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Paul Clarke

Thirty podcasts.

Published 8 days ago • 2 min read

Hi Reader

The majority of the start-up founders & business leaders I get to work with are drowning in input and starving for insight.

What do I mean? As I see it, they will tell you they consume enormous amounts of content e.g. four books on the go at once, podcasts on commutes, LinkedIn threads they scroll through waiting for coffee. So they say they read voraciously & that they listen constantly. At the same time though, they can’t understand why their thinking hasn't improved.

Something is obvious to me here; there's a specific difference between listening to people and listening to outputs. Very few talk about that.

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When you read someone's book or long essay, you're following a mind at work. You watch the person think along with their false starts, the corrections, the moment they realise their initial framing was wrong and then change direction. That's what real thinking looks like when it's exposed. It appeals because it’s how you learn to think yourself.

When you consume the same person's fifteen-second clip, their podcast intro or their algorithmic highlight, you're not watching them think. I reckon you're getting the moment their mind produced something extractable. So not the twenty minutes of considered pondering that produced the moment or the rabbit holes they went down. Just the extractable bit; the least useful part of thinking.

Think about it. Someone, or something, else selected the moment you’re watching or hearing. Someone/something else decided what would hit you in the feels. The actual person who did the actual work is hardly there at all.

And so the founder or leader who listens to thirty podcasts in a month is not, in any meaningful sense, listening to thirty people, but to the algorithmically filtered subset of what social platforms have decided is engagement-optimal or will increase dwell-time. They're consuming a version of thinking that's been designed to be consumable, which is roughly the opposite of what actual thinking is for. A bit like the way fast-food is designed to mimic real, high-quality food.

I’ve thought a lot about this and it’s why I’m certain that the input doesn't produce insight. The mechanism that would let it convert has been removed at the source.

For contrast, those founders & leaders whose thinking improves perceptibly over time tend to be different in one regard. They pick a small number of people whose minds they want to spend real time with, and they follow those minds through long form. They read the books, not the AI generated summaries. They sit with and through the essays, not the pithy threads. They deliberately reject the algorithmic feed as a substitute for the real work of engaging deeply with another intelligence.

Could you name three people whose thinking you're following & immersing into in long-form right now? If the number is less than three, you have your diagnosis.

Often, when you're wrestling with ongoing performance issues or concerns you hold them in and appear all stoic on the outside. A lot of the time just airing those same issues and hearing your own voice is the catalyst for a solution.

If that feels like it might work you'll get me at paulclarke.ie@gmail.com or paul@theleaders.coach

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Onward and Upward,

Paul

​https://www.paulclarke.ie​

Connect with me at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulclarkeperform/​

Beechmount Vale, Navan, Meath C15
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Paul Clarke

"Fine Lines" - For founders and commercial leaders of B2B growth-stage companies who'd rather be told the truth than told they're doing fine. We talk about the parts of building a commercial function nobody warns you about.

Fine Lines is a weekly newsletter at the intersection of commercial performance and human development - for founders and sales leaders of growth-stage B2B companies who have already tried the obvious fixes and are now asking better questions. Each Tuesday: one idea from real commercial experience and research, examined with enough rigour to be useful and enough honesty to sting slightly. The equation running underneath every edition: Capability × Ability = Performance. Most interventions address the Ability side. Fine Lines addresses the variable nobody is measuring. If you want frameworks and inspiration there are better newsletters. If you want your thinking challenged and, occasionally, your assumptions dismantled then you are in the right place.

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