At Present Tense, we aim to help make your life a bit easier. In the coming blog series, Present Tense Recommends, we’ll share significant business influencers, leading business blogs, innovative apps, and trending podcasts to increase creativity, efficiency, potential, and ease.
Why podcasts?
In the last few years, the podcasting industry has skyrocketed. Remember those images of an entire family huddled around a transistor radio listening to a breaking news broadcast or a favorite weekday program? Today, we get our news on the go, can learn at our own pace (while simultaneously doing a million other things), and are free to listen to global insights from the comfort of our portable headphones. Regardless of your preferred platform, podcasts continue to transform the way we learn.
What’s this business about?
Among the millions of podcasts and genres available to spark your ear drums, the business genre continually ranks in the top 5 of the most popular ones. For all of us busy entrepreneurs, podcasts allow for learning on the go and for when we feel we’re already way too busy to take the time to read or research a particular topic. They offer advice, provide access to insight from notable individuals, make that learning both convenient and incredibly simple, and actually help us broaden our skills as audio learners. Providing strategies for far more than marketing, motivation, and mindfulness learning tips; the regular voice emanating from our headphones has an intimacy, a friendliness, and a quality all its own.
Which will you choose?
There are podcasts geared toward women entrepreneurs, those that focus on issues of diversity, and many designed as a space for learning and growing your own business. We’ve curated a list of podcasts that tend to rise to the top of the lists - which ones are for you?
Entrepreneurs on Fire: With over 2000 interviews and new episodes each and every day, John Lee Dumas helps to educate, motivate, and inspire heaps of entrepreneurs. Regularly chatting with successful business owners, his conversations and insight provide actionable information from those who have been down the road and many who are farther along the journey than we are.
How I Built It: NPR’s Guy Raz curates a fascinating mix of interviews with some of the world’s most significant business leaders. In the space of a 30 minute episode, moguls and mega moguls share their journeys. Listeners are treated to chats with innovators, idealists, and interesting business leaders who share their origin stories, challenges they faced, and those ‘aha moments’ of utter enlightenment along the way. How I Built It is ‘less about the tactics and more about the journey’.
Mixergy: Ever wish there was a mentor out there waiting to guide you through the roller coaster of business life? If this is you, check out Andrew Warner’s strategies for managing entrepreneurial challenges. With over 1500 interviews, heaps of mentors are brought together to discuss issues that often plague business owners, provide solution based courses and share all sorts of tips. If you’re someone who sees the whole picture and believes there’s no one way to run any business, this one’s for you.
$100 MBA: Hosted by Omar Zenhom, this podcast explores training and education for business entrepreneurs. In short spurts, Zenhom chats with various marketing and business professionals who often come from more ‘unconventional backgrounds’ and many times, never even attended business school. Sharing details like how to keep your business running efficiently, his insightful episodes provide actionable advice and steps to create that functioning and successful business.
HBR Ideacast: Here’s your chance to get in on the scoop from Harvard. With influential interviews with business thinkers, this weekly podcast, run by editor Sarah Green Carmichael, brings mega moguls and ‘titans of industry’ into your world. Designed to inform those looking to level up their businesses, in under 30 minute episodes, Green Carmichael shares some of what those large corporations are thinking, advantages and details about scaling upwards, and many of the challenges faced on the path to success.
RISE: Rachel Hollis, a speaker/author and motivational speaker, hosts this weekly podcast complete with powerful information from industry bigwigs. With advice for tips and tricks to manage procrastination, mindset shifts, and business growth, this industry powerhouse is a welcome listen.
Start Up: A former employee of NPR, Alex Blumberg, documents details on the focus of startups and the challenges that show up along the way. As it’s happening, he shares his journey of building a business and includes details like going from idea to pitch to backers to partners to functioning business.
Tim Ferris: The acclaimed author of the 4-hour workweek has regularly seen his eponymous podcast voted #1 business podcast on Apple. Curious about how business, management, or a particular space can shift your perspective and performance? If so, this one’s for you. A fierce advocate for working smarter, not harder, Ferris provides tools, tips, and tactics to learn to delegate, manage problems more creatively/effectively, and gives examples of successful humans to emulate.
Brown Ambition: Mandi Woodroof and Tiffany Aliche, two financial reporters, host this insightful podcast. Focusing on ‘career, business, building wealth, and living in this brown skin’, these influential women of color cover a broad range of topics. A main thread that runs through the podcast covers issues such as managing one’s time and work, and the everyday politics that impact communities of color.
Being Boss: Hosted by both Kathleen Shannon and Emily Thompson, this small business podcast is designed for the creatives of the world. Focusing on the ‘rebels of the business world’, these hosts discuss topics like branding, coaching, ego, and of course, when to hire that expert.
Goal Digger: Engaging in topics for women entrepreneurs, Goal Digger, hosted by Jenna Kutcher feels more like an in person clinic than it does a traditional podcast. While chatting with giants of the internet world, Kutcher delves into subjects ranging from being a CEO, to brand inclusivity, to managing that work-life balance of a busy mom, bringing a friendly attitude to all of her listeners.
Marie Forleo: Named by Oprah as a ‘thought leader for the next generation’, Forleo, the creator of one of the fastest growing companies of Inc. 500, shares heaps of helpful hints and advice for ‘happiness, success and productivity’. If you’re seeking business strategies, marketing hints, or charismatic conversations about careers - check out this space.
In this pandemic, I’ve found a love of podcasts. Yes, I may be late to the party, but I’m glad I’m here. For me, The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos and 10% Happier with Dan Harris have been my staples. Complete with science, mindfulness tips, how to manage time, interviews with influential individuals, and suggestions to integrate positive life skills - these two keep me informed, help me grow, and give me insight that I didn’t before have. Their voices stream through my headphones and elevate my knowledge - it really does feel like I am inviting a friend over for a chat.
So search wherever you get your podcasts, find ones that provide insight, give them a listen, and learn something new. The voices radiating from your headphones have the potential to shift your focus, change the game, and make you and your business an even greater success.
Comments