As we go through a hundred interviews over the past two months, I frequently hit a wall whenever I point the conversation toward extracurricular activities.
Interviewing for a handful of roles – from senior engineers through key account managers to some marketing and growth engineers, external resources are often missing or lacking, anything from pet projects to conference attendance, lack of volunteering and open source work, or even podcasts and industry “influencers”.
I thought about my personal involvement in these. After 10,000 hours in training courses and consulting 1:1 aggregated, this puts things into perspective.
How long have I been learning from podcasts?
Over 2,000 hours at this point.
- Hundreds of “Marketing School” episodes
- B2B Revenue Vitals
- My First Million
- Hormozi
- Brutal Truth of Sales
- RevOps Lab
And tons of other educational episodes on different niche and business-building skills.
Podcasts, similarly to long courses and curriculums, don’t just build skills, but teach new forms of mindset.
Even Mark Cuban agrees it’s one of the most impactful growth strategies for entrepreneurs:
They reveal patterns, mental models, and contextual situations that put you in the shoes of the host and the ICP.
To briefly explain or train a new hire similarly would require weeks if not months of field work – walking the walk, meeting prospects, heading into situations with limited insights, clueless to the problems of the day.
Most learning does indeed happen daily, even for 15-30 minutes, building the reps and training the right muscles.
Avoiding that continuous learning leads to a large gap impossible to catch up on quickly.
