My Biggest Takeaway After 100 Podcast Episodes

100 podcast episodes in the books! When I first started this journey, all I kept on hearing was, “You’re crazy! What are you thinking?! No one is going to listen to an instructional design podcast!” All things that absolutely no one said to me. If anything, I think I said this to myself. Educational podcasts are typically, well, boring. What if I did the opposite and really let the passion shine through for how much I love designing learning experiences?

Well, 100 episodes later and I think it’s safe to say, we did it! It’s a pretty surreal feeling. I’m still shocked at how many of you listen to this show and just how many of you have stuck around from day one. If I’m being honest, being a podcaster wasn’t a part of the plan. And if I’m being truly honest, I didn’t have a plan at all for this journey. I have a bit of how you say an obsessive personality. If I find something that I really enjoy, I tend to go all in. Podcasting fell into this bucket.

I love listening to podcasts about fantasy football, business, leadership, entrepreneurship, and self-help, but the thing I never listened to as an academic and an instructional designer were podcasts about instructional design. It’s way too niche, I thought, and that no one would give an instructional design podcast a chance. This was what I was passionate about though and wanted to share instructional design tips with others. What still surprises me to this day is that folks like you actually listen to this show. There was a pivotal moment when looking at my inbox and the download numbers to say, wait a second, do I actually have something here? Could this turn into a real podcast to help people with their instructional design needs?

How on earth did we get to 100 episodes about hardcore learning nerd content?

Humor me and let’s go back a bit.

Most of you know that I love health and fitness. You may have also seen some LinkedIn posts tagging my buds in the sturdy and nerdy group. In about 9 months, I lost about 30 pounds of fat and ended up competing in a few natural bodybuilding shows. With my obsessive personality, exercising and meal prep was all that I could think about. My friends and family noticed my results and before I knew it, I was helping people with their fitness goals. I wanted to send them resources that could help them, but I found most information online about nutrition and training confusing. I also had a different mindset with my results because I focused on behavioral change. I acknowledged that if I was going to do this for the long-run, it would be a slow and steady pace. There was no 30-60-90 day transformation spectacular for this guy. I wanted a permanent change, not a quick fix.

To do this, I took a good hard look on my past failures and what I learned along the way. What worked well for me? What was a distraction? What could I do differently the next time around to overcome these challenges? It was probably the first time ever that I examined my own behaviors and crafted a plan individualized for my own needs. Surprise, surprise, it actually worked. To spread this message with folks and share how to replicate my steps, I turned to starting a podcast. In 2018, I launched the iron university podcast. It was essentially a fitness podcast that prioritized learning over anything else. Even though listening to these old episodes make me deeply, deeply cringe, it built the foundation for me on how to podcast. I learned everything from how to edit, to adding in music, to script writing, to interviewing people, and trying to find an identity in an incredibly oversaturated market.

To my surprise, people listened. Conversations at work began to revolve around the podcast. Seeing family over the holidays meant that they asked how my podcast was going and mentioned their favorite episodes. It was weird. It was very cool, but so, so weird. The podcast eventually fizzled out because I didn’t have the same level of enthusiasm anymore for making fitness content. Instead, I had a new passion: instructional design.

At this time, I had just started at MIT. We were creating a new online leadership program designed specifically for engineers, scientists, and researchers. For this program, senior level leadership wanted to pull out all the stops and to truly make this program the best it could be. We conducted a pilot program and after hosting a few focus groups with these learners, I realized that there was an opportunity to create a podcast for this program. No one else on my team knew how to start a podcast, so I volunteered. All of a sudden, I found myself hosting a short podcast series for MIT.

My health and fitness podcast was a bit wild. It didn’t have as much rhyme or reason for things. For this new podcast, I was representing MIT, so I think it’s safe to say, it had to be a tad bit more professional and polished. I took inspiration from a podcast called, Business Wars, where the host would read from a script, but interjected conversations to reinforce the main points. It was a unique style that I was able to mimic in my own way, but I had no idea if learners were going to like this formatting. I uploaded the first episode and anxiously waited. A few days later, one of my team members noticed that the learners were talking about the show in the discussion boards! The thread in the DB started by asking when the next episode was coming out because they enjoyed the show. That push of positive feedback was all that I needed to make me rethink about starting my own podcast.

And that my friends is how I took a chance with starting a podcast about learning and instructional design. This podcast started off with a bit of a bumpy ride. I decided for the first five episodes that I was going to batch record them. This means recording all the episodes in one sitting. The idea behind this was that if a listener stumbled upon this show, they could binge listen to all the episodes at once. It’s always the worst when you find a show you like just to see that there is only one episode.

