In this episode Ross and Josh speak to professional speaking human Merlin Mann about overcoming or, perhaps, embracing self-doubt, to become better producers of quality work.

Josh and I work pretty methodically. Along with our sometime co-host Jerome Lebel-Jones, we have recorded 20 episodes of The Nudge podcast. Nominally, it’s a show about being better designers –– our idea was to make a podcast for designers that mostly featured people who weren’t designers for their day job –– but really it’s about continuing to grow and learn throughout your life.

We’ve had a rule that we would only interview people face-to-face. Partially, that’s a hold-out from the way I was taught to interview people, and partially it was because to create something interesting it helps to have constraints, even if they’re made of smoke.

For episode 20, we broke our rule. Merlin Mann was nice enough to speak to us over Skype about self-doubt, premature praise, and how hard it is to do an Australian accent. If you have 37 minutes to spare then this is the episode of The Nudge for you.

Episode 20: Self Doubt with Merlin Mann