An Intentional Ending: Completing the Journey for This Body of Work

John White: Foreign. Welcome to the Nerd Journey podcast. Our goal is to help you, the technology professional, accelerate your career progression, increase your job satisfaction, and be more effective in your existing role.

Nick Korte: We want to bring listeners like you the career advice we wish we'd been given earlier in our careers.

John White: I'm John White, journeyman on Twitter, sharing co host duties with nick Cordy at NetworkNerd.

Nick Korte: We're two former IT operations guys who have moved on to pre sales roles with technology vendors. We have our opinions, but we also like to highlight the journeys of others and see what we can learn from them.

John White: We'd also like to ask for your feedback. To make this a conversation, not a one way broadcast. Email us@nerdjourneypodcastmail.com or DM US Erdjourney on Twitter. So come join us on our Nerd Journey.

Nick Korte: Let's take a trip.

John White: All right, Nick. Episode 356. I don't think that we should bury the lead. This is the last episode of the Nerd Journey podcast. We still love the mission of the podcast, but I think we, you and I need to shut it down.

Nick Korte: Yeah, afraid we do. It's kind of sad, honestly. In most of our interviews with guests, we always rewind the clock back to the beginning. So what if we did that for the show itself? What do you think?

John White: Yeah, that sounds great.

Nick Korte: And we'll just pick apart the lessons learned along the way as if we're doing a guest interview.

John White: Absolutely. That sounds great.

Nick Korte: Do you remember how it got started?

John White: I would say that I was at VMware and I was on the VMware Community Roundtable podcast as a sales, uh, engineer, co host of the podcast, obviously loved listening to podcasts, loved the format and was really interested on, in finding, you know, something to do. And then you were joining VMware. I remember that we were talking about it as you were joining all the things that I thought that you needed to know what to expect when joining a company like VMware. In that conversation, I said, maybe we should start a podcast.

Nick Korte: Just for the record, this was the weekend before my first day at VMware. John fires off a chat message that says we should start a podcast. And I looked at that a few different times and I'm like, okay, what, what would I talk about? I guess we found some stuff to talk about.

John White: We did, we did. And we had some ideas going into it. Right at that point in time, VMware blogs and VMware podcasts were an interesting way to connect with the community and, you know, become Nerd Famous, which is, you know, a uh, trademark term that nobody else can use except for me. TM. TM.

Nick Korte: And this was late 2017, just for everybody's reference. When I got the message from John, we started talking about this. Late 2017 is the ideation period December and then actual launch would have been July 2018.

John White: So this is almost exactly eight years ago.

Nick Korte: Yeah.

John White: As we're recording this in late December 2025.

Nick Korte: That's right.

John White: So I think we thought one of the things that we could talk about is VMware news. You know, we were both going to be working for VMware at the time.

Nick Korte: Mhm.

John White: And our opinions on it and maybe interesting things in VMware technology that we were coming across.

Nick Korte: Yep.

John White: But also, you know, the conversation that we had originally started, which was, hey, we both came from small and medium sized business IT practitioners coming to sales engineering and maybe we could talk about that journey and help people understand that, you know, that was something that they could do too.

Nick Korte: Yeah. I want to say we had about 10 different episode recordings in the can before our launch. You know, we did some just practice throwaways and then we had about 10 that were going to be the first 10 so that we were ready to go and we could, we could hit our cadence. I actually don't remember what made us decide to do a weekly podcast, but we did and it's been pretty amazing ever since. But I do remember we launched it while I was on vacation.

John White: That's right. That's right. I didn't remember that until you just said it.

Nick Korte: And we recorded a podcast while I was on vacation too.

John White: That's true too. Which, uh, started a, um, pattern of, uh, Nick doing podcast work while vacationing.

Nick Korte: It's the only way to vacation, isn't it?

John White: Well, I would argue no.

Nick Korte: Uh, I mean, it worked out fine for many years, I think.

John White: Yeah.

Nick Korte: Yeah.

John White: Even though we had 10 episodes that were recorded in the can, we had to not use some of them, at least not in the ways that they were edited and recorded. I think pretty early on we realized because we had prerecorded 10 episodes, we were not going to be timely and points of authority on VMware technology. One of the really interesting things that happens is that you realize that you're not an expert. You're more of an expert than probably a whole bunch of other people in the world. But we didn't work on product teams. We were customer facing solution engineers. And that doesn't lend to like, depth of expertise. It leads to opinions. Definitely, uh, inexperience but we were both still pretty early. I think I was in year maybe starting year three and you were in year zero, right? Year one.

