Jordan Paris Just Keep Learning Summary
Jordan is a podcast host, entrepreneur and author. He has a top ranked show called The Jordan Paris Show and has been featured as a writer in Entrepreneur and Forbes. He also did a TEDX Talk called: Is the debt worth the degree? His approach to life and business is simple, yet powerful: don’t make a living, design a life.
In this episode of The Just Keep Learning Podcast, we talked about education, how to start a podcast, dealing with haters, and achieving your goals in life.
Episode Notes
Our guest today has a ton of experience in building business, especially when it comes to podcasting. He grew his first podcast, Growth Mindset University to being ranked in the top fifteen of education, self-improvement, and training. His show focused on entrepreneurship, self-development, writing and educational leadership.
His TEDX Talk was all about education too. It focused on the question, have you ever regretted taking on college tuition debt? What if you believed that an internship provides more life experience than a classroom? Jordan shared how you can make the most out of your college experience. He talks about succeeding financially, socially, and authentically in a world that is different for each of us. Jordan is really big on finding real world experiences aligned with your goals and interests to prepare for a career.
We all evolve in our thinking and Jordan is one of the best at being a personally critical thinker. Upon reflecting, he realized that we live in a world where things are getting tense, real issues are bubbling to the surface, and wanted to do his part to create conversations that can have greater impact.
The podcast episodes evolved into his second podcast, The Jordan Paris Show, where he started discussing current affairs, politics and debunking myths. He got into this style of show because being a best-selling author, getting a TedX Talk, and achieving some social media status felt like fake social proof.
Jordan, like many of our guests, does a lot of awesome work. He is also the founder and creative director of Trend Up Media, a one-stop podcast agency that produces shows to help businesses grow in both profit and influence.
Jordan is a heart-felt leader who takes a no BS approach in seeing out his mission to be as real as possible. His main platform on social media is LinkedIn where he has built a community of people who are focused on achieving whatever success means to them.
On this episode of The Just Keep Learning Podcast, we talked about podcasting, productivity, business tips, nutrition and mindset. Like any strong entrepreneur with a focus on the meaning of life, Jordan helps people learn to escape the rat race by acquiring cash flowing assets and building passive income. With this the real goal can be how to live life to the fullest and do more of the things you love.
Perhaps the most impressive thing about this discussion is Jordan’s willingness to say “I don’t know” in the face of challenging questions. It is also pretty neat how Jordan explains that we all must continue to fight our cognitive bias. That it is ok if we no longer believe what we used to believe.
12 Tips To Help You Start A Podcast:
1. Don’t Be Afraid To Ship It. The most important thing in the beginning is building all of the skills and experience. There is only one way to improve and that is by having episodes that are not good at the beginning.
2. Don’t Give Up. Nobody will listen at first. Unless you are already a big brand you will have to grow one listener at a time. This can be a positive because you will have time to figure out your workflow and improve before more people start listening.
3. Don’t Delete Old Episodes. No matter how cringe you feel your old episodes are, they are important to show growth to your community. No matter how embarrassing it is, keep your old episodes up so you can be an inspiration to others wanting to get started, not to mention show the full story.
4. Don’t Be The Best Kept Secret Online. Get out there, shill and share your show. Also realize, you are never as good as you might think you are. Continue to improve and continue to share the show so that more and more people can know about it. You could build amazing content and literally no one will find it. So keep spreading the word.
5. Create Micro Content From The Main Podcast Pillar. Record great episodes, but don’t stop there. Find a way to share the highlights and quotables on social media platforms you think connect most with your audience. Don’t be afraid to experiment and try different styles of videos, thumbnails, vertical, horizontal, durations and whatever else comes to mind.
6. Focus On One Platform. Determine your best percentage based breakdown of time spent building community on a social media platform. Feel free to share quickly across all platforms, especially if people want to find you. But, be sure to focus at least 75% of your time on one single platform, because without focus no one will find the show.
