These episodes are my personal exploration into podcasting and the practice of medicine using my chosen specialty of urology as the pivot point.  Most of the episodes that I write and record begin with a single idea, thought, topic, or quote. This episode is no exception, and begins with a book I read recently about James J Hill, one of the most successful railroad magnates of the gilded age in the late 19th century. I recently read a book called James J. Hill: Empire Builder of the Northwest by Michael P. Malone and I read it as part of a book club assignment that, along with Wikipedia and other online resources, is the inspiration nad source material for this episode.  James J Hill was an extremely wealthy man at the time of his death. At the end of his life, Hill was asked by a newspaper reporter to reveal the secret of his success.  Hill responded : "Work, hard work, intelligent work, and then more work.” James J Hill worked. And worked. And worked. He once is to have said, “Give me Swedes, snuff and whiskey, and I'll build a railroad through hell.” Work, hard work, intelligent work, and more work. Such was the life of James J Hill. What fascinates me, what I would love to pick James J Hill’s brain about, is this idea of intelligent work.  What did he mean when he said that? What for James J Hill would constitute intelligent work.  What I am thinking about today in this short episode is the addition of more intelligent work along with work, hard and more work as the key to success as I move forward in my career.  What is that? What does it look like? How do I get it? 

Bladder Cancers begin on the inner surface of the bladder, in the lining cells called the transitional cells. Bladder cancer is most often a transitional cell carcinoma.  Bladder cancers most often grow as a polyp on the surface of the bladder or as a flat tumor called a “sessile” tumor. Bladder cancers can invade the deeper layers of the bladder and they becomes much more likely to spread if they become invasive. Bladder cancers can also grow along the surface of the bladder into something called carcinoma in situ. Bladder cancers can be low grade (slower growing) or high grade (faster growing and more aggressive).  Cigarette smoking is the number one risk factor for forming bladder cancer and blood in the urine is the most common sign or symptom. Tumors that form along the surface of the bladder can be lopped off under anesthesia using a transurethral (through the urethra) resection technique. For many patients this is the only treatment they will need. Patients with invasive tumors or carcinoma in situ need more aggressive treatment.  Bladder cancer is a disease with a high recurrence rate. Even small low grade tumors resected completely have a high risk of recurrent tumors in a relatively short period of time either in the area of resection or in any part of the urinary system where we find transitional cells, most often the bladder but also the renal pelvis draining the kidney, the ureters that transport urine down to the bladder and the urethra. Even the slow growing bladder cancer grow quickly enough that if not caught early enough they will cause complications such as bleeding and pain, or, worse, they can convert to high grade tumors that become invasive. Bladder cancers take constant surveillance to make sure the cancer has not come back.

This is the last in this five part series about content creation. in this episode we will talk about keeping a scheduling. We need to be consistent.  Consistency creates loyalty from the audience, but it has intrinsic benefit to the creator as well. When we think about creation we need to think in terms of a defined length of time, usually daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, biannually, yearly. And we can even extend those numbers  What should we do every Day, week, month, quarter, biannually or twice a year, yearly, bienially (every two years), quinquenially (every five years) decennially (every ten years) and quadracentenially (every 25 years)? When we create content for the medical practice I believe we should have a long view.  The practice of a physician and a medical practice doesn’t allow for the time necessary for regular tweets and facebook and instagram posts of any meaningful content in my opinion.  Our daily responsibilities take up most of our time. Seeing and operating on patients. checking lab and X-ray results, calling concerned families and taking calls from the Emergency Rooms. Content creation is something important, but it’s not urgent, and often gets pushed to the side and not done. Your schedule will be determined by the type of content you are creating. Some content will take more time. A piece of written content will take you far less time than audio or video content. But audio and video content is all the rage, so choose your efforts wisely and plan acordingly.

