that one. So all of a sudden it became so much harder to describe what I do without invoking them and their show. But maybe I was getting a lot of new listeners because people were searching for their pivot and ending up on mine. I don't know if that's the case, but can you imagine? Well, maybe it ended up giving me all these years of free marketing and free organic show growth just because they also exist. So at that time I had to remind myself, eyes on your own paper. I cannot obsess over what they're doing and how big and fast their show is growing and how they're backed by Vox Media and how they're having merch and in person conferences and events and then, oh, now New York magazine buys them. I mean, it was leading me to just such levels of compare and despair that I had to remind myself, this is what I'm doing. I actually wrote the book called Pivot. They did it. So it's okay. We can both exist. Eyes on my own paper, stay focused on what I'm doing and keep going. And if there comes a day where I'm no longer having fun with this, of course I can stop. I can shut it down, I can pivot if you will, but I don't need to, as long as I just stay focused on my own paper, on my own progress.

Lesson number five, keep up with new software. Don't worry too much about sunk costs. You might think it's weird to have a software lesson in here compared to the other ones are about mindset and motivation and how to keep going. But this is important because in eight years of podcasting so much has changed. I've shifted the platform that it's hosted on from Libsyn to Megaphone at least three times. I've shifted the newsletter software that powers part of my business, moving from AWeber in 2010 over to Mailchimp. Then my whole business backend was powered by Kajabi, which is really an all in one for all kinds of things in the business. And now just a couple weeks ago, I moved up everything, 20,000 subscribers across pivot and free time over to Substack. And I couldn't be happier. Every single time I've done one of those migrations of moving everybody around. It's incredibly nerve wracking. What am I going to break? Probably am breaking a million things in the process. And is it worth doing? Should I just stay where I'm safe and comfortable? But yes, it has always been worth it with podcasting. I told you the early days, I would just dial into a conference line and record. And then the pandemic hits and everyone gets used to zoom. And then a new service called Riverside FM launches, and that's what I use now. Even within Riverside, I needed to learn. Oh, I shouldn't create a new room for every guest because that creates a new link every time. And then there's margin for error because if I forget to send the link or I send the wrong link. So I needed to create one room for the Pivot podcast, one room for free time. Then the link never changed and I could put it in calendly so that everything about guest booking was automated. They fill out the calendly, it gets automatically added to their calendar with the correct room link. Then a zapier integration sends their calendly information to my Notion podcast production board and it's all there and it's automated. But that takes time. Even Notion didn't exist when I first started podcasting. So managing the whole sequence of a Day in the Life of a Podcast episode is a complex thing. And it got so much easier once I did teach myself Notion and move my whole business backend over to Notion. I'll put a link to the Day in the Life of a Podcast episode. Loom in the show notes in case you want to check that out. And if you're a business owner, I also have a Done for you business operations dashboard, where I give you everything that took me years to build for my business backend, including a podcast production template, content calendar. So much more. I'll put that in the show notes too. The key thing here is that just like people who say, oh, I had to walk to school uphill both ways in the snow, sometimes it feels like that if you're an OG in a space like blogging or podcasting, it's like, oh, I had to teach myself HTML and CSS and hard code websites in a text editor back in the day, and now Squarespace makes it so easy. Anyone can do it. That's a good thing. And it's true that some of what you do in the early days of any platform or process like this is obsolete. And you learned and did things the hard way, and that's no longer necessary. But I've learned that it's really important to just keep up with what's happening and not jump to every new shiny software object, but also not be afraid of them and be willing to traverse those learning curves to improve process and make things easier for you and for your team and for the guests and I happen to love tinkering in new software, but sometimes it's not easy to know who's going to stick around. So one big mistake I made was I paid money every month and a little bit up front for a podcast transcription service and I put the link in every single show notes for every episode. And then boom, that service pivots. The customer support stops writing back to me and my team. They no longer do transcripts, and now I have a zillion broken links that we need to go fix. That was something that I kind of bet on the wrong software. And I also learned a very hard lesson about those broken links that I should have just had one vanity URL like pivot method.com transcripts that would have never changed. Even if the software that I used or the format of how I delivered transcripts would change, I wouldn't have to go fix 100 broken links. Because when you're doing something like this on a weekly basis, the more times you put a link or something that could possibly change, the more you need to go back and fix if it doesn't work out.

