Justin: 00:02

We all know people that have been doing the same thing forever, and they're not getting better. They put out a 1000 episodes, and episode a 1000 is just as unlistenable as episode 1.

Jeremy: 00:13

When people think about consistency and compounding, people might have this idea that I should be creating my show 2 or 3 years before before it's really gonna start to grow. But here's a lot of factors that play into why that happens. And it's not just doing the same thing for multiple years. Welcome to podcast marketing trends explained. I'm Jeremy Enns from podcast marketing academy.

Justin: 00:33

And I'm Justin Jackson from Transistor Datafem. And together, we're digging into the data behind the podcast marketing trends 2023 report to help you understand what it means for you and your show.

Jeremy: 00:46

Our goal is to help you make better informed decisions about the way you create and market your show so you can spend more time on what actually matters for growth and accelerate your results.

Justin: 00:55

Let's get into it.

Jeremy: 00:59

So Justin, I want to pose a, bit of a question here to you about Warren Buffett, of all people. Okay. He actually started investing in the stock market when he was 11 years old. He is, as of right now, 93 years old, and he is currently worth a $133,000,000,000 My question to you is, how do you imagine the distribution of his wealth accumulation occurred throughout his lifetime?

Justin: 01:24

I don't know. I mean, in my head, I'm just thinking it just probably compounded at a steady rate over his whole career. Like, it was just like he was just putting in the effort bit by bit, and that just grew at the same rate up until now. He just lasted a long

Jeremy: 01:41

time. Okay. So you mentioned that it probably pounded over the the course of his career, and that is actually correct. But this actually gets at something that we are going to talk about in-depth in the episode today, which is this idea of compounding and how much it kind of just boggles our brains as people. And so when we actually look at the distribution of how Warren Buffett accumulated his $133,000,000,000, we see that, actually, he accrued 99.7% of that wealth after the time he turned 52 years old.

Jeremy: 02:13

No way. 40 years of investing accounted for 0.3 of his total net worth, and then the final several decades, 99.7%. Wow.

Justin: 02:24

When you put it that way, we're all just getting started.

Jeremy: 02:28

That's right. Yeah. And so one of the things that, you know, people talk about with Warren Buffett a lot is that one of his advantages is that, yes, he has been a great investor, but he actually hasn't been that savvy. It's that he's been playing the game a long time and that he's just been consistently putting in the work and that the longer that you stick with it, the more the gains begin to add up in the long term. Mhmm.

Jeremy: 02:46

And so this is something that applies equally to creative work, and I think it's something that's really frustrating. It's kind of mystical as a creator because what we hope is that, you know, things are going to grow linearly that we put in a certain amount of effort, and we're going to see the similar amount of reward for that. And what we see time and time again with many creators is you look at them, they might put in months, more often years, maybe even decades of work before things really start to turn upwards. And, I'm curious before we dive into some of how this plays out for podcasters and creators in general, is this something that you have experienced in your career? I think we're gonna get into some of the specifics later, but what's your personal kind of story with compounding then?

Justin: 03:27

Yeah. I talk about this a lot because we have this software business, and people ask me, you know, like, how'd you do that? And they want me to give them tips as somebody who's just starting out. And what's difficult to convey is that starting that business was just built on layer upon layer of experience that's not easily transferable. My experience is not easily transferable.

Justin: 03:55

And you it's not until you look at all those layers, all that foundation that was set before we founded the business that it makes sense. Once you can start unpacking it and going, oh, wow. First, it was that and then that and then that. It adds up. It makes sense.

Justin: 04:13

But what people see from the outside is just, oh, you started this thing and it works. And that's just not the case. There's just so many experiences and connections and things that came along the way that built up to that thing working.

Jeremy: 04:30

And we're gonna get into some of the nuances because I think a lot of times when people think about consistency and compounding, people might have this idea that, okay, I've heard that I should be creating my show 2 or 3 years or something like that before it's really gonna start to grow. But I think there's a lot of factors that play into why that happens and it's not just doing the same thing for multiple years. So we're gonna look at those in a second. But first, I wanna start off with some of the data that came up in the report and it really speaks to this idea that longevity is a huge advantage in podcasting. So the first thing that I asked was just for all the podcasters who submitted the survey was how long have you been publishing your show?

Jeremy: 05:09

Some people had been producing their show for a matter of months. Some people hadn't even launched yet, but were just getting started. And other people had been producing their show for multiple years. And so, one of the things we saw was that the overall average from all the 500 plus people who submitted the survey, on average, they had been producing their shows for 4.3 years, which I I was pretty impressed by. I thought, woah, this is a pretty experienced group of people who completed the survey.

Justin: 05:34

Yeah. Especially because this is for a single show. Right? This doesn't take it this isn't how long they've been podcasting total. This is just how long have you been producing this show.

Jeremy: 05:45

Yeah. That was what I had asked was this specific show that you're currently kind of submitting this survey for. Some people did have multiple shows going at the same time, but I think, you know, on average, we can assume that this is, people, submitting their experience for one show. Now it does get a little bit more interesting when we start to break down the data into these specific different, growth categories. And so in this case, we were breaking down the shows by size.

Jeremy: 06:08

And so we broke them down to shows with more than 10,000 downloads an episode on average, shows between 1,010,000 downloads an episode, and shows with less than a 1000 downloads an episode. And, what we saw here was very telling, in my mind here. Yeah. We saw the shows with more than 10,000 downloads an episode had on average been producing their shows 7 years. Wow.

Jeremy: 06:29

The shows between 1,010,000 downloads an episode producing their show 4 years. And the shows with less than a 1000 downloads an episode had been producing their shows 3 years. So this very kind of clear indication that, you know, the shows that made it big, there were not a lot of shows who had just been, you know, producing their show a year or 2 years that made it to that size.

Justin: 06:50

That's a huge difference. So, like, that big growth number, the people that are getting most of the downloads have been doing the show for 7 years. And who does anything for 7 years? You know? Like, even who does anything for 4 years?

Justin: 07:05

You know? It it it's almost like I would guess that most new podcasts, like, you can measure the amount of time they're working on it in months, not years. So this whole group is, I would say, way above average for what we would see in the normal podcasting ecosystem. Impressive to do anything for 3 years, 4 years, or 7 years, and then to have this clear correlation between time spent and the number of downloads you're getting. I guess that's the that's the secret.

Justin: 07:38

We can end the show. You wanna grow longer? Just just, keep going. And, in 7 years, you too can have a show that's doing more than 10,000 downloads per episode.

Jeremy: 07:50

That's that's probably it. And, we also looked at it from a couple other ways here too. And so, of course, you know, years being active is one factor. That's a little bit hard to tell. It doesn't really say have they been producing consistently for that long, what goes on there.

Jeremy: 08:02

Some people do have breaks, things like that. Maybe you release 1 episode a year. That doesn't really tell us much about that. So I also looked up, using the listen notes data actually for the shows that I was able to find that for, which was, the majority of them. And I looked up how many episodes have they released overall.

