I read Willpower by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney recently. Great book. I wrote to Roy Baumeister right after asking him for an interview for the Real Leaders Project earlier this week. He happened to be traveling to Adelaide himself with a 5 hour stop over in Sydney. He didn’t have a phone that worked here so we vaguely arranged to meet for an interview at a coffee shop at the domestic terminal this morning.
And, wonders of wonders, we did manage to find each other. We went on to have a 20 minute conversation in a very noisy cafeteria. It was a ton of fun and I’m already looking forward to releasing the interview in a few weeks.
It wasn’t perfect. The Real Leaders Project has never been perfect. We’ve never done a high quality HD video interview in noiseless surroundings. We’ve been lucky to meet with some really inspirational folk – most online, some in person. We’ve had some prior contact with a few of them so that’s helped our rejection rate rise to a respectable 50%. It’s been scrappy, failure ridden, desperate at times, but we’ve motored along somehow. We’ve been working as a team for a year now – it’s only now we’re getting to a website (do check out the beta version and give us feedback. It’s 50% done).
But, we’re glad we’ve done something. Granted – it’s not resulted in a hundred thousand views per video. We don’t have a gazillion subscribers on our YouTube channel. Most of those who watch are from the small community on this blog. So, why do this?
Because you can sit down and wait for the conditions to become perfect. Or you can go out and make the best of what you have. You just have to be prepared to tell yourself “this might not work” and keep plugging away. What you do may come to something some day. There’s a big chance it might not. It might go on to make a massive difference to world. Then again, it might not.
The funny thing is that we often set out looking to change something by investing time, sweat and effort but what we change most is ourselves.
And, besides, this whole interview experience with Roy Baumeister – not perfect.. but what a great story!
A Learning a Day 