Two Skills That Will Grow Your Podcast

I'm a huge fan of transferrable skills.

When I ran my digital agency I was the person who knew plenty about plenty and could talk knowledgeably enough on marketing or design or coding or user experience or app development to be able to 1. sell those things and 2. manage them successfully.

I'm no specialist in any of them, product marketing seems to be my specialism, but I have enough quality knowledge from years of experience to be able to connect the dots and importantly, to be able to apply knowledge from one skillset to the requirement of another situation.

My skills are transferrable.

Once you learn how to do something, you see its application in all walks of life and you see how that thing connects to the other things around you and how it can be applied to make those better, too.

In short: by learning the skills to achieve outcomes and not just the outcomes themselves in any given process, you can deliver yourself quick wins but with the underlying knowledge to be able to rapidly pivot, meaningfully assess & measure and apply those skills forever, to anything.

In fact, there's a famous Italian proverb dedicated to this mindset: 

Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.

You don't have time for quick fixes.

A quick fix is rarely that.

Why? 

Because it doesn't usually work. 

When it doesn't work you enter a cycle of dejection and hunting: you feel dejected about the thing you've spent time and heck, maybe even money, on and you immediately begin searching for the next silver bullet that will give you that "10x" boost you need.

When you employ a quick fix you usually do so without any strategy, either. So you end up changing something or a range of things on a whim - or on instruction from someone - without any real thought to the consequences and without even really listing out what you did change, when and why.

That's dangerous because you can't go back. Well, you can... but only for a while; until you've implemented so many small quick fixes that what you started with is so far away from where you are now that you become even more dejected that your passion has become an unrecognisable behemoth full of patchwork and filler.

Thus, the "quick" fixes actually sap more and more time as you unravel each of them, trying to overlay a new one every time you see a shiny new idea that will "grow your podcast easily".

"I wish I'd started earlier."

I've just gotten back into bass playing. It's been about 10 years since I really played properly and you know what, I got back to a decent level pretty quickly. 

I had the muscle memory and I knew my way around the fretboard again instantly. I was a tad slow, but that's ok - the basics were there and getting back up to a decent level didn't take half as long as learning it from scratch.

I was able to dust off a skill I'd spent years learning and apply it pretty quickly to something today.

But I had a level. 

I couldn't get any further than where I'd gotten 10 years ago. 

I could learn a new song (quick fix) but might only know how to play that song. I wouldn't know the tonal structure of it, I wouldn't know why it was composed that way and I wouldn't be able to take that song and improvise around the chord sequence enough to enjoy making it my own.

But I'd know the song. That's it. I'd just know the song - an exercise in repetition and simple mimicry.

I pondered this as I began to feel myself getting back to my previous playing level and decided that I had two paths to choose from: I could keep learning songs and feel...