Jeremy: 08:17

All time. And so what we saw here was that the shows with more than 10,000 downloads an episode, the median number of episodes they'd released was 286. So getting close to 300. The shows between 1,010,000 were a 127 episodes, so less than half. Barely significantly lower than half.

Jeremy: 08:37

And then the shows with less than a 1000 downloads, an episode were just 52 episodes published. And so this is actually, I think, a little bit more interesting to me because in the the years active data, there was 3 years for the shows less than a 1000, and 4 years for the shows that were 1,000 to 10000. But the distinction is much different between number of episodes published where 52 episodes for the smallest shows, a 127 episodes, so more than double for the next tier, 1,000 to 10000 downs an episode, And then again, more than double up to that highest tier of more than 10,000. And so here, we've got years, but also the number of reps that they've got in with just producing episodes, which I think that that's a huge, huge factor to to consider here as well.

Justin: 09:20

Yeah. You know what I like about this is I can visualize with this show. We've been doing this not even a month or 2

Jeremy: 09:27

months. I don't know. A month,

Justin: 09:29

I think. Something like that. And so and we're at, I don't know, 300 downloads per episode or something. And so I can imagine a graph, you know, going out into the future, like, oh, wow. Like, if we just kept producing episodes every week and did it more than a month, did it, like, a year and then 2 and then 3 and then 4, I can imagine us getting 2 thousands of downloads per episode.

Justin: 09:55

It's just like, oh, that that makes sense that that would happen. But that's not usually how people think. I think especially in the era of these algorithmic feeds, I can just pick up a piece of content and just, like, go crazy with it. You know, you your your first time posting on TikTok and you might get a 1,000,000 views, it spoiled people and maybe misled them. And Yeah.

Justin: 10:19

Yeah. I I like this idea of it's just reps. I mean, of course, it's more than that, but there is a simplicity about that that's encouraging. Because if you just keep putting in the reps, you keep publishing episodes, you can imagine the show growing as you continue to put things out.

Jeremy: 10:36

Yeah. And I think we'll get into a little bit more of that nuance in a minute there with the distinction between reps and maybe skill and practice and the things that kind of accrue as you you do more reps. But the one other wrinkle that I thought was interesting here was we've kind of looked at the data so far here in terms of size of show, but the other way that we slice this was in terms of growth rate. And so this is detached from size of show, and actually the larger shows have a kind of necessarily harder time growing. So they're never going to have as high a growth rate as the smaller shows.

Justin: 11:07

Yeah.

Jeremy: 11:07

But I was curious to know, you know, what when it comes to the actual growth rate, and so we looked at the shows that doubled in size or more, the shows that outperformed the median but didn't double. So 21 to a 100% growth. The shows that were, 0 to 21% growth, so they grew but underperformed the median and then there were shows that shrank. And what we saw here was that the shows that grew by any amount basically had all produced the same amount of episodes. So there was a 105 for the shows that grew by a little bit.

Jeremy: 11:35

A 105 episodes was the median for shows that grew kind of in the median to above medium but didn't quite double and then a 107 for the shows that doubled. And so it didn't seem like the number of episodes produced actually had any impact on the growth rate. We saw that the shows that shrank, they actually produced double the number of episodes. And the reason here is, again, lots of those shows are big and a lot of times, they actually start producing more episodes. And so they don't get as many per episode downloads, but they get more downloads overall is often how that works.

Jeremy: 12:05

And so we don't even really need to consider those shows in in this case here. And then, again, with the years active, we see the same thing where the shows that shrank, they had been active quite a bit longer which makes sense. They're probably bigger and they're actually producing more episodes, getting fewer downloads per episode but more downloads overall. Mhmm. But all the other shows had basically been producing for the same amount of time at any growth rate.

Jeremy: 12:26

This was really interesting in that on the one hand, it doesn't seem like the, amount of time that you have been active or the amount of episodes that you had published had any impact. But on the other hand, all of these shows had been active at least 3 years was the average in any of the growth ranges as well as having produced at least a 100 episodes. And so, again, this is a pretty savvy dataset of podcasters here who submitted this. And even with some of this growth rate data, they necessarily needed to have been producing for a year for me to include them in this. Otherwise, it didn't really work for the data.

Jeremy: 12:59

And so, you know, there's some nuance here, but I think that that is really encouraging. I think for most people that it's not like you can't grow really quickly if you haven't produced, you know, a certain amount of episodes.

Justin: 13:09

Yeah. There's another thing I would like people to consider, which is we're talking about shows that have gone on for years years years, and it just makes sense that the listener would wanna move on. So not every show can last forever. And we have this idea in podcasting because there are some shows that have just been around forever. But I bet you all a lot of those shows like, even I read a piece on, This American Life, partly because of this new iOS thing where iOS is now recording less auto downloads.

Justin: 13:42

You know, their numbers are dropping. And Mhmm. With anything that's mature, you've got to imagine that you're eventually gonna hit your ceiling, and then eventually, things drop off. That's how things work. There's very few things that grow, you know, a 100% year over year forever.

Justin: 13:59

That just doesn't happen. So there's kind of 2 lessons. It's like, this takes a long time to get this right to build up an audience, but then it also makes sense that you can't keep that audience forever. You, you know, you might need to start a new show, a new fresh thing, and then ask that audience to follow you to the next show. But the idea of, you know, I'm gonna do this one podcast forever, and it's gonna grow every single month forever.

Justin: 14:25

It's not gonna happen. That doesn't happen with anything.

Jeremy: 14:28

A lot of times you think about this in, like, the tech world where everybody kinda knows there's this s curve where it starts off kind of slow, nothing's happening, you're doing a lot of work, and then it starts to turn upward. Now things are growing really quickly. And then eventually, you know that that is going to flatten out because there just are no more people who are in your target market. Mhmm. And you begin to either having to kind of diversify and, like, expand what you offer.

Jeremy: 14:49

And maybe that will allow you to grow a little bit more, but it begins to water down the content. Maybe the people who originally loved the the show don't quite like it so much anymore and so they start leaving. Or you then kind of diversify and say, okay. We're gonna start new shows that are somewhat related to tap into, you know, our existing audience or various other audiences. Yeah.

Jeremy: 15:05

So something to keep in mind that that ceiling exists for every single show. And for some shows, that might be 50 people. For some shows, that might be 500,000 people. Mhmm. And for most shows, it's probably somewhere in between there.

Justin: 15:16

Yeah. And you can keep doing it for the superfans too. Like, it growth isn't everything.

Jeremy: 15:21

Let's get into this, this idea of compounding returns and explore it a little bit more. So to start off, we've kind of talked about it a little bit already here, but do you just kinda wanna give your interpretation of how you think about or would describe the idea of compounding returns.

