I’ve been thinking about two interesting things this week:
You can train your mind to think differently And how to make my hobby podcast profitable.

You can train your mind to think differently

Did you know you can train your mind to think differently? This quote for Jony Ive says something really important, that is easy to overlook, and to forget:

Steve was preoccupied with the nature and quality of his own thinking. He expected so much of himself and worked hard to think with a rare vitality, elegance and discipline. His rigor and tenacity set a dizzyingly high bar. When he could not think satisfactorily he would complain in the same way I would complain about my knees.

Jony Ive, Wall Street Journal

We can shape our thoughts just like we can shape our bodies. By intentionally thinking in certain ways. Your patterns of thought is not you. It’s just what you’ve trained your mind to think like. And unfortunately, you probably did a lot of this training as a teenager.

Thankfully the brain never stops changing, so we can start practicing better patterns any day. Today I will practice by writing as clearly as I can, and when I stop working, I will journal how I was lucky today, to improve my luck.

If ego is the voice that tells us we’re better than we really are, we can say ego inhibits true success by preventing a direct and honest connection to the world around us.

Ryan Holiday, Ego is the Enemy

Making my hobby podcast profitable

For two years now I’ve been recording a podcast about design together with one of my favourite designers Jaan Orvet. It’s quite random, since design is a messy field. But I love it!

This year though, I’ve decided we should start making it profitable. While we won’t make a lot of money from this hobby, I’d like it to cover it’s own costs at least.

But how should we make money of a podcast?

In general there seems to be two ways: advertising and listener supported. Both have advantages and disadvantages.

It’s easy to get advertising. But they care about large numbers, not the quality of our niche audience. We might also get stuck with ads for things that we don’t really like, which I don’t think is intellectually honest. Maybe we can reach out to our favourite products and ask them to place ads with us?

It’s harder to get listeners to pay directly, because we’ve all gotten used to getting our content for free these days. I don’t have a big problem with that. But this podcast is also not really educational, rather more entertaining for fellow designers. And light entertainment is less valuable than education in my opinion.

I’ll follow up with what we test!