The 5 Ps
The 5 Ps: Practise and Preparation Prevent Poor Performance. For example, if you run a marathon with no training, it probably takes five or six hours. But if you train for months or years, that period will be much shorter – and that’s the same for anything you do. For example, when I do a series of interviews that I know are going to last maybe five minutes each, the preparation that goes into that is months.
For Tomorrowland, I think I’ve done 90 interviews over three weekends. And you can’t have the same questions for everyone – you can’t just quickly go, “Right, this weekend, I’m interviewing this person and this person, and I’ll just ask them these things.” You don’t know who’s necessarily going to turn up out of the blue! There are always surprise guests. Really? Who’s that? What are you doing here?
You have to eat, live and breathe that world if you’re going to succeed. So if you know you’ve got an interview, you should know the subject inside-out. You should have checked all of their social media platforms, you should have followed them and watched their Stories (that’s where a lot of the secret sauce comes from these days). If there’s a magazine article or a news article about them you should read it; if you need to go back to the past and see the start of their journey, you have to absorb that too. Needless to say, it’s not a two-minute job.