Justin: 15:36

So for me, this is multifaceted. People think about compounding very simplistically. Like, they think about it in an investment sense. Like, I just invest a $100 every month no matter what, and it gains interest, and then that interest goes into the pot, and now I'm earning more interest on this bigger amount and just grows and grows and grows. And it's it's overly simplistic for something like podcasting because when I think about compounding returns, it's like it's the accumulation of everything you've done in your life.

Justin: 16:06

Every action that you've taken, every risk you've taken, every experiment you've run, every person you've met, childhood experiences, the family you grew up in, it it kinda covers everything. And then all of that accumulates into a thing, which is you, that then has the ability or inability to create something that's compelling for an audience. So that's the way I think about it. What are your thoughts around compounding?

Jeremy: 16:39

Yeah. So to your example, and actually we use the example earlier of Warren Buffett, finance and investing for retirement in the stock market. These are things where compounding returns certainly play into. But, really, I think about it in terms of, like, exponential growth. And so we can think of, like, linear is in a straight line Mhmm.

Jeremy: 16:54

Where it's, again, it's like the steady line effort in equals results out. Where compounding, it becomes detached from your effort at some point. And so you might put in a ton of effort into something or you're investing into your retirement account, and it's just like you're not gaining that much interest for a long time. But then toward the tail end, much like Warren Buffett, all of a sudden, every year, you're earning 1,000,000 of dollars in interest or in Warren Buffett's case, 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars in interest from your investments that they're pulling in, and it's totally detached from any effort that he's putting in. It's just that the base kind of principle in this case has it keeps on growing and growing and growing, and it's accruing more of that returns.

Jeremy: 17:30

And I think to your point, investing's a pretty simplistic way to look at this because we've essentially just got, okay, we put money in and that gains interest. But I think with something like creative work where it gets really hard to understand why this happens. I think we want to think about, let's just say podcast growth, but we could use any kind of social media email list, you know, whatever you're trying to grow your audience. We think, oh, I just keep doing this. And the more effort I put in, you know, the more it's going to grow.

Justin: 17:54

Yeah.

Jeremy: 17:55

But really, the the some of the reasons behind that compounding are, for 1, the more work you put out there, the more surface area you give people to discover your work. But then there's all these other factors where your skill improves. Each episode, hopefully, that you put out, you're getting a little bit better. Whether or not you realize it or not, it's really hard to do 300 episodes and not be better than you were at episode 1. And, you know, to your point here, like, we're, you know, 10 episodes in at this point that we've released.

Jeremy: 18:21

We've maybe recorded 15 or something like that. And we've experienced already in the short amount of time, like things have gotten tighter, where it's getting, to be more natural to record them. We don't have to do as many kind of retakes, things like that.

Justin: 18:32

Yeah.

Jeremy: 18:32

And, you know, when you mentioned, like, being able to look ahead over several years or 300 episodes and think, oh, yeah. I could see where this could go in terms of audience growth. I was kind of thinking, I can't even imagine where this would grow in terms of our skill development around this and how our report would change and how we would kind of know how to play off each other and Yeah. All these other things. We'd probably start to accrue other things as well where maybe we start to get some income for the show, and now we get to invest that back into video production or advertising or something else that then amplifies the level of the show further so it's now a better show which then creates this flywheel where it grows further.

Jeremy: 19:08

We get more income. We get to invest that in further. And that's when we really start to see some of this compounding returns. It's like all of these things are coming together to incrementally improve every little aspect of everything both us as people and as creators as well as the show itself. And so it's not just about doing the show more, the same show.

Jeremy: 19:26

It's like, how are you actually stacking little brick by brick by brick that eventually adds up into this this much better, bigger show?

Justin: 19:34

Yeah. And the other thing that's hard to get right from the beginning is this understanding of the audience and what resonates. You kind of gradually build up

Jeremy: 19:45

Yeah.

Justin: 19:45

This sense of taste, but not just a general sense of taste, but a sense of taste for this particular audience. Like, what resonates with this group? What drives more engagement? And that takes time. It takes time.

Justin: 20:02

It's lots of feedback. It's like we're gonna run into people at podcast movement, and we're gonna get feedback there. We're getting feedback in, you know, our inboxes. We're getting feedback in surveys. And we are starting to get this intuitive sense of what the audience likes.

Justin: 20:21

Mhmm. And you can't do that overnight. It that's a compounding return. James Clear has this metaphor of an ice cube melting. Like, you raise the temperature by 1 degree, nothing happens.

Justin: 20:31

You raise it by another degree, nothing happens. You keep raising it by a degree. And in a sense, it's like, wow. We're putting in all this work. We keep raising the temperature, and this ice cube hasn't changed.

Justin: 20:41

And then suddenly, it crosses a threshold and starts to melt, and it feels like it's happening all at once. Creative endeavors are like that. It's just like you're gradually increasing the temperature, and the results are a lagging indicator of you increasing the temperature. Right? It takes a while for you to see the culmination of everything you've been doing, which can be frustrating, but that's how it works.

Jeremy: 21:05

So I'm a little bit torn a lot of times when talking about this. Because on the one hand, I want to encourage people who have good ideas that are worth pursuing to stick with them. And at the same time, this is something that I think people don't talk about enough because they genuinely want to be supportive of their audiences, of people who are trying things, and they don't want to discourage them. But I think about, like, I've been working in podcasting now for 8 years. I think, coming up as, next week or something is my 8 year anniversary of of first starting as a podcast editor.

Jeremy: 21:32

Mhmm. I was a listener before that, but I think, like, in the past year or 2, so 6 to 7 years in, I feel like things have really clicked where I'm like, I have a pretty good sense at this point, like, what's gonna hit and what's not going to. I know how to talk about the problems. I can sit down and in, you know, 10 minutes write a really great email about something podcasting related. I don't really have to work at it anymore.

Jeremy: 21:52

Mhmm. And I feel like now everything's gravy from here on out, but it took me 8 years to get here. Keep in mind, like, I avoided doing a lot of the things that could have accelerated that process at every step of the way. Now, like, I've been working full time in podcasting, but I did not do a lot of, you know, customer or potential audience, interviews or things like that.

Justin: 22:10

Mhmm.

Jeremy: 22:10

And, I actually have a friend of mine, Andrew. He had a call with a friend of yours, Nathan Barry

Justin: 22:16

Okay. A

Jeremy: 22:16

few weeks ago. Cool. And so Andrew, had a call with Nathan. He had actually signed up. I think he bought his authority book, and there's one version of the book where Nathan will get on a call with you, which is kind of crazy to me because Nathan runs ConvertKit, which is a huge company now, and I can't he's still doing coaching calls with people who buy his ebook.

Jeremy: 22:33

But I think it says something about who Nathan is. Yeah. And so Andrew bought the book. He bought the upsell to get the call with Nathan. And he's thinking about doing something in the world of habits, which is a very difficult world, basically, because James Clear has taken it over now.

Jeremy: 22:47

Mhmm. And so Andrew has a lot of experience in that world, but he's kind of like, I don't know what to do with this. And so he got on a coaching call with Nathan, at the end of the call. Andrew asked Nathan. He was like, so, you know, what could I do that would be so impressive that you would get on another call with me?