Nick Korte: Yeah. Technical generalists across the portfolio was really our role.

John White: Mhm. So as we were launching, I think we realized, oh, wait, some of this stuff is not timely anymore because some of it was, hey, this, you know, release of this product is coming and this is what we find interesting about it. And then when we were actually launching, that was going to be, I don't know, two months out of date or whatever.

Nick Korte: Yep.

John White: So some of that stuff just became not relevant. And it was all the VMware specific stuff. And only the kind of. The only evergreen stuff that we had was the career stuff.

Nick Korte: Right.

John White: So that became a little bit more the focus. I think that we were still thinking, oh, hey, we'll just record more maybe VMware specific stuff later on, you know, as that happens. But, you know, for right now, here it is. As I remember, the early part of it was very prescriptive about, you know, kind of a recipe for this is how a resume should happen. And these are the types of interviews that are going to happen as you, you know, apply for a, uh, job at a large tech company. And this is what the interview process probably is going to look like. And here are your goals for each one of those interviews. And that stuff is still evergreen, right?

Nick Korte: A hundred percent. And I think if someone were to listen back to those first 10 or 20 or 50 episodes, even, you would find that John really had to carry those conversations. Because I was not really thinking about career things. I picked a lot up just from the conversations we had on the podcast. It was a very new muscle. You know, it was like somebody who just started working out a particular muscle in their body. And I'm, um, I'm still just lifting the bar. Right. Trying to lift the bar.

John White: Right, right.

Nick Korte: Do you remember what made us end up asking guests on the show? Because it was around episode 11, 12, 13, right in there where we had Tom Delicati as our first guest. And I can't remember what made us say, yeah, let's have a guest.

John White: I think it was always back of mind. Again, my background was coming from the VMware Community Roundtable podcast, and that generally had guests from the VMware community, whether those were customers or product management or those different types of roles. And I think at a certain point we were like, well, we're just two people and we have our experience, but we can't represent that as the full breadth of all of Experience that just doesn't make any sense. So we need to start exploring what other people's career journeys have looked like and see if we can extract some, some knowledge and recommendations from that.

Nick Korte: Yeah. And I don't know that we had a prescriptive plan for how we were going to interview people at that time. Maybe we did, I don't remember. But I think we found our style pretty quickly in terms of the long form. Telling your career story, picking out the lessons learned and inflection points.

John White: Yeah, yeah, I think that was the structure from the beginning.

Nick Korte: Okay.

John White: We just kind of hit upon that and that was something that I think originated from. Well, that's something that we can look up ahead of time on somebody's LinkedIn, um, or least, you know, ask them ahead of time, if they're not on LinkedIn, to talk about what jobs have you had, what roles have you had, what stories, you know, do you think you can share in knowledge? And what emerged from that was totally different from, you know, hey, it'll be easy to structure a conversation around somebody's job history. Right?

Nick Korte: Yeah.

John White: Because I think what happened a little bit later on was, oh, these lessons that are learned from these inflection points are really interesting. And I don't think that we knew that was going to happen going in. No, it was just kind of like, oh, so you probably learned something from that. You know, as that job wrapped up and another job started ramping up, you know, what did you learn from, you know, that, that transition and that happened on the fly. Yeah.

Nick Korte: Just kind of fell into it.

John White: Yeah.

Nick Korte: But the, the long form, I'm definitely biased because that's how we've been doing it, but I personally like the fact that we've been able to hear more of someone's story in their career rather than just, oh, we got 30 minutes with this person kind of thing.

John White: Definitely, you know, different people like different lengths of podcasts.

Nick Korte: Mhm.

John White: Some people might only like 5 minute podcasts or some people might only like 10 minute or 15 or 20 or whatever. Their commute time happens to be is generally how it looks. Right. Or however much time it takes for them to do their chores every day, um, washing all the dishes or whatever it is that they have to do. But we wanted to tell interesting stories that had an arc, a beginning and an end, and a journey in between. And we were able to find those, even chopping people's long two hour conversations up into, you know, two or even three episodes.

Nick Korte: Yep.

John White: So I think that worked for us. I don't know if it worked for

Nick Korte: everybody, but it certainly made it easier in terms of we could record one two hour interview with somebody and that gives us two episodes on the backside. So, um, we probably spent the same time interviewing people that we would have. We just didn't interview as many as if it had been one episode per person.

