Posted on by Nick Korte

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

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When does a body of work reach completion? One answer is to end it by choice.

This week in episode 356 you’ll hear the reasons behind our intentional ending of the Nerd Journey Podcast. We’ll rewind the clock and focus on the show’s trajectory and inflection points over time just like we’ve done for guests, share what we learned over the course of an 8-year journey from idea to consistently released show, and discuss our favorite moments.

All of our content will remain online and accessible for listeners like you to go back and enjoy. Don’t miss our final call to action in this episode. Just because this body of work is complete, there is still work for all of us to do for our careers.

Original Recording Date: 12-20-2025

Topics – A Purposeful Ending, Where We Started, Interview Format and Getting to Launch, The Why Behind the Ending, The Lessons We Learned, Our Favorite Moments, What to Expect from Us Moving Forward, There’s More to Be Done for All of Us.

1:01 – A Purposeful Ending

  • We’ll give you the bottom line up front: this is the last episode of the Nerd Journey podcast. We still love the mission, but the time has come for us to complete this body of work.
  • When we have interviewed guests on the show, we’ve talked through their career timeline and pulled out the lessons learned. Today, we’re going to do it for the show itself.

1:38 – Where We Started

  • John was working as a sales engineer at VMware and was the co-host of the VMware Community Roundtable Podcast. He loved listening to podcasts, enjoyed the medium, and wanted to find a topic for a show. At the same time Nick was in the process of joining VMware, John and Nick were discussing all the things Nick needed to know to transition into sales engineering for a technology vendor.
    • “In that conversation, I said ‘maybe we should start a podcast.’” – John White
    • As Nick remembers it, this happened the weekend before Nick started at VMware in December 2017 (almost exactly 8 years before this episode’s recording). Nick wasn’t sure what he would talk about on a podcast.
    • This suggestion from John started the ideation period, and our launch of the show was in July 2018.
  • John talks about some of the initial ideas for the focus of the show.
    • At that time, VMware podcasts and blogs were a great way to interact with the greater community. Doing something like this was also a way to become what John calls “nerd famous.” By the way, no one else can use that term now (trademarked by John).
    • We initially considered talking about VMware news and our opinions on it since we both were going to be working at VMware.
    • Both John and Nick came from small-to-medium business IT operations and eventually became sales engineers at a technology vendor. One of the things the show could be for is to talk about that journey and help others understand it was a possibility for them as well.
    • John and Nick recorded about 10 episodes before launching to help hit the release cadence.
    • Nick doesn’t remember why they chose a weekly release cadence but remembers the show launched while he was on vacation.
      • John and Nick even recorded a podcast episode while Nick was on that vacation, which started a habit of Nick doing podcast work while on vacation.
    • Because they had recorded so many episodes in advance, they were not going to be timely or points of authority on VMware technology. Both Nick and John’s roles were as technical generalists on the VMware side.
      • “The only evergreen stuff that we had was the career stuff, so that became a little bit more the focus. I think that we were still thinking…we’ll just record more maybe VMware specific stuff later on…as that happens. For right now, here it is.” – John White
    • Early episodes were very prescriptive about resumes and job interview processes at larger tech companies, for example.
      • Nick points out that John had to carry the conversation in these early episodes because he was just learning to think about career focused topics (sort of like being new to lifting weights). But, Nick picked up a lot just from the conversations on the show.