We are in the midst of a five part series talking about content creation for physicians and medical practices as a way to do content marketing for the practice.   This episode is dedicated to my fourth principle for content creation: do one thing well.   In the previous few episodes we have explored 1. share information and solve problems, 2. telling a story, 3. reimagine one form of content into a different form. This fourth principle, do one thing well and the next principle, keep a schedule, are the get down to business, get to work principles that require a bit of discipline. As a bit of review, content marketing is putting stuff online that provides immediate value to a potential patient even if they never pick up the phone to seek your services.  Content marketing shows expertise in a field. Content marketing builds trust. Content marketing helps people.  Doctors and professionals of all sorts put themselves online in the practice website, video platforms such as youtube or Vimeo, social media services, advertisements, and even encourage our patient to post reviews on online review sites. We are trying to tell the world who we are, what we do, and why people should choose us for their medical care. All physicians should consider themselves content creators. As physician content creators we want to share info or solve a problems using our expertise in our chosen field of medicine. We need to think of ourselves as storytellers when we create content to make us not boring. And because we serve many different people with many different needs we think to re-imagine our content for different audiences, a blog post for one or a youtube video for another. In the previous three episodes I have tried to expand the way that a physician sees him or herself as a content creator. You can do it; You should do it. Your phone in your pocket has everything you need to get started. But you can’t be every thing to every body everywhere all of the time. The secret to any content creation, or any creative endeavor is that it is hard work and it takes a lot of time and effort to be any good.  Which really brings me to my fourth idea, to put a stake in the ground and try to do one thing well. For most of you and I think for most practices a simple organizational change, and my suggestion, will be to regularly review and update a practice website, the starting place for your content creation. There is always a bit of proverbial bed-making that needs to be done for the practice website. A phone number needs to be changed, a doctor moves out of state and leaves the practice, the current mask policy for the practice during covid needs updating. But maybe in addition to the regular updating of pictures and phone numbers your practice wants to have a place where you regularly update some information or help to solve problems for patients or people just looking to get some help, for lack of a better term we can call it a practice BLOG, and a few well written paragraphs with each post may be all that is needed to tell the story that can help a few patients.  The choice will be yours to make for your medical practice. The key is to get the one thing done well, or as well as you can, even if it seems like a small thing.  Your content creation may never expand beyond that; it may not need to.  But the one thing done well can serve as the foundation for anything else you want to do.  The call to action for this episode if you are thinking about content creation is to choose this year what is the one thing you are going to focus on to do well and to do the work to get it done.  In the next episode I am going to talk about the fifth principle for content creation, keeping a schedule.    

We are in the midst of a series of episodes that I am doing about content creation for the medical professional/doctors/medical practice. This five part series is based on five foundational principles or ideas for content marketing for the medical practice. Content marketing serves three purposes 1. it shows off your expertise, 2. it builds trust, 3. it helps people.  Our #1 job as physicians is to share information or solve problems for our patients. That is the first principle on my list. The trick in our content creation, and one I am far from mastering, is to avoid being boring, tedious, or dull. Which led me to my concept #2: tell a story. We are all storytellers and we all have stories to tell.  Stories educate,  entertain, inform or inspire. Stories aren’t boring. They draw you in and pull you along. Stories are how we understand the world and how we understand ourselves. We tell our stories in many different ways. This brings me to my number three principle: reimagining our content, rethinking one form of educational or informational material into a different form. When we make content for patient education or information we should immediately turn and ask ourselves what else can this be. I have a handout for say kidney stone prevention. Can I make this an infographic or a short educational video for YouTube or TikTok? The answer I think is yes, of course. And I think we should always be considering HOW to do this.  Our printed educational handouts become videos becomes infographics become movies and maybe even an audio or podcast format. The reason we do this is both to expand our reach and the life of our content but also because the different forms will appeal to different people or patient populations. My call to action or encouragement to you is to think in various forms for content creation. For many or most practice our “content” will be simply our website. Other practices will venture beyond to audio and visual content.  But no matter what we do we have to think about what info we want to share, what problems can we solve, and what stories can we tell.  We have many tools for online content creation. All we have to do is use our imagination to be creative and resourceful and to figure it out. Principle #3: Re-imagine your content. 