John White: Definitely. Like, if we put two hour episodes out there, there is definitely a psychological barrier to doing that in my mind.

Nick Korte: Oh, yeah, right. That would be brutal on editing. Like, you, you start to edit a two hour interview and you're like, oh, yeah, yeah.

John White: People probably don't think about the backend effort that goes into that.

Nick Korte: One other thing I want to add as we're talking about how this got started, just know everybody. When we first started, John had to give me advice on like, okay, start with this cheap mic so we have the same mic. Like, at first I was just using a headset and I finally got the same mic you had. And then we later invested in a little bit nicer mics. But I knew nothing about editing and really not that much about how to make a podcast. John knew the, uh, administrative things that needed to be in place to even get it out there and available.

John White: Well, I would maybe push back on that even a little bit because there was a lot that we had to go through and figure out just to do that. Right, fair point.

Nick Korte: Fair point. Yeah.

John White: I think that there were some things that I knew, like, hey, you know, we could host on WordPress and there's a plugin that would turn episodes, you know, audio, MP3s into an audio feed that we can publish as a podcast. That part, you know, I did some research on. But even then, you know, between the time that we actually recorded episodes and the time that we launched, as you mentioned, was something like six months.

Nick Korte: Yes.

John White: And there, there was definitely some blocks and hurdles that I had to go through mentally in order to launch. You know, it started to get overly complicated and involved in the backend. What engine are we going to use? Should we do it this way? Like, what's the coolest technology that we can use? And in the end, I think you kind of kicked me in the butt and said, hey, what do we need to do to launch? And I was like, WordPress, this plugin, we can get it done right away. And that is what happened. And we never actually changed from that.

Nick Korte: We ran out of time.

John White: Exactly.

Nick Korte: Because we learned that once you get an idea for a show and you start podcasting, you're never going to run out of show ideas.

John White: That is true. We had ideas and ideas and we never ran out of ideas. We still have ideas. Uh, but I think that the fact that we still have ideas begs the question, Nick, why are we stopping the podcast?

Nick Korte: I think we ran out of time. At least I have run out of time to spend on the back end.

John White: That is a very real thing because

Nick Korte: it's a weekly show, right? So you have to think about it. You. For each show, if you listen to it, there's an intro outro, if we have an. An interview with a guest. So that has to be recorded later. Right? It wasn't recorded at the same time as the guest interview. Show notes, of course, they're not AI generated. That's. That's me, you know, that's John and me making the show notes. Uh, I've always enjoyed writing the show notes and not generating them. And I actually feel like I remember more of the episodes because of that. Trying to put in all the links and stuff like that. But it's a large amount of time per week. And I mean, I have a, uh, teenager now and lots of activities outside of school. I've had some workload increase at the office and probably for the last year, I think I've been fooling myself at how much of a toll it's been to just get an episode out each week. I mean, if you've listened this far, you've seen that we had to change the schedule to be not weekly. And we've missed that a couple times. So.

John White: And I should say this, I ran out of that time about four years ago. So Nick has been carrying that load of doing the editing for at least the last four years. And you know, for me it was, I think I had a job change and new baby and those things hit within six months of each other. And I just ran out of that time back then.

Nick Korte: And at some point you moved.

John White: Yeah, I moved. Yeah, you're right. All within 12 months. Bam, bam, bam. Just, uh, was not ever able to pick up doing the editing or show notes. So you've been really carrying that load for the last four years. That is as both of us are advancing in our careers and getting more busy and being asked to do more. So, you know, that has been intense. I mean, for me, I mentioned, you know, having a new baby now she's a three year old. And my wife and I just had another, um. So I'm in the middle of being girl dad times two. I actually don't think that we mentioned this on the show ever, but I left my job in June of 2025. And I've been also doing a job search, um, at the same time. So, you know, that load, uh, has not been able to let me pitch back in and pick up any of the tasks, really, for the podcast.

Nick Korte: Before we made this decision, I listened back to some previous episodes to get good advice. Right? I mean, that's what you do, isn't it? Some of the advice that echoed the loudest in my head was Amy Lewis talking about the end of the Geek whispers on episode 302, talking about ending with intention. And that's kind of how we got here. Rather than being spotty on our releases and not keeping our promise of how often we say we're going to get the show out, we wanted to end it with intention and say, okay, this is it.