So, off I went and recorded all five episodes in one take. What were the results? You might be thinking that I was ecstatic or elated with the results. The words that come to mind are despise, disdain, and pain. Through the editing process, I hated every moment more and more. Plain and simply put, it was not me. It wasn’t authentic in any way, so I burned all of the episodes to the ground and started over. The second time around was much better even though I still hate how they sound.

My first episode where I interviewed guests also didn’t go as planned. I was getting ready to interview Tom Thibodeau and Dr. Katie Novak, the authors of the book, UDL in the Cloud. As I was getting ready, a massive amount of construction vehicles rolled through and lucky for me, they decided that right then was the perfect time to pave the road. Attempting to drown out the noise outside, I began the interview in my bedroom closet surrounded by winter coats and Patriots jerseys. While I was absurdly nervous for multiple reasons, I quickly fell in love with talking about learning with guests and knew I could get behind this.

After that episode came out, something different happened compared to the other podcasts. LinkedIn messages and emails began to come in from people I’ve never met before. I was assuming my podcast got sucked into some kind of spambot responder, but nope. These were real people who just wanted to connect about the show. I didn’t know what to do with this, but it slowly became normal.

And this, is what leads me to today’s podcast topic. What have I learned after 100 podcast episodes?

I learned about the value of relationships.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this podcast began to take off during the pandemic. You wanted to learn more about instructional design, and I happened to be at the right place and the right time to share about instructional design. By listening to your feedback on what you were looking for allowed me to craft products that served you. What I Wish I Knew Before Becoming an Instructional Designer is definitely what comes to mind along with the first rendition of Instructional Design institute. While you were helping by simply listening to this show, you also helped me in a tremendous way of coping during the pandemic.

As you can probably guess, I am a people person. I love conversations and meeting people. When that basically became impossible to do in-person, I doubled downed on connecting with all of you online. LinkedIn became the spot for the learning nerds to gather and it transformed how I thought about connecting with an audience. So many of these interactions led to new opportunities and it gave me the platform to be able to reach even more folks. Even though I have fond memories of many speaking engagements, webinars, conferences, and such, I do have a favorite moment of connecting with all of you. And this moment was my birthday.

Every year on my birthday, I host a book giveaway contest. The rules are simple. In order to be eligible to win a signed copy of my book, you need to tag a friend or colleague and say something nice to them. It’s a small way to make someone’s day and hey if this just happens to be on my birthday, then everyone can enjoy a day that’s special to me. I didn’t think this act of kindness would take off, but it did! What was so cool was that so many of you reached out to simply say happy birthday and instead of saying something nice to someone else, you said something nice to me, which was incredibly kind. From videos of you singing happy birthday to playing instruments, it was surreal.

All of this goes back to my point that relationships are everything in our world.

It’s not just my observation though. What if there was a study, a life-long study, to measure how to live a happy and fulfilling life? In 1938, during the Great Depression, Harvard researchers began to study 238 Harvard sophomores. The goal of the study was to reveal what leads to a happy and healthy life. This study went on for 75 years with collecting and analyzing information and became a part of the Harvard Study of Adult Development. As time went on, an additional group of inner city boys were brought into the study and then more participants were studied like the wives and children of these men. The study ballooned to 1,300 people and surprisingly, the research continued.

It’s a bit shocking to think that a project survived for this long! This study survived considering it has passed down to different generations of researchers, always had funding, and just never fell through the cracks. These researchers collected surveys, interviews, and even drew blood and medical records. They had full access into studying entire lives. So, what did these researchers learn from studying these participants for 75 years?

Dr. Robert Waldinger, the 4th Director of this study, recorded his main points in an amazing TEDTalk that you should absolutely watch. It’s worth the 11 minutes. To summarize the study, there were 3 main takeaways that all revolved around living happier and healthier lives:

Social connections are key and loneliness kills
Quality over quantity of relationships
Good relationships don’t just protect the body, but the brain

So, overall amazing relationships tie directly into a life-time of happiness.

Why am I bringing this up on the podcast? After 100 episodes, my main takeaway is that I keep on recording podcast episodes because it keeps me connected with all of you. Relationships are everything. They give life meaning. Which is why I love this show. Connecting with you, the learning nerds, has been so incredible. To think that there would be people all over the world who also consider themselves learning nerds is something I never could have expected. The relationships I’ve made from talking into this microphone are ones that I’ll never forget.

I’m confident in saying that the podcast guests will never forget you either. Every guest ends the episode by saying how to contact them and that they would love to hear from you. A considerable amount of you actually follow up on this and have reached out to these folks, sending your appreciation. I always hear back like clockwork about how I have the best audience and that they were blown away by the kindness of the learning nerds. That sort of kindness is very much needed in the world today, so keep it up!

For all of these reasons, I say thank you. Whether it’s by bringing me into your home, your commute to work, or walking your dog around the block, I deeply appreciate your time.

Here’s to 100 more episodes, and to serving the instructional design community more!

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