Sometimes it takes some bad presentation opportunities to make all the other opportunities look easy and comparison. Once I was hosting a late night talk radio show in South Beach, the southern tip of Miami Beach. This was back in the heyday of the South Beach craze would have been around 1993. And my shift was from midnight, Friday night, Saturday morning till 4am. So I had a four hour stretch. It was a political talk radio show and a place where everyone is thinking about partying and dancing and going crazy.
And I had no guests. It was a color based show, so it was me pontificating on the world. taking calls, what could go wrong? So I do the first hour of the show, no calls. I've covered everything in the news today. What's going on in Washington news.
The major news stories what was on the news that night kind of running out of material we go into it and I'm begging for calls nothing's coming our to really kind of scraping the barrel on topics begging for calls no calls our three at some point I start reading chapters from a political book I'd written just dying out there please another commercial please Will someone call we get to our for finally we're halfway through our for the phone lights up. I'm looking at the glass window to the producer. I can see the lights flashing I feel a sigh of relief. And we'll go to the coals now let's go to line one. Jim who's on line one. I look through the glass.
The producer is like this. The producer has fallen asleep. Ah he's fallen asleep. The phone line is still flashing, flashing, flashing color one will be with you in a moment please. And I'm begging begging. The caller gave up wasn't till the next commercial break.
I was able to wake up the producer. And it was a disaster of a show. It was frankly, pathetic. I got through the whole four hour shift. The next host comes in. How's it going?
How's your shift go? You know what? After doing four hours without a single guest, a single call. Now someone asked me to get up, talk for an hour Piece of cake. Someone needs me to do a simple online Video for three or four minutes, unscripted without interviewing someone. Piece of cake.
So in retrospect, it was a great learning tool because it forced me to think, while I speak, to think and speak under pressure to fill up space. And it was a great learning tool. didn't win any awards. As far as broadcasting awards didn't make me a lot of money. I don't think I even got paid for that. If I did, it was something like $5 an hour.
But it did teach me if I have to fill up space. I can. It also takes tremendous pressure off if I'm asked to speak somewhere, and I'm told to half an hour and the last minute, I'm told it's an hour or it's 45 minutes. There's no sweat coming off my brow. It's completely relaxing because it's easy for me to think Think in front of people and speak. And especially if I have a live audience in front of me.
I can ask them questions, they can talk back to me. And it's so much easier than being on that South Beach talk radio show where no one called. And I don't think anyone even listened. Okay, so why do I tell that story again, I want people to realize I'm not some perfect, great, wonderful, articulate, perfect speaking trainer speaker in front of them. I've had failures too, and that you can learn from your failures. Any business person, any political leader, any entrepreneur, who's in this for the long run, who really wants to do a lot with their career, I think is going to have some bad days a bad presentation, some bad speeches, some bad media interviews.
The point is you have to learn from you have to figure out what happened here, will somehow make what I'm doing over here. Better For easier or clear and that's the lesson