John White: Uh, I think doing things intentionally is the magic phrase. We haven't lost the love of this task. We both want this to continue, but realistically, we can't do it. And rather than sputter and peter out and never be heard from again, we just thought, we'll follow the lessons that, you know, we've learned from, uh, are our bet whores and do what they did. Let's be intentional about the end. And, uh, I really love that idea. I'm glad that you suggested it. And here we are. Those are the reasons we learned a

Nick Korte: lot along the way. John, what's something you learned?

John White: I learned how much there is to learn from other people's experiences. Even in examining my own experience and my own biases about how people should search for jobs, apply for jobs, and go through that interview process, you know, I went, oh, you know, I have these beliefs, and I don't know why I have them. Let me examine them. We put all of that stuff out there. And then I wanted to, uh, you know, pressure test that against, you know, other people's experiences. So we asked for some of their advice around doing those things. Other hiring managers, you know, how do you read resumes and that kind of thing and what's important? And so, you know, we heard other people's impressions and then how other people went about their career journeys. You know, that was the thing that I learned, you know, was to. To hear about all these different experiences, this vast breadth of experiences, you know, different types, you know, diversities of experience, different kinds of people from different backgrounds doing different things, realizing, you know, man, there's just so many ways to do it. And, you know, man, I'm just super grateful for that. How about yourself?

Nick Korte: I learned a ton about the Mechanics of podcast production.

John White: Mhm.

Nick Korte: It was around episode 113 when I think you had to take the first break. And I said, okay, tell me everything I need to know about editing in 30 minutes. So I learned how to edit. I got hooked into podcast communities even.

John White: Right.

Nick Korte: I even went to a podcast conference this year, which was amazing.

John White: Yeah.

Nick Korte: Met some people who run their own podcasts. But I learned how much salesmanship is involved in getting a guest. You know, you have to sell someone on being on your show. What can they bring to your listeners? How easy can you make it?

John White: We have a pretty big ask, right?

Nick Korte: We're asking for an hour and a half to two hour, two hours of block. And, and I learned that if you make it easy for someone to say yes and you build the outline of questions you might ask and you tell them what your show's about and what you want to cover, they'll say yes. And they might give you more time than that. That's right, because in some cases we got way more than that, either in recorded time or in the off air conversations we had just because it was fun talking to these people. So I learned so much about different people that I never would have met otherwise. I am thankful for all the learnings of all the people who have been on the show and I'm thankful, uh, for everything I've learned from you, John, just from our conversations from episode to episode.

John White: I've definitely heard you say things like, oh, John's good at this. And I've gone, wow, am I good at that? I guess, you know, I do have experience at that. And then I realize in that exact same way that you have these skills and experiences that I don't have. And I've been just incredibly grateful for that. Like that insight about, about selling a guest, about how do you approach somebody and make it easy for them to say yes? That was just an incredible insight that you had that I applied to many different things in my life. When I was approaching, you know, at any job that I had, when I, when I was making an ask of somebody, I, I used that exact methodology. If I'm asking for somebody's time, I need to make it easy for them to say yes. This is this incredible outcome that's going to come of this. It's going to benefit, you know, the company, you, your product group, whatever that was, and really outline it, uh, and show them that I wasn't asking them to do a bunch of work other than maybe showing up or uh, maybe doing a little bit of preparation a

Nick Korte: hundred Percent, A hundred percent. I will also say that I learned how to beat perfectionism on a week to week basis because no matter how much you crank and edit and fine tune the audio, it's never going to be perfect. You're never going to record the perfect intro. The deadline was always there to keep me honest. Like, nope, you got to get it done. And I'm sure that my family thought I was insane sometimes. But like Seth Godin talked about in the, in the Practice. Great book. If you never read it, you're keeping a promise. When you say you're gonna have a release cadence, you know, you're promising your listeners. So whether one person listened or a million people listened, we tried to keep that promise. And it was important to us to keep it, even if it was hard.

John White: And man, that first time that we had a million downloads in a week, that was amazing. It was, it was such a good feeling.

Nick Korte: I can't even remember when that was.

John White: Yeah, yeah. What was that date? I don't remember that ever happening. Because it didn't. Sorry, everybody. Um, but having a million people listen to a specific episode or even hit the site in a specific week wasn't the goal. I think the goal was the breadth of work, in making it accessible, in having people, you know, be able to benefit from it.

