When you were young, or at least younger, did you ever aspire to be at TV talkshow host, a best-selling author, motivational speaker, a political pundit, or a celebrity giving interviews on the red carpet? The only problem was, where do you apply for these jobs? Especially if you’re 18 or 22 or just out of school? Most people, at least in the past, just gave up on these goals once they entered the so-called real world, their work world.
But we live in a new world. I am very envious of those who are just being born now, or have been born in the last couple of decades. Because the rules are different. In the past if you wanted any of those cool jobs in the spotlight speaking out, you had to either know someone, graduate from certain schools, have a certain look, or just win a lottery ticket of sorts. You had to get the stamp of approval from gatekeepers.
Today is a bad time to be a gatekeeper. The gates keep crashing down, not just in the world of politics, but in media, publishing, and an every sphere of public and cultural life. This is not always a good thing, but it’s a great thing for people who want new careers that are fun, exciting, and stimulating.
If you aspire to a career as a public speaker, motivational speaker, TV host, talk show host, a pundit, or a celebrity, it’s never been easier to succeed, but, and here’s the catch, fail much, much faster.
What do I mean by that? In the past, you either failed a lot and got really lucky break. Or you just had to give up. My own career is somewhat of an anomaly. For 35 years I have basically failed miserably in my media career. I have had dozens of TV shows, local radio shows, and syndicated talk radio shows fail miserably, and go bust. I’ve had DVDs launch that went nowhere, I’ve had books published that were not profitable. I have launched podcasts that failed to reach audiences. I’ve been on seven different radio networks and almost all of them went out of business. I have launched online media-based courses that went nowhere for a decade and a half. And don’t even get me started on how many failed website ventures I’ve started.
But don’t feel too sorry for me, I did create a successful media and public speaking training business that’s been profitable for the last two decades and has given me a nice living. But when it comes to creating pure media businesses, and being a media success, and really reaching out to a wider audience, it didn’t really happen to me until the last year or so. In the last year I’ve reached very large audiences and in a very profitable way with my online courses. I now have more than half a million student enrollments all over the globe across 100 platforms, and have many best-selling courses. My reach and my audience are vastly larger than its ever been throughout my career.
Here’s what I find so fascinating. What took me 35 years to do I believe can now be done in 35 months for many people, especially young, ambitious, hungry people. I believe the reason I was successful, is I just kept on trying new forums, new formats, new media, I always kept trying when most people give up. I’m ashamed to say, and I say this with absolutely no pride, it took me 35 years to have a highly profitable successful media venture that makes significant revenues and reaches large groups of people.
But it doesn’t have to be that way for you. Why? Because you can now experiment, trying new formats, try new mediums, and fail much faster than before. When I launched a syndicated TV show in the 1980s, it took me two years to figure out this was going to be a failure and I’m going to lose six figures. These days you can launch a new YouTube channel and figure out in a month or so if there an audience year. 20 years ago I launched a nationally syndicated talk radio show. It took a year out of my life.
20 years ago I launched a nationally syndicated talk radio show. He took year out of my life growing audience getting on more and more stations trying to get advertisers before I realized this just wasn’t going to work. Nowadays you can launch a podcast and spend drastically lesst time that a daily talk radio show, and figure out some time to just a few months whether this thing is going to work.
For people who aspire to publish and educate the world on variety of issues, as I always have and continue to, the old way was spend two years researching a book, spend your writing it, spend a year trying to find a publisher, then if you didn’t fail at any one of those, spent a year trying to sell it going on talk shows. Even if you get to the finish line, chances are you didn’t make any money. That’s all changed now when it comes to publishing not only books on Amazon Kindle but publishing courses.
I happen to have found my successful niche in creating video based online courses. Now that I have hundreds of courses, most of which you failed, I’ve stumbled upon a successful formula that allows me to create best sellers, relatively easily, inexpensively, and successfully.
You may have no interest in creating video-based online courses. That’s fine. But if you have a desire to create, whether it is a talk show TV show radio show, Kindle book, motivational speech, anything, you can create it faster than ever. And you can fail much faster than ever.
You may ask “TJ why is that a good thing? Who wants to fail?” Because to paraphrase Thomas Edison, you can find 1000 ways to not do something correctly which will lead you to what does work.
I believe that’s happened to me in my career I simply ran out of things that didn’t work. So I finally, through the process of elimination, found a speaking medium that really worked for me, and helped me find an audience and a success. That’s what I hope for you, regardless of your age. Because we can complain all day long about living in a youth and beauty worshiping culture, but now the gate keepers have less power. If you have important messages to share with people, you can reach out to them directly, you can speak out. And that’s what I enjoy helping people do. Even though I haven’t been the most successful talk show host, news anchor or motivational speaker, I do believe I have the tools to help others become great communicators in their own niches. So that’s why I create online courses on really every aspect of communicating, and plan on doing that, I hope, for another 50 years. That’s the other good thing about new gate keepers, they can’t tell you it’s time to retire.
If you want to check out some of my online media training and presentation skills training courses, please check them out here.