Podcaster Anna Corinne on how to be the creative director of your own career

For this week’s MVP, we’re chatting with Anna Corinne.

NYC-based podcast host Anna Corinne is wooing fans and followers with her uplifting inspirational video podcasts, like “Become the Creative Director of Your Career” and “Become Your Own Muse.”

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The typical message for professionals is “do more” and “be better” to soar to (conventional) success. But Corinne’s refreshing angle to 185K subscribers of her podcast Wild Geese—an ode to Mary Oliver’s poem that begins “You do not have to be good” and which lives magnetted to this writer’s fridge—involves radical acceptance, ditching your former self’s and other people’s success markers (um, titles and money). Instead, she wants us to replace that endless quest for betterment with embracing being “bad” at things.

Yes, please, more of this.

For anyone who’s had enough prescriptive advice on how to do better, Corrine has another take: how to do what you love and love what you’re doing right now.

I’m always interested in people who plan and study to go one way, and then totally pivot. Tell me about your career path?

I’m from Texas but came to New York for school; I went to NYU for a drama degree. I love acting, but it became clear pretty quickly that acting as a career was not going to give me the life that I wanted.

I graduated during COVID, and there was a lot of introspection. The industry paused completely, so it gave me a lot of time to wonder about what I really wanted. I had friends that were so eager to get back into it, while I was kind of enjoying not having to worry about auditions and getting out there again. I didn’t really want it like other people did—so that’s got to tell you something.

It’s good that you listened, though. Lots of people might not.

I can understand why: While I was in acting school, I always thought, “I’m an actor. I am supposed to be an actor. I’m going to be an actor.” It almost didn’t occur to me that I didn’t love it and there were other things I loved more.

All through college, whenever I wasn’t studying, I’d be listening to podcasts—just for fun, I said. I never even let myself imagine that podcasting would be a career path for me, and that I was listening to so many of them, I was giving myself an education in podcasts.

Even after I gave up acting, I worked a couple of years in corporate project management working on … podcasts. It took me even longer to say, “No, I actually want to be the podcast host.” It sometimes takes a while to connect the dots.

What happened or changed that let you finally step up?

I spent a few years watching other people do it, and I finally figured out that podcasting is not the huge, mystical thing it was in my head. I had it hyped up to be something I couldn’t do. It was meant for other people who were much more well-spoken and established and all of that stuff.

But being able to see the backend, I’d see people stumbling over their words and making mistakes. I realized that it’s totally normal and very common, and it’s just edited out. Podcasting isn’t about showcasing your perfection or expertise, it’s about being curious about the world.

Lots of your content is about how it’s fine and good not to be awesome at whatever you’re doing. How can we push back against perfectionism?

Know that you don’t have to be amazing when you start something. You definitely will not be. Even people who are great at it weren’t great when they started. I always encourage people who want to be a podcast host, or anything else really, to go back to the beginning.

Something that’s really cool about the internet now is that you look back at an archive of content to see and hear the first things that people posted. You’ll see they did not start at the level that you found them. The early stuff can feel embarrassing, but creating things means being willing to be embarrassed in public. It doesn’t always feel great, but that’s how you learn and that’s how you get better.

Your first post was in April 2024. How do you feel when you revisit?

Honestly, I just feel proud of her (me). Obviously, there are things, when I listen back, that were not well done. There was a point where I was really struggling with the audio and the mic sounds terrible—but whatever. I’m still really proud for starting and keeping going even when it was bad. That girl decided that her podcast was worth making even if nobody listened. I validated this project for myself before anyone else did.

Is that, as you say, being the creative director of your career?

For me, becoming the creative director of my career happened because I needed a different path. It became a necessity. Not because I dreamt of being an entrepreneur, which I never saw myself as. I always felt like I needed someone to guide me in some way. I needed a boss to tell me what to do, with very clear instructions.

There’s nothing wrong with that, by the way, and I think we need moments sometimes when we follow someone else’s lead or do things in the background for other people. But there are also times when it’s necessary to build up the courage to step out and away from that and towards your actual values.

You have to ask yourself and really root into how you feel, what you need and how you can give yourself that.