This next expensive lesson I learned is one that some of you can relate. If you've been doing training in the real world or face to face with people, if you've totally started off in the online world, you might not be able to relate to this. Here's the big problem I had. I had a successful model. I've been a successful media trainer, and I've trained presidents of countries and prime ministers and Nobel Peace Prize winners all over the world. So I've gotten, you know, a high opinion of myself.
So I tried to recreate what worked for me in the real world in the online world. And I tried, I tried, I tried and I pushed and I pushed. And finally I've kind of concluded that I'm basically trying to put a square peg in a round hole. It's just not working. I have not been respecting the online medium. In my real world training practice, everything I do is about quitting.
By getting people to practice their speeches, I record it, play it back, critique it, or we do sample interviews, I record it, play it back, critique it. And we do it again and again and again. And typically, anyone I'm working with gets on camera a dozen times in a day and they leave, loving the training, loving me having really mastered new skills, and they're now great as public speakers and media communicators. So I have spent so much time over the last 20 years trying to recreate that experience. And I finally realized it's just not going to work. That's not the sort of environment people are in if they are trying to learn online.
Typically, they're multitasking. People are on the subway on a train on a plane. Maybe they're watching TV with their family and trying to multitask. So they're simply not going to do what I asked them to do. I asked people Stop the course right now. Pull out your cell phone.
Record yourself giving a speech or doing a sample media interview, upload it to YouTube, and I'll critique it. It's all part of the course you're paying for it. There's no extra charge. I begged and begged and begged and begged for years. And far less than point oh, 1% of my students do it. Now, is it their fault?
No, it's not their fault. It's my fault. For not respecting the media. This is a different medium, there's strengths and weaknesses to everything. Movies can be better than books. But books can be better than movies, books, you can put a lot more detail in it.
A lot more complexity than a movie because movies are only going to be about 50 pages of a book. If you look at the the screenplay, so every medium has strengths and weaknesses. The big mistake I've made is trying to force one medium on the students in another medium. And I still have not really figured out the solution to this because my frustration is people have been extremely happy with my in person trainings, and actually improved a great deal with a lot of my online courses on public speaking and media training. For the most part, they get high ratings, but if they didn't do any videos, if they just sat back and watched me, typically they're not getting nearly as much value. So the real challenge I have to any of you out there is realize what works in one situation what works in a real world face to face training situation simply will not work in an online training you can try.
But at some point, you got to listen to people, and I was slow to do that I was arrogant and I was slow to listen and I would just do Bad people more. Yeah, why haven't you uploaded the videos and I put another videos and telling you you got to put your video. No one did. At some point, you have to respect the marketplace and the marketplace of online students does not want to have to record themselves and upload videos. And I have to acknowledge that once I acknowledge that I can then structure my courses differently. And it's some level it's it's a more passive environment.
Because when I'm doing a training, and some of you in certain fields are like this, too, if you're teaching piano or banjo, it's physical, you're there. But when I'm in a training in the real world, I don't have to worry about someone also multitasking and being on their phone. They're frankly petrified because they see me come at them with a bright light in the camera. So it's frankly much easier for me to train in the real world because I have so much power over the trainer. For the trainee, this student who's online, they've got all the power, they can hit pause, they can fast forward, they can ignore any request to do homework. So at some level, I've got to make this experience valuable to them, even if they want to just passively sit back and watch videos and occasionally read something.
So it's a different environment. I was slow to realize that whatever you do, it's fine to bring core content books from other things you've done other successes in life, but you've got to look at everything as far as how is it really being used by your online students?