I started the Motorcycle Mentor Podcast several years after I started riding—back when fewer folks did them. It was a top-rated podcast about motorcycles on iTunes for a long time.

It might have had something to do with me having better-than-average equipment and me caring enough to record each episode in the comfort of my closet (for acoustical reasons)—while my wife was at work and my barking dogs were neatly tucked away in another part of the house.

A Real Struggle

I’m not going to lie. I never thought I was very good at it. I felt like I needed to write a script so I would say something coherent, but if I wrote too many words, it sounded like I was reading it. So, I transitioned to bullets.

I’ve always battled with the temptation for perfectionism.

I hope to goodness my wife never finds out how much money I spent on podcasting equipment over the years.

As you can tell from the dates of each episode, I did them in bursts. With each remake, I was always determined to create a new episode every week—but that proved too much. I even hired a producer toward the end.

While that certainly helped, I still had to write them, record them, and edit out my mistakes—and trust me, I always had a lot of errors.

Mistakes Made

Looking back, I probably worked harder on them than I needed to. But I wanted each episode to be just as long as it needed to be and not a second longer. Podcasts where the host turns on the microphone and babbles for an hour or two are insulting to listeners.

The simple truth is that podcasting just wasn’t in my wheelhouse.

I stopped making new episodes around the time I published my first book. I did a few more to announce other books and events, but never on a consistent basis.

I’ve thought about deleting the podcasts altogether. But new listeners reach out every once in a while and tell me they learned something from them. So, I’ll keep them live for now. If nothing else, I think listeners can get a sense of my passion for the topics I talk about—especially in the later episodes.

You can listen to all the podcast episodes on iTunes.