Jeremy: 23:01

And Nathan kinda thought for a minute, and he was like

Justin: 23:03

Great question.

Jeremy: 23:04

You would have done 40 customer interviews, and you would come back to me with actionable insights that, what you're gonna do next. And so Andrew took that away. I've checked in with him a couple times since then, and he immediately in the 1st week set up 30 audience interviews with people from his newsletter. Yeah. And so not everybody showed up.

Jeremy: 23:20

So he's at about 25 that he's done so far, 30 minute calls with each of these people, and he's got a bunch of notes on this. And he's like, yeah. So what I'm gonna actually do is I'm gonna probably get to 60 because I've we've done a lot of reading about people in, like, Y Combinator, the the tech accelerator. And one of the things that the people who organize that have said is, like, the people that they know are gonna succeed, the organizers will tell them do this thing, and those founders will come back, and they'll have done double that and gone well above and beyond. Mhmm.

Jeremy: 23:44

And so Andrew's like, I'm gonna do way more than Nathan expected, and I'm gonna come back to him. And he's gonna be so impressed about what I did that he's gonna get on another call with me. Yeah. And so Andrew's he's probably in his forties, I think. He's done a lot of creative projects, but he's, like, in this kind of new space to him.

Jeremy: 24:00

Yeah. And he's like, I'm hitting the ground running, and I'm not wasting any time doing this. Yeah. And I think about the 8 years that I've been in podcasting, and I have not done any of that. I've slowly it's taken me 8 years to do what he's trying to compress into a few months.

Jeremy: 24:11

Mhmm. And I think that this is something that everybody can do, and I think that there are things in this compounding that a lot of these things can be compressed. They don't need to take so long, but you need to go out and get them. And I think that part of it's knowing what some of these assets are that compound. But then it also it's just being kind of willing and unafraid to go out and and start to get those in a condensed amount of time.

Jeremy: 24:34

And I think that once you start to build up those things, like, that's when things actually start to take off really quickly.

Justin: 24:40

This made me think of this advice my friend, Ben Orenstein, gives, which is try 10 things as fast as possible and see what works. Just start failing, start making mistakes, start getting some data and see what happens. And the idea here is that one way to increase the rate of compounding is to increase the rate at which you're doing things. And so Mhmm. This has limits.

Justin: 25:07

You can't just say, well, in in that case, I'm gonna publish 10 episodes a day, and, you know, I'm just gonna totally growth hack this whole thing. But the idea is you just start putting in reps, and that's what your friend Andrew is doing. He's like, okay. What's a a rep that's hard to do, but I'm gonna just do it more frequently? Customer interviews.

Justin: 25:26

That's hard to do. It's hard to get people on the phone. It's hard to actually sit through. Like, that's a lot of calls. You and I have a hard time getting on this call every week.

Justin: 25:35

Like, can you imagine doing that? Like, okay, I'm gonna get on 20 of these a week. That's Yeah. A lot of work. But by doing those hard reps, you are increasing the rate of compounding.

Justin: 25:48

As somebody in my forties, sometimes I get a little surly, you know, when I see these young earnest kids out there putting in the wraps. It's it's bad. You shouldn't get cynical about this, because the truth is all of us can do this even if you're forties, fifties, sixties, whatever. You can just start putting in the reps wherever you are at right now. And the more reps you put in, the better chance those are gonna compound and turn into something valuable.

Jeremy: 26:15

Yeah. And I think the other thing that's interesting about this specific situation for Andrew is that it also gets into one of these other assets that compounds that I know we've talked about in basically every episode, which is your network and your connections and your relationships.

Justin: 26:28

Yeah.

Jeremy: 26:28

And I think we talked about maybe in the non social media marketing channels episode about how a lot of times when collaborations and relationships really start to pay off is when you accrue a lot of them, and they're not necessarily your best friends, but there's a bunch of people in your space, in your industry who they know you do good work.

Justin: 26:45

And so

Jeremy: 26:46

this is something that can't be shortcut because I think very many people can do great work, publish a daily, you know, blog post or Twitter thread that's great for a week Yeah. Or 30 days maybe. Something like that. But it's really hard to show up for 3 years at a time and continually put out great work and this is something when in any space I've noticed this too and you see this happen so often where people who've been in the game a long time, they'll see somebody new come on the scene and they'll put out great work and it's like, oh, interesting. Okay.

Jeremy: 27:13

But I'm like not gonna commit and put too much effort into building a relationship yet. Mhmm. Because you have seen so many people who start off hot. They don't get that result in the first, you know, month or 2, and then they give up. Mhmm.

Jeremy: 27:24

And it's the people oftentimes I I have certainly felt this myself where I was, like, you know, writing blog posts or doing whatever content that I've done in the past where I was, like, man, I don't feel like I get the the respect I deserve or whatever.

Justin: 27:34

Mhmm.

Jeremy: 27:34

And it's like when you've been doing it for 5 years, it's almost like people start to warm up to you who've been doing it for 10 years 15 years. Yeah. And you're finally like, oh, yeah. I see I needed to earn that because now you can also see looking back at other people who are starting out and have seen them kind of like a lot of people start off really quickly but drop off really quickly as well. Mhmm.

Jeremy: 27:51

And I think that that can't really be shortcut, but it's something that once you get over that hump and you built that reputation, this becomes a huge amplifier of everything that you else that you do going forward.

Justin: 28:01

Yeah. And those relationships. You know, when I was doing my interview podcast, almost every crucial moment in somebody's career where they really elevated their career or really elevated their business or really elevated whatever creative endeavor they were doing, the pivotal moment was almost always meeting somebody. It's like, oh, and then I met Heaton Shaw, and then he showed me this, this, and this, and he introduced me to this, or he challenged me on this. And this is true in my life.

Justin: 28:31

I can connect the through line of every success I've had leading up to this moment. It's all because of people, connections. You know? I met my business partner, John, through Chase Reeves, who I interviewed on that first podcast. And these relationships you build along the way, it can't again, this is the the hard thing is it can't be just any relationship.

Justin: 28:56

This can't just be any reps you're putting in. You can't just put any episode out over and over and over again. Like, there has to be some strategy to it. You have to be trying to connect with interesting people that are doing interesting things that know interesting people. You have to be putting out interesting episodes and you keep trying to improve.

Justin: 29:18

But if you are continually kind of ambitiously seeking after interesting connections, better skills, better reps, Eventually, that will culminate to something really great. What I like about it is you can just say, you know what? I'm just gonna go to a meetup. You know, there's, like, thousands of meetups around the world all the time. Most of them are free.

Justin: 29:46

Most of them are in your area. And the kind of people that go to meetups are curious, ambitious, self starters. You're gonna meet other people that are trying to make a dent in the world. That's how you get going. That's how you make those connections.

Justin: 30:03

So I like the the connection piece because it's something that you can start doing now.