I have 5 principles or concepts that I think are important for me to remember as I create “content.”  Those five things are  1 share information or solve a problem 2. tell a story 3. reimagine content 4. do one thing well 5. keep a schedule We are working through these 5 principles each as an individual podcast episode.  In the last episode I said the physician should focus on sharing information and solving problems. This is what we do in our everyday lives. We meet with patients one on one in the clinic or hospital setting and, well, share information and try to solve problems. Whenever we create a website, a podcast, a blog post, video, infographic or whatever we are doing the same thing, and we do it one on one because each view of our content is usually one person looking at that content. Your online content is just an extension of what you do every day as a physician. In this episode we try to tackle my #2, principle, tell a story. We are all story-tellers. And we are the stories we tell. Stories are how you and I, how we all, engage with and understand the world and engage with and understand ourselves and each other. The story we are ultimately telling in our content creation is the humble story of ourselves. Who are we? What do we do? How do we do it? Why? What is our mission, our vision, and our values when it comes to how we practice medicine and treat our patients? What do we offer in terms of services, and sometimes more importantly, what can’t we offer our patients? Your content creation tells your story. Your content creation tells us something about you. Tell us your stories.

This is number two in a series of six podcast episodes I am making about content creation for content marketing for the medical practice or medical practitioner. share info or solve a problem tell a story re-imagine content do one thing well keep a schedule For each of the next five episodes I am going to work down the list and break down each principle or concept as I understand it.  These concepts are not original thoughts of mine, just a short list of five things I thought could help me frame what, why, and how to create online content for “content marketing. Marketing is finding our market, our niche, those people who need our services, and letting them know who we are, what we do, and where to find us. The idea in online content marketing is to put stuff—websites, blogs, videos, podcasts, etc.— out into the digital world that helps your market learn about your expertise and creates a bond and a trust that leads someone to become your patient or customer.  We should see content marketing as a positive. It allows those people who need us to find us. And it helps those who don’t need us or who we can’t service to look elsewhere.   If we are a doctor or a medical practice wanting to dive in to online content creation all we have to do to get started is to ask ourselves, what information do I have that I can share, and what problems can I help solve with whatever content I create? If you are a urologist or a urology practice the answer is actually pretty easy. We are experts in kidney stones, enlarged prostates, bladder/prostate/kidney cancers, recurrent urinary tract infections, incontinence and voiding dysfunction and the list goes on. Pick one of those and start typing or hit record on some electronic device and then pick a platform where you are going to put that out into the world.        

First, a huge thank you to those of you who have contacted me to encourage me as I reboot and rebrand the Why Urology Podcast into Urological. Thank you so much for listening and for your ongoing support. 1. share information or solve a problem, 2. tell a story, 3 re-imagine content, 4. do one thing well, 5. keep a schedule.  These 5 things are the 5 principle ideas or concepts that I wrote for myself as a guide when creating content, whether it’s for education, information, marketing, or general engagement with my patients for my practice. Don’t be boring. People get bored quickly. We all have limited time and attention spans shorter than a Goldfish, and we move on quickly when something is dull.  How to not be boring: 1. You do you, 2. be passionately curious, 3. pursue excellence, 4. share with others. Thank you for listening.

