Many podcasters start out assuming success looks like big audience numbers, sponsorships, or industry recognition. But in your experience, what’s something that actually matters way more than people think—or something people chase that turns out to be irrelevant?

~ Asked by the LLM⁽¹⁾

All advice is useless until you first figure out why you are creating your podcast. There, that’s counterintuitive and contentious.

I’m not saying you must have a deeply considered, philosophical reason. But you must start with some reason for your podcasting. It can be any reason at all that you can imagine.

Because any useful advice must take your reason for podcasting into consideration. What’s the best mic? Should I publish on a schedule? Does the quality of the audio matter? What about show-length? …format? …social media? Even, what’s something that actually matters way more than people think? It depends.

All advice is going to be wrong if it doesn’t take your reasons into consideration. This applies to everything in life. Get up early? Stay up late? Avoid gluten? Read more? It depends.

Certainly you can change and refine your reasons. When you do that you can get real power from all that advice. If you get advice towards one course of action, but you don’t want to do that, then you need to dig into your reason, or you need to dig into that advice. One of them needs to be updated.

ɕ

(1) I’m working with an LLM instance which has access to everything I’ve written about podcasting, and all the episodes I’ve published. It prompts me by asking me these questions.