127 Interviews. 64 Subscribers.
The Interview
I went on a podcast yesterday. Consulting Rainmakers, hosted by a young man named Mikulas Zach. I did my homework first and watched a handful of his episodes to get a feel for it. Business owners, consultants, authors. Why 75% of ERP projects fail. Why a $200 million company stops growing. What a CEO gets wrong with AI. Serious people on serious subjects, and a host who knew the material and asked the next question instead of the obvious one.
So I showed up expecting a seasoned interviewer.
We spent a few minutes getting acquainted before the recording started. He mentioned he was a full-time student in Prague. That was the first surprise. Then I asked him why he started the podcast.
To improve his English.
Who does that? Most people who want to get better at a language take a class, download an app, or watch movies with the subtitles off. He decided the fastest way to get fluent was to put himself on camera, in his second language, interviewing professionals two and three times his age, and publish every one of them.
Then he mentioned I was his sixth interview of the day.
Then I found out he's 20.
The Scoreboard
Here are the numbers, because the numbers are what turn this from a nice story into a real one.
127 full-length interviews. 569 clips cut from them. 696 videos on the channel. Twenty-two thousand views across all of it, which works out to about 32 per video.
64 subscribers on YouTube. 439 followers on LinkedIn.
Read those again. That is the scoreboard after 696 videos. Most people would have quit at fifty. Plenty would have quit at ten, and by any math I know, not one of them would have been wrong.
Now look at what sits behind each of those 127. He has to find the person. Then he has to reach out, cold, as a 20-year-old student, and ask an author or a firm owner to give him an hour. Plenty never answer. The ones who say yes, he has to research, prep for, record, edit, clip, and publish. Six of them in one day, the day I was on. All of it in a second language.
And then he checks the numbers, and the numbers say 64.
That's what paying your dues looks like. Not a line on a poster. Going the extra mile when nobody's watching, nobody's keeping score, and the scoreboard itself is telling you to stop. It's rare at any age. I've spent a career watching for the people who have it — the ones who took the shift nobody wanted, who stayed after the last truck left, who did the work before anybody thought to ask. He's one of those. He just happens to be 20.
Paying Your Dues on the Floor
Here's why I'm telling an operator audience about a podcast host in Prague.
It's October. If you run a building, you have a class of new hires on the floor right now. Most of them young, most of them seasonal, and you have about two weeks to figure out which ones you want past December. You won't find that on a résumé, and you won't find it in the interview. You find it in the moments when nobody's watching.
Who sweeps the dock at the end of the shift without being told. Who asks what's next when the line goes quiet instead of waiting to be told. Who shows up on day six after a brutal day five. That is the same thing Mikulas is doing with a camera and 64 subscribers. Going the extra mile when the scoreboard says there's no point. It was never a generational trait. It's an individual one, and the floor is where it shows.
But there's a second half to this, and it's on us. Mikulas keeps going with nobody noticing. Most people aren't built that way, and that's not a flaw in them. Dues paid into a void don't get paid twice. If you want the extra mile from your crew, somebody has to be standing there when it happens. The supervisor who sees it and says so, by name, that day, is the difference between a seasonal hire who becomes a lead and one who becomes a December exit.
The ones who have it are already on your floor. The question is whether anyone's looking.
How It Pays Off
I'll add a link to the episode here when it goes live. Until then, the channel is Consulting Rainmakers, and it has 64 subscribers. If you run a firm and have a story about the early days, he'd be a good 45 minutes of your time.
Here's the part the scoreboard can't see. He has now sat across from 127 senior people and asked each of them how they got where they are. He's learned a little something from every one of them. Nobody gets that from a class or an app, and no 20-year-old gets handed it. He earned it one cold email at a time.
And those 127 people know his name. Somewhere on that list is somebody who, a year or five from now, has a seat to fill, remembers the kid who did the work when nobody was watching, and makes a call. That's how it actually pays off. Not in subscribers. In one person who remembers. The dues always get paid back — just never by the scoreboard.
Be the one who's looking.
Comments