Or why we do what we do, just before we leave — There’s a memory from my childhood burned into my mind. It involves a grumpy feeling of sitting in the car while it idled, waiting for my mother. She was not in the car yet, she was cleaning. “You should always need to leave the place better than when you found…

The “Unlisted” feature on Medium means you can’t make money on Medium…but it makes for great teaching materials so you can make money elsewhere — This past winter, I was brought into a university classroom at Toronto Metropolitan University as a sessional instructor to co-teach an undergraduate course in Environmental Studies. Ironically, my BA degree was in this exact discipline, but this time I was brought into the classroom to teach the students how to…

How to dig into your past jobs and experiences to find your 10 percent edge — your competitive advantage — This month I have vowed to myself that I will finally finish off the online course that I’ve been chipping away at for years. …

I was most surprised by Number 6 — After a decade of close listening, many years of cutting audio tape, and a semester as a visiting lecturer at a university, I decided it was finally time. One year ago, I launched my first Substack: Bingeworthy, about the art and craft of narrative podcasts. Substack has exploded in the…

It’s not about you, it’s about executing ideas — This is a trap that many freelancers fall into: you get hired to work on someone else’s project, you get hired on despite the fierce competition…and you arrive feeling like you should prove your worth. You might find yourself chit-chatting with colleagues about topics that look like one of these: …

Here’s the odd way that I dealt with it — There was no singular day. It wasn’t a definite event, although there were many to choose from. It was more like a slow clap towards a climax. Little things piled up on top of bigger things. …

Veteran journalist Richard Stengel discovered a box like this — Richard Stengel was an up-and-coming journalist in his mid-thirties, based in New York City. …

What I’ve finally learned about how to move forward with difficult friendships in mid-life — The run-up to the actual date I turned 50 was torturous for me. Not because I’m worried about getting old, that much I’m looking forward to. Not because I think that 50 counts as being old…I still feel very young (and I had a grandmother who lived to be 111…

The narrator is everything to narrative podcasts — these three got it right — There are a few rules that I’ve come to when it comes to how to choose the right narrator for a series, and these are basically immutable: The narrator must have a personal connection to the story. Without a personal connection, it’s very hard to care; it’s perhaps the bridge…