Part I - Context & Mission

The best way to summarize this debrief is by using a quote from the #1 book on the list of 📚 that have unlocked my mind

God has prepared a path for everyone to follow. You just have to read the omens that he left for you.

Week 1 Day 1, the first episode of the Walk The Talk Teacher podcast, is now available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. I released it on Monday, 09/19/2022. 4 days later I got an email telling me that my podcast had already started topping charts in multiple countries around the world, and, 8 days later, it has been played more than 250 times by people all over the world including 🇷🇼 🇺🇸 🇨🇦 🇬🇧 🇩🇪 🇫🇷

This debrief is made up of 5 parts. This post is part 1/5. In it, I will take you behind the scenes to give you more context behind the episode and share my mission for producing the episode.

In subsequent posts I:

• Explore the hypothesis I had & how I tested it - Part 2
• Share the tools & techniques I used - Part 3
• Analyze how I executed my plan - Part 4
• Reflect on the lessons I learned in the process of producing & distributing this episode - Part 5

Context

The previous Friday, 09/16/2022, I had graduated 41 students I had been teaching web development for 4 weeks. The class I was teaching them is one of the classes in Amazon's Software Development Engineering Apprenticeship program open to US military vets and vets' spouses.

Long story short, the way this class ended and everything that happened in this class woke me up to something I had been aware of but never took any action towards.

In true teacher fashion, on graduation day, I encouraged my students to take stock of what I had taught them and continue learning by sharing their progress often.

Little did I know that after the class was over, I would look at myself in the mirror and realize how much of a hypocrite I had been. Here I was, with some unbelievable & moving life experiences but had never followed through with my own advice of continually learning by sharing my progress often. That is the reason I chose the name "Walk The Talk Teacher", to remind myself to practice what I teach. In the Week 1 Day 1 episode, I also share why I named it "Week 1 Day 1".

Mission

In previous projects, most of the time, I overanalyzed things and told myself that I needed to have everything figured out, which resulted in me spiraling into inaction.

With the Walk The Talk Teacher project, I vowed to do it differently this time around. I promised myself to heed my own advice, that starting is the most crucial action there is. I vowed to start, even though I had never ventured into podcasting before nor had I really immersed myself in a creative project by myself. I promised myself that I was going to just start and see what happens.

As such, my mission for Week 1 Day 1 was to just get something out as fast and cheap as I possibly could and let the numbers be the ones to tell me if people were or were not interested in my story.

Next, let's explore the hypothesis I had before I recorded and released the episode & how I tested it in Part 2.