7:50 – Interview Format and Getting to Launch

  • Nick couldn’t remember what made them bring in guests originally, but Episode 13 with Tom Delicati was our very first guest interview on the show.
    • John feels bringing in guests was always back of mind for him, and it was what he saw happen on the VMware Community Roundtable Podcast.
    • “We’re just 2 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 knowledge and recommendations from that.” – John White
    • Nick doesn’t remember having a prescriptive plan for interviewing guests but feels like they settled into long-form interviews as a style pretty quickly.
    • John says this was a structure they hit upon in the beginning (talking through someone’s job history). The lessons learned from career inflection points like job transitions emerged from conversations with guests. John and Nick did not know this was going to happen when they began.
    • Nick likes being able to highlight more of one specific guest’s story than otherwise could have been done if each interview was only 30 minutes with a guest. But we fully acknowledge people like different lengths of podcasts.
    • “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 2-hour conversations up into 2 or even 3 episodes. I think that worked for us. I don’t know if it worked for everybody.” – John White
    • “We probably spent the same time interviewing people as we would have. We just didn’t interview as many as if it had been 1 episode per person.” – Nick Korte
      • We also didn’t want to release a 2-hour interview as one episode. That’s a lot of editing for just one episode release. People might not realize how much time goes into editing and production even after recording an interview.
  • At the beginning, John had to give Nick advice on the kind of microphone to get. Nick started recording with a headset and then bought the same mic as John. They would each later invest in nicer microphones as the show progressed.
    • “I knew nothing about editing and really not that much about how to make a podcast.” – Nick Korte, on beginning as a podcaster
  • There were a lot of things we had to figure out just to make the podcast publicly available.
    • John had researched some of the administrative things. He knew there was a WordPress plugin that could be used to turn MP3 files of released episodes into publicly available audio feed that would be the podcast.
    • John says there were some mental blocks and hurdles he had to get through before launching the show, highlighting the fact that it took 6 months to go from idea to publishing. He was getting overwhelmed trying to figure out the back-end production and publishing process.
    • John thinks it was Nick who kept asking what needed to happen for us to launch, and we went with WordPress and the plugin mentioned but never changed anything…because we had no time to go back. Nick and John learned that once you start a show and get it going, you will never run out of ideas.

13:58 – The Why Behind the Ending

  • We never ran out of ideas. In fact, we still have ideas. So why are we stopping the podcast?
    • We ran out of time.
    • Nick has run out of time to work on editing and production. This has been a weekly show (up until the last couple months of our run), and it takes a large time commitment each week.
      • For guest interview episodes, the intro and outro were not recorded at the same time the interview took place. These had to be recorded before the episode was released.
      • The show notes are not AI-generated. Nick enjoyed writing them and adding in important links and references, feeling like it allowed him to remember the episodes better and internalize the lessons within them.
      • Nick has a teenager now with many extracurricular activities and has had a workload increase at his job.
      • “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.” – Nick Korte
      • We even tried changing the release schedule to bi-weekly and have missed that cadence a couple of times.
    • John ran out of time about 4 years ago and hasn’t had much time since to handle podcast related tasks.
      • John experienced a job change and new baby at that time and couldn’t add anything else. He also moved at some point.
      • John and Nick have been advancing in their own careers over time as well, which has added responsibility.
      • John and his wife recently had a second child. He also left his job in June 2025 and has been doing a job search at the same time.
    • Before Nick and John made this decision, Nick listened back to some previous episodes to get advice and perspective. Some of the advice that echoed the loudest came from Amy Lewis in Episode 302 – Ending with Intention: Once a Geek Whisperer with Amy Lewis (2/2). The idea of ending with intention stood out.
      • “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, ‘ok, this is it.’” – Nick Korte
      • “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 we’ve learned from our bettors and do what they did. Let’s be intentional about the end.” – John White

