My wife had been thinking of running a marathon for a long time but due to work, baby and other commitments she could not get herself in a position to participate in one. She thought of running the Silicon Valley marathon but then she could not prepare herself and did not register.
All along I had been telling her, she should just register and make an attempt, after all its the mindset that matters.
Just a day before the marathon (i,e on Saturday 24th, 2009) I drove her to San Jose Hilton where the last minute registrations for the race were taking place. While she was filling up the form.. its dawned upon me. If I can convince her to run..why can’t I run myself?
Right there and then I registered. Got the chip and the bib.
There after it was all chaos, I had no idea on how to pull such a huge undertaking(or it sounded like one at that time). I made a few calls to my sister and brother-in-law both of whom have run marathons in the past successfully.
No one in my family has ever run a marathon until my sister attempted it first last year. To this day she has already run a couple of half marathons. In fact she ran the Silicon Valley full marathon( 26 miles) last year. My brother in law is a tremendous athlete who has many athletic accomplishments to his credit. He is an encyclopedia on health & fitness. So both of them were a tremendous inspiration.
At about 11:30PM I sent out an email to all the readers of this blog asking them for some last minutes tips. I received many well wishes from people far away from Thailand, Indonesia & Nepal. Some of the tips I received were amazing, I have summarized those tips below this post, just in case you decide to run a marathon yourself.
Information Marketing: The 5 Questions I Inevitably Ask Everyone Of My Guests
This past weekend I was attending Jerry D Clark’s Rhino Millionaire Intensive in Dallas…
One of the attendees asked Jerry for a list of interview questions, that he can use to conduct his interviews.
Over the years I have done several teleseminars and interviewed many successful people on my blog. Over these many years I have made one observation consistenlty i,e The quality of the interview is not dependent on the type of questions you ask but the amount of prep work you put in going into the interview. Also the chemistry you develop with your guest in the first 5 minutes of the interview does control the overall outcome.
What happens if you have not done your prep-work and you absolutely don’t know this guest that well at all, but have to perform the interview becuase of some other obligations. This specific scenario happend to me recently when I had to do a series of promotional interviews with 12 speakers for my Internet Income Summit. Most of the speakers were known to me, but a couple of them were completely new and I never heard or spoke to them before. These speakers were recommended to me by my trusted friends and mentors.
If you ever encounter a situation like this or you have to interview someone but don’t have a set questions ready.. use my five-question formula.
Question #1: Friends my name is Srini Saripalli and I welcome you all to an exciting interview with . You are all in for a treat. welcome to the call, thanks for taking time to speak to us. we have many people on the call, some know you some don’t. Would you mind giving a breif introduction about who you are what you do.
You have to change a few things in that question, but overall you can see the question is tactfully framed, all becuase you don’t know much about what this person does and what his or her credentials are.
Question #2: What is your biggest mistake. Something you wish you would have not made?
This is an open question that fits everyone, every successful person has made mistakes.
Question #3: God Forbid, if you have to startover again for some reason, where would you start. What are the set of actions you will undertake
This is a trick question that resets the interview, take the guest into an emotional zone. Its a very powerful question that can directly impact the outcome of the interview regardless of how bad or good the interview has gone thus far.
Question #4: We are already into the call. Do you mind if we unmute the line and take some live questions
If your guest has done a good job till this time. You will have atlest a couple of quality questions come from people. In my experinence for every 50 people on the teleconference line only 5 will speak up. Most people on the calls are either shy or are multitasking.
Question #4: Is there any quesiton that you think I should have asked you, but I missed out.
A great way of telling your audiance that your guest is the hero for now, not you.
Question #6: Any final closing comments before we close out for tonight.
Again a powerful question giving one more chance for the guest to emphasize on the close.
I hope you found this post informational. Any questions or comments please don’t hesitate to share.
Internet Income Summit: Video Snippets
Last few days had been hectic, spending late nights with my video team to finish the editing of Internet Income Summit footage. I can tell you the content on this footage is simply amazing. Great speakers, great concepts. I was running around and conducting the seminar and I hardly sat through other presentations. Thank god I could catch up with all this great content.
By the time I got on to the stage I was completely exhausted from the preparations for the summit. If you see my entire presentation you will see how tired I was towards the end. Despite all this I think I delivered…:)-
I had so much to share that I went well over 2hrs with my presentation. Towards the end Cassie had to stop me, hardly did I know it was 1:20PM and I was holding the audience from their lunch.
One big thing I learned from this whole experience was to respect the clock, stick to a schedule and be sensitive towards people’s needs. If you were there on Sunday you know we started on time.. See I’m learning.
We are just preparing to release the DVD’s of the event and you will get a chance to order the pre-publication copy shortly.