Jeremy: 30:08

And I I think the one thing that also stands out to me with this idea of compounding, on the one hand, there's this, like, additive growth. But on the other hand, there's this subtraction of friction is part of how I feel about it, where people are more likely to make a a connection between you because you've kinda proven yourself. You're, like, in the in crowd now. So now it's easier to get not only any guest on your show, but better guests. You can get better interactions, and that then further elevates the level of your show.

Jeremy: 30:32

It further proves your credibility, which makes it easier to get the next guest. And so the friction across all of these things, your skills are better. So it takes you less time to do all these things used to do. When your taste is better, your hit rate is higher on the topics that you're putting out there. And all these things, it's less about the growth in terms of, like, I did this thing and it got more followers.

Jeremy: 30:49

Mhmm. It's actually easier to do those things as well. Yeah. And I think that that's a big part of compounding. It's like a a negative compounding almost where it's like it's removing friction and making things easier as you keep going.

Jeremy: 31:00

But that's part of like the skill development and a lot of all that stuff that is hard to see on a day to day basis. And it's like measuring your kid growing on the the door frame where it's like from day to day, you're probably not gonna see anything, but you do that every 3 months or 6 months and you realize, oh, okay. Like, they're they're growing up here. The same thing with skills. It's like from one episode to the next, probably you don't really notice that you're getting better at anything.

Jeremy: 31:20

But you look back or you listen back to a year ago and you're like, oh, wow. Like, I have improved a lot and the show is just way better. But never at any point during that process where you're like, oh, this episode was just, like, 10 times better than the previous one.

Justin: 31:31

Yeah. Hopefully. You know, the other thought I have with all that this stuff as you're talking is I'm just imagining we all know people that have been doing the same thing forever, and they're not getting better. Yeah. There's shows that they they put out a 1,000 episodes, and episode a 1,000 is just as unlistenable as episode 1.

Justin: 31:52

And I I just imagine, like, somebody who is, like, lifting weights, but they just keep lifting the 1 pound weights. And Mhmm. It's like they're doing lots of reps, but they're not improving. They're not getting stronger. They're not, you know, building anything substantial.

Justin: 32:08

They're just staying the same. And, you know, we review a lot of podcasts. The thought that comes to my mind is I think some people are not listening back to their show. They're not listening to it with a sense of taste and going, is this getting better? Could this be better?

Justin: 32:32

Oh, wow. My microphone is way quieter than my cohost. Oh, man. My chair is squeaking. There's this one podcast I used to listen to, and the the chair would squeak all the time.

Justin: 32:42

It's like you got if you're gonna put in the reps, like, put some more weight on the barbell or whatever and actually improve and look at what you've done in the past. Like, okay. Last time I did 20 reps of this. This time I'm gonna improve by doing this. This is one of my worries about talking about compounding is I know people that they've just put in this very minimal effort their whole life, and they haven't received anything of it.

Justin: 33:11

But then they look back and they go, well, I have 10 years of this effort. And it's like, well, yeah, you kinda wasted all that time. You gotta be pushing forward or you're not gonna make progress.

Jeremy: 33:23

Yeah. This is something I have so many conversations with people, and it always is a huge red flag for me when they say, my show's great. I just need to know how to promote it. And to me, instantly, I have never heard a successful creator who is satisfied with their work. Mhmm.

Jeremy: 33:38

They're proud of it, but they're not satisfied. Yeah. There's a distinct gap between where they are and where they want to be. And I think about that with everything I do. I'm like, okay.

Jeremy: 33:45

I'm really proud of this show that we're doing. I'm proud of my newsletters. And I'm also I know. I'm like, I have more that I could do. And, like, there is something innate in me.

Jeremy: 33:53

And I don't know if everybody has this. I know I certainly feel this where I am just perpetually dissatisfied with the quality of my work. I think it's good but I'm like, it's that Ira Glass quote. It's the gap between your taste which is up here and your current abilities. It's the pursuit of closing that gap that I think propels the people who actually grow and reach those kind of big audiences, the big successes that, you know, I think a lot of us are shooting for.

Jeremy: 34:17

I think that's the driving force behind it. And so I think I I don't wanna say people shouldn't be satisfied with their work, but I think that that is a trait that I have noticed with basically everybody who is a really successful creator is, like, they are always hungry for more. And they're always looking for ways to push the envelope and kind of continually to improve their skill set, their networks, their connections, what they can invest back into their work. And I think that, you know, that's something that certainly compounds over time.

Justin: 34:41

Yeah. I highly recommend people listen to the Ira Glass episodes of Mike Birbiglia's podcast, Working It Out. Mike Birbiglia is a comedian, and Ira Glass is his adviser, friend, but they kind of critique each other's work and try to make it better. And just entering into that world and seeing how people who are kind of at the top of their game, how they try to level up a bit of comedy or a narrative podcast is so fascinating. And I think you would get a sense of, oh, wow, this is kind of what I should be aspiring to, is, work at this level and self improvement at this level.

Jeremy: 35:26

So I think that we could probably talk about compounding returns and improvement of your work and all of these things for for several hours. But there's another side of the idea of compounding that I think is worth exploring. And this was actually brought up by a listener who reached out to me on LinkedIn. His name is Nick Korte or Korte, k o r t e. So shout out to Nick.

Jeremy: 35:44

We've had a previous conversation a few months ago around the idea of burnout and creative burnout in particular. So there's kind of a time burnout, and then there's kind of just a energetic creativity burnout that can happen. And I've certainly experienced both versions of that at different times in my career. I think most people who do creative work or entrepreneurial work have experienced that at some point. But it got me thinking about this quote by actually bringing it, back to Warren Buffett, his business partner, Charlie Munger Mhmm.

Jeremy: 36:07

Who has this quote, the first rule of compounding, never interrupt it unnecessarily. Mhmm. And this is something that in the times when I've experienced burnout, it's like you're working really hard and momentum is going up and then you hit this wall and you're going back down to square 1 and you've interrupted that compounding and all that momentum has been lost. And so I think that this is an interesting angle to talk about here too is that there's compounding and continuing to put out the work, but there's also this you don't actually wanna go so hard that you burn yourself out, you hit a wall, and now you can't keep investing into those returns.

Justin: 36:40

Yeah. For myself, I think about this in a much longer time frame, which is over a lifetime. And Yeah. To me, my life is just one big marathon, and the point is to keep moving. So Mhmm.

Justin: 36:55

I wanna have a pace that allows me to keep moving. Sometimes I'm sprinting, sometimes I'm walking, but I'm always moving if I can. And every once in a while, you need to stop. That's true too. Mhmm.

Justin: 37:08

But the idea is that when I do stop, I'm gonna get back on the horse and keep staying in motion. So I've learned that you can cultivate a life of just like, how can I seek out interesting people? How can I seek out interesting conversations, interesting projects? I'm gonna have to say yes to a few and no to many. Right?