Nick Korte: Yep. We also had to learn how to tell people about it. Like if you come on camera with a decent mic. Oh, well, do you have a podcast? Well, actually, yes, I do. And here's what it's about. And I have to be able to tell you about it in 15 seconds.

John White: That's true. Every time you join a zoom call,

Nick Korte: you have to be able to state your thesis and mission, so it just gets super clarified. Uh, I will also say that we did use some AI in our workflow. John taught me a ton about generative AI, and with his help I was able to create this workflow that would help me brainstorm on on titles and show descriptions based on the show notes that had been written, and then even get a prompt for a featured image that we could use once we started doing those. So it's dragged some, um, generative AI tinkering, which I definitely appreciate honing the skills on.

John White: Right, right. But you never did want to just input the transcript and then have it spit out an episode outline. I don't think we ever got there because I think we'd lose touch with the actual content if we were to do something like that. I mean, just back to the audio ticks, I think, you know, after you Edit a podcast. It is impossible, impossible to listen to other audio and not hear the issues. Oh, yeah, it's a real kind of a curse, actually.

Nick Korte: It is. I can hear mouth noises on Zoom like you wouldn't believe. They're so loud.

John White: You can listen to somebody else's podcast and know who is the editor and who is not the editor by the way that they talk into the mic and the way they don't talk into the mic. You can just hear that and go, oh, that person never listens to the audio or else they wouldn't talk that way.

Nick Korte: Yeah. Good times. What about favorite moments? What were some of your favorites, John?

John White: Man, I don't know that I can pick one, but I. I think that we got to kind of talk to some of our heroes, um, in podcasting and maybe even some people that were nerd famous that we got to talk to over the years and get their points of view on career. I remember we talked to Nicholson about how to evaluate an offer and money management. I think it was those types of things being, being able to talk to people that I think if I just reached out to them on LinkedIn and said, hey, can I talk to you for two hours for no other reason than you to benefit me? They would have probably said no. And the structure of having a podcast allowed us to have those conversations. And almost every single time that we interviewed somebody, almost every time, I want to say 98% of the time, at the end of it, I was like, that might have been my favorite interview almost every time. So it's still really tough for me to look back and go, you know, one of those conversations is going to be, you know, my favorite because it's, it's, you know, I have a, uh, very strong recency bias, I guess, is what I'm saying.

Nick Korte: Oh, yeah, I hear you. I hear you. I don't know if you remember, but kudos to you and Mike Burkhart. The first time we had Mike Burkhart on the show, if you recall, I was having wifi issues and you guys hung on the line while I moved everything to the living room of my house and recorded from the floor so that I could get a good WI FI signal.

John White: I do remember. And it was, you know, one of the few times that I was sad that we were not doing a, uh, YouTube show, because on video you were on your stomach, you know, facing into your laptop with a mic in front of you.

Nick Korte: Yeah.

John White: Which would have been great for YouTube views.

Nick Korte: And I'm sure the YouTube video views would have Been great. The time we forgot to hit record multiple times when we were at VMware. Explore together in the same place.

John White: That's right. I will say that the times that we got to record in person with each other were some of my favorites.

Nick Korte: Absolutely.

John White: Just because, I mean, I love hanging out with you. You know, we have a personal relationship that, that transcends this and it. To be able to. To kind of put those things together. Maybe people don't know this or forget this. Like, I live in the Bay Area. Nick lives in the Dallas Fort Worth area. You know, the number of times that we've been in the same room recording, uh, this podcast has been less than five. I want to say it's been three.

Nick Korte: That sounds about right. Yeah. Our studio is virtual.

John White: Yes. If I had to, you know, even succumb to recency bias, I would say our interview with Milinda Sy, that one was great. Was really amazing. And that was the only time actually that we've been pitched a guest, you know, like a cold pitch by marketing. And it's been.

Nick Korte: Right. It was a great one.

John White: And it was a good pitch too.

Nick Korte: 100%.

John White: Right.

Nick Korte: We literally got two plus hours with a CEO. I couldn't believe it.

John White: It was amazing. And he was so generous and so insightful. But that's been, uh. Another pattern is people being generous with their time and insightful. Right.

Nick Korte: And then the off air conversations too. They're probably gonna stick around for a few minutes. I mean, we have to make sure everybody's audio uploads. But sometimes we talk to people for 30, 40 more minutes after we hit stopped recording. And both of us are like, we should have recorded that too.

