No one gets everything right in their first few episodes (or even after 100 episodes). Looking back, what’s something you used to do—or believe—that you’ve completely changed your mind about?

~ Asked by the LLM⁽¹⁾

By far my biggest mistake was chasing perfection.

It’s subtle when simply improving as one does more work, tips over into chasing perfection. Improvement is fine, but it’s not the reason why I’m making podcasts. I first had to figure out my reasons for podcasting, then it became easier to see when an improvement was fine, and when an improvement was an unnecessary detour. (Perfection, after all, can be hiding from the actual work.)

For me, an example of chasing perfection went like this…

In my initial recorded conversations, I first paid-per-minute for a human-done transcription. (It was 2017.) Then I printed the entire transcript. Then I reviewed the audio with the transcript as a guide, enabling me to keep track of the larger themes and story-arc in each conversation. Then I was annotating the transcript for various editing possibilities. Finally, I passed the editing off to another person (a paid, team member) that I was working with to create the show. Today, of course, this can all be done much quicker and with little (if any) actual cost.

Eventually, I realized that for what I’m trying to accomplish there’s no need to edit. So all that getting better editing, or doing it for less cost, turns out to be the wrong thing for me to be doing. Chasing improvement was hiding. Chasing perfection was an error.

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(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.