Justin: 37:34

That's part of it as well. When I hear Charlie's quote, I think some people could say, well, I've gotta keep the streak going. You know, it's like, I can't ever take a break, and I don't think that's what the answer is. I think the answer is you just stay in motion. Right?

Justin: 37:50

Charlie didn't keep making the same investments in things that had gone bad. Like, he was like, oh, wait. We gotta stop. We gotta pull back from investing in that and invest in something else, but that you're still moving forward in that sense. So don't take this to me and like, oh, I just gotta double down and keep doing this podcast that nobody's listening to, and I've been doing it for 10 years.

Justin: 38:12

But if I just keep going, it's gonna win eventually. Maybe the answer is well, maybe you need to stop investing in that project and start investing in something else. And you're continuing the act of compounding, but you're cutting off a bad investment.

Jeremy: 38:29

Yeah. And we're gonna talk more about this, to close out the episode here, but so many of the skills that you build in one area or one one project are transferable somewhere else. And so I have had many projects that on the surface, it would be easy to say that they failed where actually, you know, maybe I didn't make as much money as I wanted to. Maybe I lost money on it. Maybe I wasted months on a project that ultimately didn't do anything.

Jeremy: 38:51

But, basically, every one of those projects has given me something in terms of skills or connections or something else that I've been able to take to the next project. And so one of the things that I really think a lot about now when choosing projects is, like, how can this be a win even if it fails on the surface? And so there's at least 2 objectives. And so this podcast, I don't think this is going to be a massive hit where we get thousands of listeners or anything like that. It's gonna be a short run show.

Jeremy: 39:17

The world of podcasting is pretty small. But for me, one of the big curiosities is like, I've never created a video podcast before. Mhmm. So even if nobody ever listened to the show, this would be worth it to me because now I've gone through the process of creating a video podcast. Yeah.

Jeremy: 39:29

And we can then talk about, like, we've got to have these conversations, which we had maybe talked a little bit about here before. And so there's partly just this relational aspect of it that, like, it's worth talking to you every week. Yeah. If even if nobody listens. And there's all these other things where I like to really think about those early on of, like, I don't need to kill myself over this one metric of success because there's all these other ways that even if it's not really successful there, I'm still gonna come out ahead.

Jeremy: 39:53

And so I think that's an important Mhmm. Context to think about everything that you're doing in as well. But then also, like you said, being willing to pull the plug on that project and take those skills that you learned and put them somewhere else.

Justin: 40:03

Yeah. If it's no longer serving you, then get rid of it. Start something new. I moved to something else. That's fine.

Justin: 40:10

And this is from somebody you know, my 2 of my shows, Build and Launch and Mega Maker, were both on the premise of, like, Mega Maker was I was gonna make a 100 things in a year. And sometimes I've looked back on that and gone, I wasted my time. Like, what was I doing? That was like a midlife crisis. I was, you know, building all this stuff.

Justin: 40:28

I had this big long list of, over 200 things that people submitted that I could do. But on the other hand, now I look back on it and it was like, at that time in my life, I was staying in motion, and I was trying lots of different things, meeting lots of interesting people, and moving on from projects. So I would create something, build it, launch it, and then move on. Create something, build something, launch it, move on. And you can't do that forever.

Jeremy: 40:56

Mhmm.

Justin: 40:57

But in terms of the job it was doing for me, which was developing skills, getting to exercise my creativity, getting to meet people, getting to practice building in public, that experience was very valuable. And maybe a 100 things is a bit too much, but one thing people could do every year at the end of the year is just write down what are 10 projects I would like to try to do this year. And they shouldn't all be, like, ongoing commitments like a weekly podcast. Sometimes it should just be, like, I'm gonna try to pitch one idea to a podcast I really like, or I'm gonna try to get on one show as a guest. Those are nice little projects.

Justin: 41:37

And if at the end of the year, you can go, oh, wow. Look at all the evidence I have for ways I moved forward this year. And that creates momentum, and that compounds, you know, as you move forward on your journey as a podcaster.

Jeremy: 41:52

Yeah. The other thing that I wanna throw in here in terms of avoiding burnout, playing the long game, and kind of continuing to move forward even if it's not in, you know, this one specific direction, which might be podcast growth or business growth or whatever it is. I think that a lot of times specifically, you're plugged into the productivity space. There's especially if you're plugged into, like, the bro productivity space, there's this kind of, like, just do the thing and, like, wake up at 5 AM every morning. And, like, you know, and I bought into a lot of that stuff in the past.

Jeremy: 42:20

I mean, like, okay. I'm gonna do this every day, and this is gonna what's gonna make me successful. And some of that stuff can work in the short term to help you, you know, do a sprint and make some progress. But you start listening to interviews with any successful people. Like, there are so many paths to be successful.

Jeremy: 42:35

And I think that for me, the thing that has been most useful to me is actually kind of acknowledging, like, where I'm at creatively and energetically and where my interests are and trusting in that. Mhmm. And that's something that I have cultivated over the years. I think it's like the more you follow that and the more it pays off, the more you realize, oh, when I'm feeling a disconnect or a misalignment in some part of my work, actually, the answer is probably not to push through. I think some of there is some discernment.

Jeremy: 43:00

There are some things that are going to be hard that you do need to push through. And there are other things that when you can kind of get the sense that, like, I'm just not into this anymore. Like my I don't actually maybe even want the result anymore even though I think that I should. It's like, okay. Let's recognize that and let's say, okay.

Jeremy: 43:13

Maybe it is time to take a a step back from this. Maybe I come back this project later. But for now, I'm gonna follow my interest somewhere else and I'm gonna do something that, like, feeds me and fuels me. And that's actually the thing that allows you to to play the game longer and stay in it and not, like, bash your head against the wall and quit with frustration and just be left with a sour taste in your mouth. And so I've worked with so many people who, you know, 3, 5 years in totally reinvent their shows because they're just like, this isn't the show I wanted to create anymore.

Jeremy: 43:39

And they'll either start new or they'll rename that one and some of their audience will come with them. But I think that that's something that we're often scared to do because it feels like we've invested so much time in this thing and now we're stuck doing that forever. Mhmm. And personally, I just have kind of cultivated the sense of detachment for most of my projects where it's like, whatever. Everything has a kind of best before date, and I don't know when that's gonna come, but eventually it will.

Jeremy: 44:00

And when it does, I'm gonna be sad. I'm gonna grieve it a little bit, but I'm gonna be like, okay. Well, I'm gonna let that go, and it's gonna make way for something new. And I think most creative people, this is the path that they're on. And so it's being able to kind of recognize and own those moments and like flow with where your energy is going, is a much healthier way to kind of keep in motion in the long term.

Justin: 44:20

Yeah. I agree with all of that. That was well said.

Jeremy: 44:23

Alright. So, to close-up the episode here, we've talked a little bit about some of our back stories here. So I wanna get into some of the backstory creative projects that you've had that have kind of led you to now, you know, cofounding a podcast hosting platform

Justin: 44:36

Mhmm.