Welcome Back to the Why Urology podcast. I am Dr Todd Brandt.  This is a podcast is my personal experiment and adventure into podcasting and is centered around the field of urology and my very, very small place in it. I started podcasting on a lark in the Fall of 2016 with a simple premise. I was going to tell you why urology is such a great field of medicine and why I chose this as a specialty. I was able to write, record, edit and publish 120 episodes of the why urology podcast before deciding to take a break at the end of 2021 and I closed the show with no real plans to start podcasting again. I have spent little time this past year reflecting or asking myself if I was done as a podcaster, or as a content creator, but as I now look toward next year I begin to question if, and what, I may want to put out into the world. This podcast episode is the obvious answer. Apparently, I have more to say. The ancient Chinese philosopher, Lao Tzu is credited with the following quote, “Muddy water, let stand, will clear.” Here is what has become clear to me as I let the muddy water settle on podcasting during this past year away. I have missed the process of writing, recording, editing, and putting episodes out into the world and I would like to start recording them again. OK, but what comes next? First, I want to let you know that I am going to start recording under a different name. The Why Urology podcast will now become, simply… Urological. If you have been a listener in the past you know that many of the Why Urology episodes were only loosely based on something urologic. Much of the time the only association was that I was a urologist. I feel a name change reflects that I expect this podcast will continue to steer away at times from the middle lane of the urologic highway and on to some tangential side roads. Those roads may be bumpy at times, but I think the scenery may be better. Secondly, I want to apologize ahead of time that I am a bit rusty in podcasting and in all things related in any sort of content creation. It may take some time after I have turned on the microphone and opened the tap to let the old rusty water run out until the clear water begins to flow. This podcast will continue to be a work in progress. I both apologize and make no apologies for that all at the same time. I just feel the need to get going. There is a proverb I learned a long time ago that encourages a bias toward action. A word of caution: It was probably something I read from a fortune cookie or was written on the bathroom stall somewhere so take that for what it’s worth. It’s free advice and you get what you pay for. The proverb is this: The work will show you how to do it. The work will show you how to do it. I always took that to mean that if you just get started on the task at hand it will tell you what it needs. The clarity of what, where, how, and when comes in the doing, not from the idea, or the intention to do or the thinking about the thing. It comes from the action. Our task is to do a podcast. My idea is to just start, and to write, record, edit, publish and repeat, to keep going, until the rust is gone and the water runs clear. I appreciate your joining me on this journey, in listening to this episode and continuing to listen under its new name, “Urological” Urological. A podcast by a urologist, and whatever may be on his mind.  

  I will be ending this podcast in its current format at the end of this calendar year, 2021.  I have not run out of ideas for episodes of this podcast. I have not depleted my energy for doing something creative. I still want and would welcome any-and-all guests for interviews and conversations that center around some aspect of urology and the practice of medicine. I still want your comments and feedback. And I am still so grateful that you are listening to these episodes. My idea to start a podcast began around 6-7 years ago when I, myself, discovered the power of podcasting and podcasts in general were gaining a wider audience. For many years medical practices had been trying to figure out how to use all of the tools of “social media” as a form of marketing but also as a way to engage patients.  Video content was always the focus and still is today. Video is easily the most powerful and versatile tool for marketing and education, but video is expensive and difficult to do well. The audio only format of a podcast is far simpler.  It’s cheaper, easier to edit, and nearly as powerful if used within the right context. So here was the thought. Why not try an audio format only rather than spend so many resources on video content?t. The great physicist Albert Einstein said, “I have no special talents, I am only passionately curious.” That is how I started podcasting, no special talents just a passionate curiosity. I have spent many hours of time and energy, and a little money, writing, recording, editing, and posting these episodes. Making this podcast happen has fed my passionate curiosity over the last five years. And although I am no Einstein, my mind has grown during this process and I hope you have learned a little something as well. The truth is that I find it difficult to pack it all up, put it all away and leave this podcast. I feel that I have more to give. I would like to continue to create in some way, to continue to tell stories. As I said in the previous episode of this podcast, we are all storytellers. And if we are a storytellers we first need to know and understand the story we are telling. Does our story inform, inspire, educate, or entertain?  And how is our story told best? On a page, a stage, or a screen? I have tried to tell a small part of the urology story in this podcast. It has been a silly affection, but it’s been really, really fun and I am sad to leave it. Until the next story-time connect with me at whyurologypodcast.com. Be well.