In this video, I argue why you should unsubscribe from all of the business podcasts that you listen to. It’s not the reason that you think.
(Watch this Video on YouTube)
Prefer to read instead of watch? Here’s a rough script I used for this video.
Matt Paulson here. In this video, I am going to make a compelling case that you should unsubscribe from all the business podcasts that you listen to. If you’ve been listening to entrepreneur on fire, entrepreleadership, startup chat, startups for the rest of us, this week in startups, marketing over coffee, Tropical MBA or any other business podcast for more than a year, it’s time to unsubscribe. Open up your podcast app. Go through all of your podcast apps, swipe right, hold down and press or do whatever action you need to do to unsubscribe from them. Unsubscribe from each and every business podcast that you’ve been listening to for a year longer.
Why am I telling you to do this? It’s probably not the reason you think. Initially, you might think I’m telling you to unsubscribe from your business podcasts because of the issue of information overload. Some people consume way too many books, podcasts and audiobooks about business without actually taking action to start or launch their business. One of my good friends, who is a business coach, Jaime Tardy, tells her students to go on an information diet and to only learn about the exact topics they are working on right now. Like if you’re going to build out a Facebook ads campaign this week, go ahead and learn about Facebook ads, but don’t go read about company culture, search engine optimization or leading a team. Now, I think there is some merit to the idea of going on an information diet, especially if you’re consuming a lot of content and not making a lot of progress in your business. However, that’s not the reason I think you need to unsubscribe from all of your business podcasts.
Instead, I think you should unsubscribe from all the business podcasts that you’ve been listening to for more than a year because you can only learn so much from one expert. Every business expert, whether it’s Seth Godin, Dave Ramsey, Tim Ferris or anyone else, really has a handful of core messages that they teach to their audience. They take the same message and the repackage in a bunch of different ways. They’ll write books, they’ll do podcasts and radio shows, they’ll put together courses, DVDs, websites, newsletters, you name it, but the message doesn’t change from medium to medium. Eventually, you have a good understanding of an experts core messages and there’s probably not much else you can learn from them.
Dave Ramsey is a great example of this. He tells a great message to get out of debt, built some wealth and be a generous person. A lot of people that initially find his message exciting and motivating eventually find out that they’ve run out of stuff to learn from Dave Ramsey, because they’ve found financial success and don’t have much left that they can learn from Dave Ramsey. If that’s you, instead of continuing to hear people ask questions about debt, you might rather switch to a more advanced financial podcasts, like The Money Guy Show, that teaches more advanced strategies than what Dave Ramsey might teach. By actively choosing to stop listening to one expert that you can’t learn much from anymore and moving on to a new expert, you’re opening yourself up to new information, ideas and viewpoints that you may not previously have been aware of or open to.
So, don’t get me wrong. I love business podcasts. I love listening to audiobooks. I love reading business books. I certainly don’t think reading a business book is going to reinvent my business, but I find them entertaining and occasionally I can learn something that I can apply in my business at MarketBeat. I do think there’s only so much you can learn from any one expert though. Once you’ve listened to 50 to 100 podcast episodes from the same person, there’s probably not a whole lot more you can learn from them. I also understand that most people only have so much time to listen to podcasts, so I’d encourage you to stop listening to the business podcasts you’ve been listening to for a long time, and to try some new business podcasts that you haven’t checked out before.
If you’re looking for some newer business podcasts that you maybe haven’t heard before, I’m going to go through my podcast app, Overcast, now live on video and show some of them off.
[List of podcasts not transcribed]
So, those are the podcasts I’m listening to. Hopefully this video will inspire you to take a break from following the experts you’ve been following for years and open yourself to following some new experts and listening to new podcasts that maybe you haven’t considered before.