7. Grow Your Marketing One Post At A Time. Sharing micro content will be slow in the beginning. You will get no likes on a post. Then perhaps one like and a comment. But the next time you may get two, and with another piece a few more. Over time, more guests and more content will lead to a compound effect. It will snowball until it can’t be slowed down. With patience you will find more and more opportunities to engage with the audience in DM’s, or replies and likely get too busy all of a sudden.
8. Guests Will Compound Too. In the beginning you have to get what you can get when it comes to asking people to be on your show. For a brand new podcast, it’s likely to need to interview your immediate connections, possibly friends and family. Also, don’t be afraid to reach out to the people you would love to interview. The worst that happens is they say “not right now”. That’s fine, there are many amazing people out there to collaborate with. Over time, guest opportunities will have a compound effect too. One guest will lead to another, a topic will lead to leverage and before long it will be hard to keep up with the opportunities.
9. Never Worry About Clout. What you’ll realize is that just because someone has a lot of social media followers does not mean they’ll be a valuable guest for you, or your audience. Do your homework and be sure you are interviewing people that serve your greater purpose and mission. Whether they have a large following, or small following, focus on the question, will this serve my listeners?
10. Be Open Minded And Listen. We should always be open to counter arguments and guard against our biases. Lifelong learning is appreciating that we can learn something from everyone. We can also change our views on things in life as we get more information. So, don’t stress too much about who you have on the show, or what their answers are. It is not about crafting and tailoring someone’s responses. Rather, it is about being an effective listener.
11. Love Your Haters. It’s simply mathematical that haters will grow as the community grows overall. If you are doing something worthwhile, it will have a polarizing effect. And so people that dislike the show will grow too. But, there is nothing more badass and cool than remaining calm when receiving hate. Be sure to take constructive criticism and appreciate everyone’s feedback. It doesn’t mean you need to take it personally, or even accept it as something to implement. Simply be willing to listen and spend most of your energy leaning into the community that is kind and supportive toward your work.\
Memorable Quotes
“Target audience is overrated. I’m so sick of marketing classes saying target market, target market, identify your target market and they don’t teach you anything about how to get them to actually give a damn and buy what you’re selling.”
“To find your passion, pay attention to those things that you gravitate towards. Think back to your childhood and ask, what did you gravitate towards? What really made you happy and excited? Try to incorporate that into your career and test it, Try to figure out your calling. Think about what makes you feel alive.”
“I struggle with how honest I should be when answering questions I don’t have a response to. I have the courage to say, ‘I don’t know’ to people, but it can come across as, ‘I don’t want to be here’ or ‘I don’t care’. I just don’t want to BS something and fluff some answer that doesn’t serve people. That’s actually a detriment to people. If I don’t know, I will say I don’t know, but people take that the wrong way. “
Guest Bio
Jordan Paris is a podcast host, entrepreneur, and author featured in Forbes, Entrepreneur, and other publications. But most importantly he is a lifelong learner, repping that Just Keep Learning attitude.
Jordan has been interviewing people on podcasts since his sophomore year of college. While the show is amazing and really did serve a lot of people, it is less aligned with his current ambitions, and so it is on a pause from recording for now.
Jordan really matured in his personal brand and shares some amazing things about “fake social proof”: blue checkmarks, becoming a “best-selling” author by understanding algorithms, getting a TEDx talk because of the clout factor, getting featured in Forbes and Entrepreneur.com, lots of likes on social media and on and on.
He got over the social reward chasing and shifted his views. In a world where things are getting tense, real issues are bubbling to the surface, Jordan realized he wanted the show to focus less on social media growth, or popularity and more on political issues.
So, Growth Mindset University evolved into The Jordan Paris Show. This lasted for a while, but really it led to him deciding to focus solely on his companies and entrepreneurship for now. His podcast production company, started in 2019 is called Trend Up Media. And he also has a business in real estate investing called Estateomatic. No doubt there will be more companies to be built in the future as well.
FOLLOW Jordan Paris
Linkedin – Jordan Paris
Instagram – @TheJordanParis
Website – JordanParis.com