A face for radio
Though sadly, not a voice for radio
Do one thing every day that scares you. - Eleanor Roosevelt1
A brief but complete history of my podcast experiences
I went on a podcast once in a prior life to talk about film. It was a memorable trip to West Seattle to a friend’s friends apartment which had me sitting in front of a surprisingly amount of recording equipment and later thinking “well, if that all couldn’t make me sound great maybe I should stick with this whole tech career thing!” I’ve always loved film and for a solid length of time I’d been going to too many film festivals, mingling with local film press, and occasionally talking my way into red carpet photography shoots. It was, I had to admit a lot of fun. Even when I (true story) did incredibly dumb things like forget to hit record during an interview with Elizabeth Olsen. I always thought - gee, I’d love to do some more red carpet photography - but that whole podcasting thing? maybe not.
Then, I met Stuart Corrigan several years ago when he was a speaker at a Critical Chain conference. We spoke afterwards a few times - which was always a great pleasure. His consulting work seems to have been growing like a rocket the last few years, and he’s published a few short books that capture an operating vocabulary I’ve found super useful in my own thinking2.
For reasons I don’t 100% understand he seems intrigued by my work experiences and suggested an interview for his podcast. He felt the content would be helpful to companies he works with. Since he’s probably more qualified than me to judge, I’ve decided to believe him.
Most of the material is a trip down memory lane around Amazon’s peculiar ways. The old, type of those things such as customer focus, anecdotes + metrics (not one or the other), leadership principles and Tenets. Not the newer “hey, why to did let those great people go?” type of peculiar. If you’d like to check it out or share I’ve included a link below.
I cringe deeply when watching myself on video, and clearly I owe an apology on behalf of my voice to every person I’ve ever spoken to. Even given all that, I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Turns out it’s probably good advice to do things that scare you.
Stuart said some incredibly nice, rather over the top things about me during the interview. Hopefully I don’t blush too visibly on camera. It’s weird to hear such positivity not coming from one’s mom.
Other learnings
There were some audio issues, thankfully Stuart added subtitles. It seems I’m going to need to go review what’s going on with my fancy Blue Yeti microphone. A number of years ago I had a teammate who was interviewed by NPR and they sent him one of these microphones as a loaner for the interview. I figured it that’s the microphone that will make me sound like an NPR host I’d better get one as soon as possible. Turns out it’s likely more talent and audio-processing and not just the microphone as evidenced by the video below. Or maybe I just need to get one of those dead cat things to put on top of it - yes, I’m sure that’s the issue.
Time to get a better office backdrop. As personally enjoyable as the displayed mementos are, I’m realizing they’re likely distracting for others.
Better lighting likely would some help, but I fear I’m going to have to give up my dreams that age would make me at least wiser looking. I wish I could say I was converging faster toward older Clooney than older Nolte (after a rough night) - but the video doesn’t lie.
TBH - I’m not entirely embarrassed to admit that I only found this quote because I was searching for the one I had in mind from the Vampire Diaries. The first rule of truly living is to do the things you’re most afraid of. Rebekah Mikaelson
The books are somewhat perhaps closer to novella length and include (Fr)Agile and Waterfall Project ER. The former helped me put together a number of pieces that had been rattling around in my head about where Agile went wrong at times, the former was a bullet list of project management antipatterns that probably should be condensed into a one page poster that teams should hang on their walls. Both are I suspect intended as lead-gen for his consulting rather than perfectly edited works of writing. But they contain amazingly powerful concepts that are worth being exposed to. You’ll have to hire me for a speaking engagement though to hear the amazing Twilight this paragraph brings to mind.