My name is Calum Johnson.
Host of The Calum Johnson Show and owner of Calum Johnson Inc.
We help entrepreneurs build, manage and grow a podcast that tells their story and brings them business.
Born and raised in London, England and now living in New York City. Since my teenage years, my ambition has been to be an entrepreneur and own a business but I had no idea what it would be. People would ask and I had no answer.
Things continued like that through university and the first few years of my career. I started out working in Strategy Consulting at a Brand & Marketing Consultancy. I was learning a ton, working with big clients, earning a good salary especially for a 22 year old. Things should have been good but they weren’t. I was uninspired and it was starting to get to me.
The moment of change came by chance. I was listening to Tim Ferriss interview Naval Ravikant. Naval shared a lot of gems in that episode but one thing he said stood out:
“The goal is to do work that feels like play to you but works to others”.
It was so simple but that one line set a bunch of things in motion. 4 weeks later, I left my consulting job to work at an early stage startup. I needed to get closer to running something, the childhood dream. I needed more responsibility, autonomy.
It didn’t end there though, I was experimenting, constantly trying things all in an effort to answer that question, “what felt like play to me but work to others?”.
It took years to find the answer but I got there. I had decided to experiment with starting a podcast, 10 episodes lets see how it goes. How difficult can it be?
After my 4th recording, I knew I had found my thing. How? It just gave me so much energy, I would do it for free, it was so enjoyable to me. As I went deeper and deeper with the podcast, it became clear that I needed to put all of my energy into this. Another thing became clear through the podcast.
Since I was a kid I always loved media. I would religiously watch interviews with my favorite athletes and entrepreneurs, I would watch vlogs all day from my favorite YouTubers, I would listen to podcasts on the way to school, and watch documentaries after school.
I loved hearing people’s stories. And more than anything I wanted to hear the stories of the people that bet on themselves. Left their job to start their dream company, moved to a new country and just made it work, spent years training, honing their craft so they could capitalize on that one opportunity. Those are the stories I wanted to hear. The stories that make you feel alive.
Now I work full time on my own ventures. I dedicate myself to telling the story of the person who bet on themselves and won. We tell those stories on my podcast, The Calum Johnson Show. We built a podcast production agency to help entrepreneurs tell their own hero story in an authentic and impactful way, The Calum Johnson Agency.
In the last few years, I have evolved, my environment has evolved and my ambitions have now evolved. I hope to look up in the next few years and see that we have shared incredible stories, entertained many and inspired a lot of people to bet on themselves.