18:02 – The Lessons We Learned

  • John learned how much we can learn from the experience of others. He had ideas and biases about how we should handle specific aspects of our career, but doing the podcast allowed him to pressure test these ideas against the experience of others.
    • John appreciates the breadth of background and experience our collective guests have brought to the show. It made him realize there are so many different ways to do certain things.
  • Nick learned a ton about the mechanics of podcast production.
    • It was around Episode 113 when Nick became the editor because John needed to take a break. If you want to hear more about how this happened, check out this blog post.
    • Nick got hooked into podcast communities and even attended a podcast conference in 2025, meeting many other people who run their own podcast.
  • Nick learned how much salesmanship is involved in getting a guest.
    • You have to sell someone on the idea of being on the show and what they can bring to your listeners. How easy can you make it for them to say yes?
    • John and Nick asked guests for 1.5 – 2 hours for an interview.
    • “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 is about and what you want to cover, they’ll say yes. And they might give you more time than that…. 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 for everything I’ve learned from you, John.” – Nick Korte
  • John is grateful for the difference in skills he and Nick have and their ability to learn from one another just by co-hosting together.
    • He likes to apply the idea of making it easy for others to say yes when he’s asking something of someone at work, for example.
  • Nick learned how to beat perfectionism weekly.
    • Something can always be edited more or re-recorded. There was a weekly ship date.
    • “The deadline was always there to keep me honest.” – Nick Korte
    • Seth Godin’s The Practice talks about keeping a promise to the people who follow you. Having a weekly release cadence meant we were promising to ship episodes weekly.
    • “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.” – Nick Korte
    • “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 and making it accessible and having people be able to benefit from it.” – John White
  • We also had to learn how to tell people about the show in a clear, succinct way. When John or Nick would join video calls for work, people would see their microphones and ask if they had a podcast.
  • We also used generative AI in our workflow for production a little bit, even if it was not for show notes. Doing the show has dragged with it some reasons to tinker with generative AI.
    • With John’s help Nick learned how to build a Gemini prompt that would take the handwritten show notes and brainstorm titles, episode descriptions, and even create a prompt for a featured image based on the themes in the episode.
    • John shares that we never wanted to use generative AI to take a transcript and generate an episode outline. We might lose touch with the content that way.
  • John talks about the curse of being an audio editor.
    • It’s impossible to NOT hear issues in other audio. Nick can hear mouth noises on Zoom calls like you wouldn’t believe.
    • John says we can listen to someone else’s podcast and may be able to tell who is and is not the editor based on whether they speak into the microphone or move away from it and keep talking.

25:15 – Our Favorite Moments

31:05 – What to Expect from Us Moving Forward

  • What are the things that will, won’t, and might happen in the future?
    • The Nerd Journey site will remain online and accessible so our content will not disappear.
      • You can still enjoy past episodes, browse the show notes, and leverage the Layoff Resources Page as well as our Career Uncertainty Action Guide.
      • John and Nick can keep it online in a very cost-effective way just as they have to this point since the podcast was never monetized (not even Amazon affiliate links).
    • John still has a dream of making sure we have transcripts of all the episodes and making these available in addition to the show notes. Maybe that could be extended to an AI chat bot that was trained on the transcripts. There would be some overhead involved in doing it, but John thinks it’s definitely possible.
    • You can still reach out to John or Nick on LinkedIn or send us an e-mail. All current communication channels will remain in place.
      • We are available for questions, if you want to talk, etc.
    • We will definitely NOT restart this show. We have declared it complete.
      • Even if we were going to do a show like this again in the future, we would do it differently. We might choose a different name, a different description, or a different format even. But we don’t have the time to do that right now anyway.
    • We are NOT starting a new show (at least not right now).

34:59 – There’s More to Be Done for All of Us

  • Just because the show is ending, that doesn’t mean your work is complete. None of our work is complete when it comes to career.
    • “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.” – John White
  • Here are some specific actions that you should take:
    • Document your work.
    • Generate proof of work.
    • Show your work (similar to generating proof of work).
      • John says this is what we were unconsciously doing when we began the podcast, sharing how we got to where we are and our job transitions so others can follow a similar path if they choose.
      • The purpose of showing your work is so that others can learn from your experience and so you can remind yourself of what you’ve accomplished at a later time.
      • Nick highlights that Episode 66: Three-Month Check-In as a Google Cloud Customer Engineer with John White, Part 1 remains the most downloaded episode in our catalog.
    • Aim for small, iterative improvements.
    • Turn information into knowledge.
      • Some of this is through writing. We spoke several times on the show about writing being thinking, and it was specifically referenced in an episode with Josh Duffney – Episode 156 – Better Notes, Better You with Josh Duffney (1/2).
      • Manage your knowledge in some kind of written form that isn’t in your head. Make it a knowledge management system of some kind.
    • Practice Deep Work. It’s the most important work you can do because the skill of sustained attention will be the thing for which people are paid.
    • Be mindful of technology waves and trends, and consider placing some small bets. Many guests have invested time and effort to become proficient in a newer technology before or as it was catching on. Don’t be afraid to tinker with those newer technologies.
    • Consistently invest in your professional network. One way to do this could be via meetup groups or online communities.
  • Reach out to use if you want to talk about careers, starting a podcast, or other fun topics. Nick can also tell you what it’s like to go through the John White School of Mentoring.
  • We want to say a special thank you to every guest who took the time to be on the podcast and every listener who took the time to listen to an episode.

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