When you hear the word producer, what comes to mind?

Movies?

Music?

Television?

Podcasts?

For most of my career, that’s pretty much how I thought about it too.

I was a podcast producer.

I knew how to set up a show. Develop concepts. Work with talent. Tell stories. Fix bad audio. Solve problems. Make adjustments when something inevitably went wrong five minutes before recording.

You know.

Producing.

But somewhere along the way, I realized something.

Producing wasn’t just what I did.

It had become the way I thought.

Producers See Differently

Put a producer in a room and we’re constantly calculating.

What do we have?

What do we need?

Who’s good at what?

What isn’t working?

Who should know each other?

What’s missing?

And the question that probably matters most:

How are we going to make this happen?

That’s producing.

And none of those questions require a microphone.

I learned that lesson after years of producing podcasts independently.

What began in my parents’ attic in Detroit eventually became more than 1,500 produced episodes, multiple shows, relationships, opportunities, books, business ventures and eventually corporate multimedia work.

And here’s the interesting part.

Nobody suddenly handed me an entirely new set of skills when I walked into corporate America.

I brought them with me.

Your Skills Don’t Belong to Your Job

That’s where I think a lot of us get stuck.

We attach our abilities to the places where we learned them.

If you learned Photoshop designing flyers for parties, you think you “make flyers.”

No.

You understand visual communication.

If you organize your church’s annual event, you might think you “help with the church program.”

Maybe.

But you also know something about logistics, project management, communication, scheduling and coordinating people.

If you’ve spent five years hosting a podcast, you haven’t simply learned how to talk into a microphone.

You’ve probably developed skills in interviewing, research, communication, storytelling, marketing, relationship-building, technology and audience development.

Those skills travel.

The question is whether you recognize them when they show up somewhere else.

That’s Career Capital

One of the biggest changes in my own career happened when I stopped thinking exclusively about what I had done and started examining what doing those things had taught me how to do.

That’s a completely different conversation.

Your job title describes your position.

Your skills describe your possibilities.

And sometimes your greatest opportunities exist somewhere your current title would never tell you to look.

That’s why I started Think Like a Producer.

Not because I believe everybody should become a podcast producer.

Please don’t.

There are enough podcasts already. 😂

I started it because I believe more people need to understand the value of the skills they’ve accumulated while simply trying to figure life out.

Start With Five Things

The Producer Mindset I’ve developed centers around five actions:

SEE.

Learn to recognize possibilities other people overlook.

CONNECT.

Understand how people, ideas, resources and opportunities can work together.

SOLVE.

Don’t become another person pointing at the problem. Become someone capable of producing a solution.

CREATE.

Ideas aren’t outcomes. Build something.

DELIVER.

Finish.

The world has no shortage of great ideas trapped inside notebooks, Notes apps and conversations that begin with, “Man, somebody should…”

Producers move ideas toward reality.

So Here’s My Question for You

Forget your job title for a minute.

Forget your degree.

Forget what your résumé says.

Think about everything you’ve learned from your career, side hustles, hobbies, relationships, failures, creative projects and all those moments when somebody looked at you and said:

“Can you figure this out?”

What did those experiences teach you how to do?

Because somewhere inside that answer may be an ability you’ve been undervaluing for years.

Your next opportunity may not require you to become somebody completely different.

It may require you to recognize more value in the person you’ve already become.

You may already be a producer.

Now imagine what happens when you start thinking like one.

Think Like a Producer.

Create More Value. Everywhere.