John White: Right, Right.

Nick Korte: You know, I really, uh, appreciated being able to have Dale McKay on. He's a mentor of mine.

John White: So.

Nick Korte: Ah, great conversation. And all the conversations about the principal title. So many different people. I love those. And why people became managers or moved away from it. Those fascinated me. One of my all time favorite episodes is 127 Countdown to Burnout with Tom Hollingsworth. I've listened to that so many times. Just a great episode. Not that every episode we've recorded isn't

John White: great, but there's the stick in your mind. Right. Especially since that was so. It was so timely. We all battle Burnout a lot of the time. So going back and listening to that one and just having that is such a gift.

Nick Korte: Just like being the editor. I mean, when you edit, you're going to hear the interview multiple times because you have to clip out things that maybe are squirrel chases or background noise. And sometimes what you talk about or what you asked about was a question that you really needed help with right then.

John White: Yes.

Nick Korte: We literally asked our guests some of the things that we needed advice on during that episode, and we got it because full throttle. So hopefully it helped you if you listened as well.

John White: Yeah. And then I think maybe one last thing for me was when we were able to clip, uh, the times that we were messing up and include it as a little, uh, treat at the end for people.

Nick Korte: Yes. And if you want to know which episodes we've messed up on, look for the stinger tag on our WordPress site. I think my favorite is still the Barry White intro. And I want to say that's episode nine.

John White: Oh, my goodness, I'd forgotten about that.

Nick Korte: And some of the funnies with Chris Williams where he's talking about Funyuns.

John White: Oh, yes, yes.

Nick Korte: But yeah, so many good ones.

John White: Do you want to talk about what might happen, Nick, as we look to the future?

Nick Korte: Well, I'm going to say what will definitely happen is we're going to keep the site online and accessible so that you can get to it. You can look at the show notes, you can listen back to the episodes, you can check out the layoff resources page, you can check out the career uncertainty action guides that are there. And, uh, the AI prompts that we've had. Our intention really is to keep it online and accessible and not just let it fade away.

John White: Yeah. We don't want the content to disappear. And I think that we can do that in a way that's very, very cost effective. It's not going to be massively expensive to do. It's something that, you know, we never really monetized this podcast. Right. Even like the things that we briefly thought about, like putting Amazon links to the books that we mentioned, uh, we never actually followed through on. So those, you know, thousands and thousands of pennies that we could have made, we passed up on. But I think we have a, uh, cost effective way of doing that. I still, Nick, I still have a dream of going through and making sure that we have transcriptions of all the episodes and then making those transcriptions available as well as the general notes, and then maybe even being able to, you know, have like a, like an AI chatbot that is trained on, on those, those transcripts.

Nick Korte: That'd be super cool. Their journey Chatbot.

John White: Yeah. So you could say, hey, I'm thinking about going into this type of position. What are, ah, the lessons learned from anybody who's been a product Manager as a Nerd Journey guest, or how did they transition into it or transition out of it? Or, you know, what do they wish that they had done before? Or what lessons did they learn? Yeah, I think I already said that. But, yeah, you know, that would be just really cool. It's just, you know, a little bit of overhead to get it done. I think that's possible.

Nick Korte: That would be cool. I mean, then I could give it a scenario and say, what would John's sassy response to this be? And then see if it was right, right, right. And just keep in mind, we are not fading away or getting blown off the surface of the planet here. You can still reach out to us on LinkedIn. You can still send us an email at nerdjourneypodcastmail.com if you want to talk or have some feedback on something we've created. So those communication channels are not going away.

John White: Yeah, absolutely. You know, we're still available. People reach out to us all the time on LinkedIn, um, to ask questions about, you know, transitions or, you know, working at specific companies. If we know anybody there, like, please feel free to keep on doing that.

Nick Korte: Happy to connect with anyone, as long as you're a real person and not a bot.

John White: Sometimes I like talking to bots, too. Wait, no, that's not true. That's not true. Maybe we should talk about what won't happen.

Nick Korte: Mm. Well, we're definitely not going to restart this show.

John White: Yes, that's safe to say. I think we've talked about it between the two of us and said, well, even if we were going to do a show like this again, maybe we would pick a different name, you know, maybe make it video included from the beginning so we could upload it on YouTube. But then we'd have to, you know, figure out how to do audio and video editing. So if we're going to do it, um, we would do it differently and we don't have the time to do it right now, obviously.