Lesson number six, hire help. If you are going to be doing a creative project for the long haul, it's worth it. Hire help. In the early days, I would have a VA who would help me with some guest prep and might help me draft some show notes. And I had a separate audio editor who would edit the audio. But we would often have to give timestamps of what to fix. But the biggest problem was me. I was still the bottleneck. I still owned the life of an episode because I had this team of kind of random contractors. None of them owned the episode fully and it would often get stopped and, and blocked at my desk. So if I failed to write the introduction for the show notes, it wouldn't go live. If I failed to send the right edits, it wouldn't get to the audio editor in time. If I failed to approve the show notes in whatever platform we were publishing in, the show wouldn't go live. And so what happened was If I had 20 episodes in the can or in the process at any given time, when I, Jenny, got overwhelmed or got busy with client work or traveling for speaking engagements, the whole thing would grind to a halt. One of the best things I did, my brother really had to convince me to do this was after the free Time podcast launched. And I just realized this was a lot to keep up with. I went all in and really went pro by hiring a full service podcast production team, One Stone Creative. So when you listen to these podcasts for the last few years and they sound good to you. That is all thanks to them. The fact that we have not missed an episode since I hired them for either Pivot or free time, and I produce 14 podcast episodes a month, if you can believe it, is because of them. Hiring them means that I get to show up and do what I do best and what I most enjoy, which is conducting the interview or recording a solo episode. And they handle the rest. So they're helping with guest prep when I'm going to interview somebody. They're helping draft show notes, they're helping edit the audio and someone else does the quality check and listens to it and gives feedback. And then they do a second round of audio edits and they draft the show notes. And if they haven't heard from me on a missing piece of the show notes, they schedule it to publish anyway. One of the most important things I said to them when I hired them was do not let me be the bottleneck. The shows should go live whether or not you've heard from me on any one piece of it. So how can we set things up where I don't stop the production schedule? And they've been so great. They've been such a wonderful partner in helping ensure that that's the case.

We'll be right back just after this.

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Lesson number seven Go your own way. There's a trend happening in podcasting that I cannot stand, that you've probably heard me complain about, and it has to do with diminishing returns and shiny shoulds. I'm going to link to a free time episode in the show. Notes on Diminishing returns and the True Cost of Shiny Shoulds I define shiny shoulds in free time as things that seem like a good idea that people tell you you should be doing. Like you should be on social media, or even you should be on LinkedIn and active and posting things at a certain frequency, but that they're shiny because ultimately they drain you. You dread doing them, you're not good at them, and they suck so much joy out of something that you almost want to stop doing it altogether. So my big pet peeve with the way podcasting is going is that everyone's saying you've got to be on video now. And so even as a guest when I was doing the Free Time podcast tour when the book launched, it was so different from when Pivot launched in 2016. Now half of the podcasts that would have me on wanted to record on video and they said, oh, I don't even like video. But I know I need to create some content for social media. So we take clips and we put it out on social. I know that their intentions are good, but for me it just takes all the joy out of what's special about the podcasting format. I love that I don't have to worry about how my hair and makeup looks like right now. It is early in the morning, Michael has Ryder out for a walk, I have sleep clothes on, my hair's a mess, I probably have sleep lines on my face, my voice is still a little creaky from being a little under the weather and also not having spoken very much yet today. And that's the good news. I didn't have to think about how messy my room is, what the lighting looks like, my background, none of it. If I had to worry about getting on video every single time I did one of my 14 podcasts a month, I would stop doing it altogether. So nobody can convince me that I should do video. Because I know that the moment I start to try to do video every single time, there will be so much friction that I will stop doing this altogether. There is a point of diminishing returns on good ideas for your creative projects, your business, even things that work if you work within a larger organization. And so you really have to think about not just oh, is video podcasting? Is it a good idea? Could it help me grow my listenership? Maybe. But what is the true cost? If it sucks all of the joy out and it creates so much friction that you never want to do it, then it will kill the project altogether. So I'm constantly reminding myself, go your own way, go your own way. And it gets to the point where sometimes I need to say yes to podcast invitations by saying only if we can record audio only. Now I'm trying not to be such a curmudgeon. And I know that it's good for me too to be searchable on YouTube. And I'm grateful that a lot of the freetime book and podcast tour conversations are on YouTube, because so many people record on video. But I also need to give myself permission to say I don't have to do video 24 7. I don't want to. And I also gave myself permission to stop getting so dressed up for those interviews, to stop worrying so much what my background looked like. Would it be better if I had a fancy DSLR camera on a tripod with depth of field and perfect lighting? Yes. But it's not a zone of genius for me to have this beautiful tech setup and clutter, free room and noise free home. I just don't live in that kind of environment. So while I do record about once a week at a production studio in Midtown called Gotham Production Studios, that just holds me accountable to recording my solo episodes and it does give me a quiet place to chat with guests. But I don't turn video on unless I absolutely have to. And it's usually at somebody else's request. Unless I'm recording with a guest together in person at Gotham Production Studios, which is super joyful. Even then I'll record the video just to have it. And so far I haven't done anything with those 10 video based podcast conversations. Part of it, because I think it's boring unless you have really snazzy editing. I think it's very boring to just look at two people talking to each other on video. And that's the other true cost of this. It's not just the friction of Am I video ready? That would slow me way down. There's so much more intense editing necessary when you're involving video than when it's just audio. So if you are falling into a shiny should where someone's telling you you should be doing something, everyone else is doing this. Oh, this is the way of the future. You don't have to listen if it would stop you from doing something altogether. Just ignore them. Could my show be 10 times bigger if I was on video? Maybe. But I don't care. I don't care if I had to be miserable and go to all this extra trouble and do all this extra work just so My show could be bigger just so I could be on video. I don't care. I really don't care. I will take a smaller show any day and keep it within the realm of fun and the realm of, like, frictionless recording that. By the way, so many of my guests are deeply relieved as well when I tell them, oh, don't worry, we're going to record audio only. So after we say hi, you can turn off the video, sit back, relax, look out of a window. I want them to feel relaxed, too. I don't think either one of us want to stare at that tiny pinhole at the top of the computer screen for an hour. It's just exhausting. So do you. Go your own way, be stubborn. I'm an advocate for being stubborn.

