The 2 mind blowing things revealed about all great interviews.
Sometimes judging yourself as if you were someone else helps see things more clearly.
Go to school, study hard, blah blah, now you’re a doctor. But the path for being successful isn’t quite so ‘guaranteed’ for people. Aspiring entrepreneurs look for “Top 3 tips for starting a business,” and stuff like that. But would you want an aspiring surgeon that got all his knowledge by watching the “Top 3 Game Changers for Brain Surgery” and “The 7 things you’re forgetting when you start surgery. Number 3 will surprise you!”
You could accurately judge that surgeon as a fool. Now use that same skill to judge your own actions.
Omar, the host of The Passionate Few, interviews finance / success coaches. He has questions like, “What’s the best advice you have in under 1 minute to someone completely starting out?”
Joe Polish (marketing genius behind the P90x workout program and Dan Kennedy’s protege) and many successful marketers often aim to sell people what they want, and give them what they need.
Omar is giving what people want to hear, and usually the answers to these questions often twist into what people need. This is why Omar, intentionally or not, is one of the better interviewers I’ve watched.
How could an interview that’s all about questions like “top 3 reasons for success in less than 1 minute” turn into a 2 hour plus interview. If you just saw the questions, you’d think the interview would have been 15-30 minutes. But it’s not, because things are more complex than we’d like them to be.
The good news is, everything can actually be broken down into the clickbait style lists, so there’s still value even in hearing these snippets. However, it takes hundreds of these types of interviews to get the slivers of depth that you need to start to progress. If you listen to 100 interviews on a topic that are only 1 hour long, you start hearing the same stuff over and over – you never get beneath the surface.
Finally, what you want to get the result you want often tends to be slanted with the belief that there are “secrets,” which makes you ask the wrong questions. For example, for men wanting to get better at attracting women, they usually start by asking what the secret best pick up lines are. But if you give a creepy guy the best tactic, he won’t succeed.
Note that this is NOT quite the same problem as what Tony Robbins talks about in having the trifecta of having the right State, Story, and Strategy. A creepy guy may seem to have a great state, story, and strategy but when he executes the strategy with the pick up line, the fact that he hasn’t showered in days makes him lose the game already and thinks the pickup line didn’t work and he picked a bad guru.
The dating world would say this guy has an “inner game” issue instead of an “outer game” issue. It’s difficult to know where you’re wrong. It may have been a bad strategy for the pick up line, or it could have been an incomplete strategy. Incomplete strategies are hard to spot. Maybe his strategy only focused on what to say as opposed to the strategy to shower prior to saying anything.
Incomplete strategies are created by trying to figure out things by shortcuts. When your marriage counselor says “You need to work on yourself” the client doesn’t want to hear that because “he’s fine the way he is!” He just wants to hear the strategies to get his wife to stop acting like a lunatic. However, those strategies are likely to not be effective for him.
Here’s the top 2 things to blow your mind about interviews.
#1 – The interview might not be helpful. Stop craving clickbait. Highly complex things are seldom broken down fully into the simple clickbait style headlines we’re attracted to.
#2 – The answers you’re looking for might not even fix your problem. To get the results you want, it’s often not found with discovering silver bullet types of “secrets,” but instead it’s a problem of your state, story, or an incomplete strategy.
