I'll never forget this sign on that hung on the wall of one of my hippie-vibes-heavy middle school classrooms:
“Don’t postpone joy.”
We would sneer at it and joke about that sign, ribbing our classmate, Joy, that she was not under any circumstances to be delayed.
Trite as that sign may have been, it almost certainly had two indelible effects on me:
A) My lack of impulse control around sweet things
B) An appreciation for “the good things” in life vs. succumbing to productivity culture
(🎶 You take the good/you take the bad/and there you have/the facts of life 🎶 )
But also: I’ve learned the joy of creating in spaces unencumbered by data-tracking.
We are measured all day long now.
Our watches zap us when we’ve been sitting too long, and then zaps us again when we’ve hit an arbitrary step count.
Apps congratulate us for drinking water. Oura rings chide our too-late dinner causing a night of disrupted sleep.
Social media platforms tell us how many people liked a thing, ignored a thing, shared a thing, saved a thing, or watched a thing for .7 seconds before deciding they’d rather learn how to clean grout in their shower.
And ok, I know those metrics can be enticing and informative. I'm definitely not ENTIRELY anti-data. I just think sometimes we’re tracking the wrong signals.
Dashboards typically measure one-size-all metrics, and they certainly don't track the squishier ones that often matter even more than hard numbers.
(I’m a living testament to the fact that “one-size-fits-all” is a myth and that squishiness is real...just ask the straining waistband of my pants. #ThanksPerimenopause)
Given my obsession with the insidious phenomenon of podfade (aka the plague that claims the lives of 90% of podcasts before they reach episode 9), I’ve set out to determine the causes and the preventive measures that can boost podfade antibodies.
My working theory, bolstered by this week’s Talking the Talk guest: performance data is a distraction and a podcast-killer, and it should be avoided for as long as possible.
The Joy CEO podcast host, Lori Pine, did something most people would find outrageous, but I find radically admirable: she very strategically launched a podcast with plenty of systems in place, and then… didn’t look at her numbers. For an entire year.
Somewhere around Week 22 of her show, a well-meaning colleague informed Lori that her podcast had landed in top 5% globally for its category. 👀
She already knew she was succeeding with her podcasts in terms of her own, squishier metrics, but turns out she was also succeeding in the numerical sense–and she didn’t even know it.
My hunch is she likely wouldn’t have even made it to that point if she’d been obsessively refreshing her podcast dashboard every week.
Podcasting is a long game that requires stamina and tenacity.
Even mega-podcaster success stories like Sam Parr were deeply dismayed by their numbers at the start of their podcast adventures, but have since gone on to grow an audience in the hundreds of thousands.
(At this year’s New Media Summit, I was delighted to witness Sam tell his keynote audience that podcasting is his #1 business pipeline conversion tool, and that any podcasters tempted to give up should give it at least a year before making any grand declarations about its success.)
The advice Sam gave echoes that given to Lori Pine by her podcast strategy advisor (not me, but fully endorsed by me based on this alone):
- Commit to a full year
- Outsource whatever drains you (s/o to the list of podcast editors I'm accumulating!)
- If part of the process starts feeling heavy, pivot instead of quitting
If you’ve ever found yourself wondering why the math isn’t mathing in your podcast, it's probably time to step away from the calculator.
Instead try shifting your focus to the metric of: is this delivering joy?
If the answer is yes, I suspect you won’t want to postpone your next episode, and the one after that, and the one after that…