Finally, lesson number eight, Keep experimenting. One might even say pivoting. You can never really know what's going to work. Or even from one episode to the next or one article to the next, what are people going to resonate with? It's really hard to tell. There have been episodes where I was so embarrassed, like my daily TED diary where I recorded from the TED conference every morning. And that first launched on FreeTime. And then we did a crossover here on Pivot. And I just thought, this is either the worst thing I've ever done, it's boring audio drivel, and people are gonna just think it's the worst thing they've ever heard. I just had no clue. But I decided, it's experimental. Why not? I'll release it anyway. And that episode has gotten more feedback than almost any other episode I've ever done. I don't know why. Maybe there's just something about even a mundane day in the life of attending a conference that people resonated with. But I got so many notes, text messages, comments, email replies about that one episode where I had been expecting that it would be such a turn off for listeners. So just keep experimenting. You don't know. You don't need to know. What's going to land, what's going to resonate. It goes back to lesson number one. How can I fall in love with this again? I think that the experiments are about how can I fall in love with this again and again and again? Because eight years, I mean, this is longer than my marriage so far. I've been married for five years, coming up right around the same time. And anyone will tell you about marriage. How do you stay married? Don't get divorced. How do you stay in podcasting for eight years? Don't quit. You will have dips, you will have plateaus. So the experiments are okay. I keep learning, growing and evolving as a person. How can I keep this fresh? What next experiment do I need to try in terms of who I invite or solo episodes I record to keep myself challenged and learning and to keep resonating with you? Who's here listening?

To that end, if you have feedback, you know I'd love to hear, because outside feedback can also provide such a boost when it's this long into a project. Sometimes, as that saying goes, it's hard to read the label from inside the jar. So if you have ideas, if you have questions or topics you would love for me to address, shoot me an email. Helloivotmethod.com Most of all, thank you so much. Thank you for being here. Thank you for listening. Thank you for leaving ratings and reviews. If you have thank you for sharing this podcast or any single episode with a friend. You can always visit Pod Link pivotmethod to send a friend an episode where they can just click to listen in their favorite podcast player. I really love that service. And here's to the future. Can I say exactly how long the podcast will continue? Nope, I have no clue. All I know is I'm still having a blast. I'm still so grateful that you're here and I can't wait to see where the show takes all of us next. Thank you so much for listening. Have a beautiful rest of your day.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot podcast. Make sure you don't miss an episode or my insider tips and templates by signing up for Pivot List, a curated twice monthly newsletter where I share the inside scoop on what I'm reading, watching, listening to, and the latest tools I'm geeking out on. Sign up@pivotmethod.com pivotlist get show notes from this episode@pivotmethod.com podcast and connect with me on Twitter ennyblake.

Remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always.

Sam.