Nick Korte: Yeah. So we are not starting a new show.

John White: Yeah, we're not starting a new show. At least not right now. I mean, you know, who knows? If somebody came to us and said, hey, we want to have you guys do this for a living, and it was a reasonable offer. Maybe we could do that.

Nick Korte: Yeah, we'd look at it for sure.

John White: Yeah.

Nick Korte: Somebody else do the editing and production. Yeah.

John White: Uh, but that's pie the sky. Of course.

Nick Korte: Of course. But just because the show ends, that doesn't mean that you, as a listener, that your work is complete. None of our work is complete, is it, John?

John White: No, not at all. People still need to stay vigilant on their own journeys, right? The things that we've talked about in curating your own career and being intentional about it always apply. We're not going to be around to remind you of that every week. So I hope that people have learned those lessons and internalized them. But if not, do something to make those things intentional. You need to prioritize your career on a consistent basis. We don't need to go over the books, but we had some ideas, some specific actions that you should take. Document your work. I generate proof of work, show your work. And I think that that's what we were unconsciously doing at the genesis of the podcast. We're showing our work. This is how we got here. You know you can do this too, right? You know, this is how Nick is transitioning into his job, um, at VMware. When I joined Google Cloud, I went, hey, this is how I'm transitioning as a Google Cloud customer engineer. And the episodes that we did focus on those things tended to be fairly popular. So I think, you know, that idea of documenting your work, that is something that you should do. Other people will find that useful. The main other person is you in the future when you don't remember any of this stuff.

Nick Korte: By the way, John, episode 66 remains the most downloaded episode to date. Three month check in as a Google Cloud customer engineer with John White, part one.

John White: Oh, really? Wow.

Nick Korte: 534 downloads based on what I'm seeing.

John White: Wow. Uh, okay, nice. The second part of that was iterative improvement, right? Don't try to make big steps, you know, make small iterative improvements. If you improve like half a percent every single day, that's probably not sustainable. But just imagine how much you'll improve

Nick Korte: over time and turning information into knowledge. Some of that is writing. We talked about writing, being thinking, using smart notes to take notes on things that you've read or thought about in your own words and compile that.

John White: That's right, yeah. Knowledge management, however you do it, um, you should do it. You should manage your knowledge. And it should not be in your memory. It should be in some kind of written form that you can recall. And then, of course, you know, practicing deep work. We read that book, Deep Work, and, you know, it just really convinced us that deep work is the most important kind of work that you can do. The thing that you're going to get paid to do, the thing that you can turn a career into. You know, the things that need sustained Attention, because sustained attention is so difficult to do. That skill of sustained attention is what people will be paid for in the future. And I think that we're kind of seeing that. Mhm. Right.

Nick Korte: A hundred percent. And then as new technology comes to fruition, think about making a bet on it. So many guests invested time early on in a technology wave, before it became extremely big or mainstream. They developed expertise in that area. It led to new opportunities for many. So keep that in mind for yourself. Keep your eyes open. Don't be afraid to tinker with some of those new things. You never know what might happen.

John White: Absolutely. So that was our book progression advice, but I think there's additional advice that we had. Right. Just consistently investing in your professional network, that is just so important that we found over time. It's surprising. It's how we found a lot of guests, but also, you know, how we just met interesting people and had interesting conversations and progressed in our careers.

Nick Korte: Meetup groups, online communities, all those things. Yeah. And we want you to know that you can certainly still reach out to us if you need some sort of help. If you just want to talk.

John White: Absolutely.

Nick Korte: You want to talk about career, you want to talk about starting a podcast. You want to talk about what it's like to go through the John White School of Mentoring. I've been there, done that.

John White: I had forgotten about that.

Nick Korte: I had to do it one last time. I used to say it a lot in the early episodes.

John White: Call back to the beginnings.

Nick Korte: That's right.

John White: All right, well, is it time to get out of here, Nick?

Nick Korte: I think so.

John White: Okay. Well, farewell, listeners. Uh, this body of work's journey ends here, but our journeys as individuals and as a community will definitely continue. We want to thank you one more time for all of your support and for listening, your attention, and your communication in the past. I'm John White, journeyman for Nick Cordy, uh, network nerd, signing off one more time.

Nick Korte: Adios,

John White: Sam.