Jeremy: 44:37

Being on this podcast here. You've got a kind of got a currently active newsletter as well, but I know that you have a long list of other creative projects that have kinda brought you to this current circumstance.

Justin: 44:46

Mhmm. I mean, I think about this, and it's just when we talk about luck, you know, I was lucky. I was born in 1980 in Canada to 2 parents that really encouraged our creativity as kids. You know, we got our first computer in 1985, and so I had early access to computers. And then I listened to a lot of talk radio.

Justin: 45:08

I grew up in Alberta, and so there's just a lot of conservative talk radio. My dad loved it. Lot of, public radio too. The other thing about the eighties nineties is we had tape recorders just sitting around everywhere. And so as kids, we would pretend to have radio shows all the time, because it was, like, the funnest thing in the house.

Justin: 45:28

It was just like you hit record on this thing, and you can, like, record a little show and then play it back and then play it for your parents. Started making movies in the nineties, had a VHS camcorder that I found. It was, like, producing all that stuff. Got Got on the Internet in probably 1990.

Jeremy: 45:44

Wow.

Justin: 45:44

Even before the web, the web came when I turned 13, and I was there for all of that. I also grew up in the evangelical church. And in church, you get so much practice, especially in evangelical churches with public speaking. You just get to speak all the time. And so there was a time where I was, like, speaking at least every week publicly, and that really helped me, you know, to be doing that from let's say I started doing that when I was 15, and it was, like, almost weekly up until I left the religion in when I was, like, 28.

Justin: 46:20

Like, that's a lot of time to be putting in reps for public speaking. I did local rave events. I started a business in college doing web design and video production. I started my first podcast in 2012. Through that podcast, I just met lots and lots of people.

Justin: 46:37

This guy, Chase, invited me to go to the XOXO Festival in Portland. That's where I met John, my business partner. Him and I hung out every year after that. At this festival, we kept going back. And then eventually, all of that culminates to the point where we can launch Transistor.

Justin: 46:53

And then there's, like, a million other details that matter. Like, I've been writing a blog since 2008. I've been sending a newsletter since 2008. I had been building a Twitter audience since 2012. Like, it was just, like, every little thing, every piece of Lego in the building got put in along the way and kinda culminates to where I am today.

Jeremy: 47:16

So one of the things that stands out to me is that no one of those things is probably you can make the argument maybe that, you know, meeting Chase Reeves and, like, getting invited to the festival, that is a pivotal moment. But most of those things, it's like no one thing contributed wholly entirely to your success at any point. It's like it's the accumulation of all these things over time. Yeah. And I think that that's what's frustrating to people when they want that, like, okay, what did you do to get this?

Jeremy: 47:40

And you're like, you read off that list and you're like, well, this is what I did. I was a youth pastor and I spoke it when I was 15. I was speaking every week and led to this and this led to this. And they're like, well, that isn't very helpful. And it's like, but it's the truth.

Jeremy: 47:50

Yeah. And I think, like, that's the unavoidable truth for everyone. There's never one thing. And I think a lot of people, when they find their way to the show or creative work that really clicks for them, it's kind of this clear consolidation of all the stuff that they've done in the past where they actually stop doing the thing they're supposed to be doing that everybody else is doing. And they're like, oh, I'm just gonna do the thing that my whole life experience has made me the only person that can do.

Jeremy: 48:13

Mhmm. And I think, like, when you finally own that and settle into that and maybe even stop resisting that, that's the point where it's like, oh, now we can actually make some progress

Justin: 48:21

here. Yeah. Yes. Absolutely. That's that's how it works.

Justin: 48:26

And if I was gonna give some blunt kind of advice, I would say the key really is getting out of the house, getting out of your comfort zone, putting things out into the world, going and forcing yourself to meet people. The first time I went to podcast movement, I'm an extroverted person. I'm a social person. I love meeting people. But I get into my hotel room, and every part of me is thinking, I don't wanna go out there and just walk around hoping I'm gonna talk to somebody.

Justin: 49:01

Like, it's awkward. It's hard. Mhmm. But every single time I pushed myself out of the hotel and I'm not gonna make any progress in the hotel room, but I'm going to increase the chances that something could happen if I'm walking around and trying to create some connections. Unfortunately, for me, the first three people I tried to connect with, it was just like they were not fun experiences.

Justin: 49:23

I just felt kinda rejected. But that's kinda how it works. You know? You gotta be willing to take some lumps. You gotta be willing to get out into the dangerous crazy world and try some things.

Justin: 49:34

So the evidence is people who get themselves out there. They're doing things. They're not staying in the metaphorical hotel room.

Jeremy: 49:42

So for mine, I was really curious. I kinda started writing this list a few months ago for some workshop that I was doing. And then I I went back to and realized, oh, there's actually even more here. So I started just writing short stories as a kid. And so I was like a reader.

Jeremy: 49:54

I would wake up, like, at 5 AM every morning so that I could get, like, 2 or 3 hours of reading in before school. Like, I'd wake up way more before my parents. And I would write as well. I was back home last summer and, my mom pulled out, like, the the memories treasures box. And there were all these books that I'd never had no memory of from when I was, like, 6 years old, 7 years old that I'd written these really silly little, like, generic stories.

Jeremy: 50:15

But I was like, k. That's interesting. I never really realized that my, like, love of writing went back that

Justin: 50:19

far. Newsletter is so good.

Jeremy: 50:22

Yeah. There's, you know, 30 years of practice almost at this point.

Justin: 50:25

Just as an aside, I'm I'm just gonna speak to the listener right now. Listener, I always read Jeremy's newsletter, and I'm always like, how is this so good? It makes me so jealous every time I re and he puts them out so frequently, and everyone is a banger. And I'm he's always got great metaphors and stories, and it drives me nuts. Well, now we know how you develop that over time.

Jeremy: 50:50

Yeah. And so that was really as a kid, I started doing that. I didn't write a lot. I don't really have that memory, but, clearly it happened. There's the the evidence to prove it.

Jeremy: 50:57

Mhmm. But, in junior high, I started experimenting with, you know, angsty poetry as, many teenagers do. And so that was something that I I leaned into that, and that turned into songwriting. And so then I started playing in, metal and hardcore bands. And so there's both writing music as well as writing lyrics.

Justin: 51:12

Mhmm. And,

Jeremy: 51:13

the performance aspect of it, I've probably written 7 different blogs. Many of those were, like, very short run. Some of those were longer. Played in multiple bands, released music, and wrote music under 4 different kind of personal projects. I produced albums for other people.

Jeremy: 51:27

So acted as a, you know, in in hindsight, being a producer, like a record producer, is very similar to what I do now with coaching around podcasting. And I I only realized that recently. I was, like, oh, this has always been something that I've been inclined to.

Justin: 51:40

Mhmm.

Jeremy: 51:41

And it's this is just a different manifestation of it. So I thought that was, fascinating. I wrote a very short lived philosophy blog, which is also, like, I take that lens to everything that I do. I wrote a pretty philosophical photography blog for a while, which now has come into the podcasting to some extent. I did several different travel blogs.

Jeremy: 51:59

I was a photographer for a while. Did, wedding photography. Did travel photography. I had a travel vlog for a a time, maybe 8 or 10 episodes which, that was my first experience video editing and that was doing all the filming and b roll and everything. That was, an interesting experience.

Jeremy: 52:15

Learned a lot there. Mhmm. Had a, travel Instagram account. And so, I don't really talk about this much, but I've traveled full time for the past 8 years. And so the 1st year or 2 of that, I was very much wanted to be some kind of travel vlogger or vlogger or Instagrammer and moved on from that at some time.

Jeremy: 52:29

So I had that whole experience is also, you know, plays into my story. And then once I get into podcasting, I've probably written, I don't know, 3, 4, 500 blog posts on stuff related to podcasting and marketing. This is, I think, the 5th podcast that I posted. And, I've done several other newsletters and blogs outside of podcasting.

Justin: 52:49

You know, one thing I just wanna pause on is what's interesting as I'm hearing you, like, bike trip blog, travel vlog, travel Instagram. Every time you started one of those projects, there was the hope that this would be the thing.

Jeremy: 53:06

Yes.

Justin: 53:07

But

Jeremy: 53:08

Every time.

Justin: 53:09

Every time. And what turns out what happened is those weren't the thing, but they led to the thing that became the thing. And I think that's that's instructive for people is that they everybody starts projects like this. Of course, you do. You're starting it hoping it's gonna be the thing.

Justin: 53:27

You know? And I've I've got new experiments I'm trying right now. I'm hoping they become a thing as well. You don't know until you start it, but they're still worth doing because as we'll see, you know, all of these things led you to where you are today.

Jeremy: 53:41

Yeah. And, like, then on top of those things, I've had many different product launches, and I think that that's the exact same thing. Every single product launch whenever I launched the 1st iteration of Podcast Marketing Academy and then the 2nd cohort, 3rd cohort, I did 8 cohorts of the the live cohort style course and then transitioned it into a membership community and then added on a different kind of done with you kind of coaching layer. And every single one of these I've actually kind of outgrown the notion now of, like, this is gonna be the thing. But basically, for most of my 20 year history creating, I have hoped that every single touch point I added these up.

Jeremy: 54:13

There's probably 50 projects here at this point Mhmm. Of various, you know, all different flavors. Every single one was like, this might be the thing. And you bring that same energy to it every time. And really, like, at this point, I my philosophy is like, basically, whatever you're working on right now, this is not the thing.

Jeremy: 54:29

Like, the best is yet to come for most of us. Mhmm. I think about where I am right now. So I'm 33 right now. If my history is any indication, I'm going to be creating stuff for another 40, 50, 60 years maybe.

Jeremy: 54:42

Like, what are the odds that what I'm creating now could actually be anywhere near as good as the stuff when I have 40 more years under my belt? It's just like that you can't even make that argument. And so I'm looking ahead and I'm like, this is all just practice at this point. Like, I'm going to enjoy it. I'm going to hope it's going to be successful, but there's still something better that I'm going to be able to do in the future.

Jeremy: 54:59

And, like, that's really where you think about the compounding returns. It's like, actually, I want to do one thing, but I also want to do a lot of things because all of these skills kind of intersect and they make, you know, whatever that next thing is even richer and better and and deeper.

Justin: 55:11

Mhmm. I love that perspective. I think I think that's it. Like, I'm gonna be doing this for a long time. This is not the thing, but to enjoy it at the same time.

Justin: 55:20

And it could be the thing. That's the other thing. None of us know. None of us know what will become a thing for a period of time. It could be this, but it might not.

Justin: 55:28

But it's still worth doing regardless.

Jeremy: 55:31

Yeah. And I think the thing is too that you you don't know what the thing is gonna be, but you have to almost treat everything like it is. Like, you have to bring your full self to it. Mhmm. And sometimes that starts out that you're just kinda dipping your toe in the water and experimenting.

Jeremy: 55:42

And it's like when you feel that pull and you're like, oh, this is actually kinda interesting. It's like actually saying like, okay, I'm gonna give all of myself to this project and I'm gonna see what happens with it. There's no guarantees but like I'm going to approach it that at least with the the mindset that it has the possibility to become that thing. And if it doesn't, that's fine. There will be something else.

Jeremy: 55:59

But, I think that that for me has been really served me really well from a mindset, perspective as well as just kind of continue to stack those bricks over time with each and every project. Mhmm.

Justin: 56:09

Yeah. I love it. I love going through these. It's so helpful. I think the only other thing I'll add is I think when we're talking about putting in these reps, one way to accelerate your progress is to get mentorship, is to get a group of friends who are also trying to do interesting things to critique your work, to help push you a little bit.

Justin: 56:32

There's many times in my life where I could have gotten better faster if I had been open to critique from trusted people. Yeah. And some of the best times in my life were I think I've spoken about this before, but I was on a retreat with with James Clear, the the author of Atomic Habits. And he pulled me aside, and he said, Justin, I just I think the thing you're working on right now is not gonna get you where you wanna go. And just to have somebody be very kind of clear and blunt with me that you should stay keep going in motion, you should keep moving, but this thing is not gonna get you where you wanna go, or this thing could be better.

Justin: 57:17

If you wanna get 2,000 downloads per episode, you've gotta fix your sound quality. If you're gonna get to 10,000 downloads per episode, these episodes have to be tightened up. They gotta be more interesting. So to have people in your life that can do that for you, you know, maybe a a secret WhatsApp group where it's just a group of friends and you you're just all super honest with each other, those kinds of groups and relationships have been really helpful for me.

Jeremy: 57:46

Yeah. And you just hear that time and time again throughout history. You hear about CS Lewis and Tolkien that they wrote together and had a whole group that really fiercely critiqued each other's work. Mhmm. And you hear it again.

Jeremy: 57:56

Like, Mr. Beast, I know, has talked about this where he had a group of YouTubers where basically every day all they did from sun up till sundown was they looked into the YouTube algorithm and they dissected dissected everything that was going on. They gave each other feedback. They made videos for months at a time and that was their whole life. And you you just see this trend pop up again and again and again and I think, you know, feedback for any of us is uncomfortable.

Jeremy: 58:18

And it's always the thing, though, that is necessary to get us to that next level. It's very hard to get there on your own. None of us can really see the flaws in our work, without an outside perspective. Mhmm.

Justin: 58:28

From the right perspective. Like, just drive by comments from people on the Internet. I'm not as interested in those as somebody who I know has good taste, who's done what I'm trying to do, who is excellent at their craft, who can look at me and go, okay. I see what you're trying to do there, but here's how to improve. Here's what you need to do to get to the next level.

Justin: 58:49

That's what you want. Ignore the haters on the Internet. So that we're not telling you to, like, entertain them, but find a trusted mastermind group or a gang of friends who are really focused on getting better.