Michael Essany: Success and the Determined Heart
Michael Essany is more than just a dreamer; he's a doer.
At 14, he set out to host his own late-night talk show from his parents' Valparaiso, Indiana living room, and that's just what he did. His first guests were Ed McMahon, Leeza Gibbons, and Timothy Dalton. Other guests have included Tom Green, Kevin Bacon, Gerald Ford, Jewel, Sinbad, Weird Al Yankovic, Ray Romano, Carrot Top, Walter Cronkite, and Michael Dukakis.
Essany's show became a local cable access hit, and The Michael Essany Show now airs nationally on E!
Of course, Essany's successes have not come easily. What follows are excerpts from my talk with Michael Essany.
I read somewhere that you said you make fear and rejection your best friends. You sent out 200 interview requests to begin with, and you got 200 rejections back. A lot of people would've stopped right then and there and said, 'Well, this isn't working.' You just kept going.
I remember I was 14, I had a publicist on the phone, and he just tore into me. 'This is a long shot,' he told me outright. 'My client only does important things and this isn't one of them!' He could not have been any more discouraging to me. I made the choice at that moment: Am I going to accept this or am I going to move on? My response was instead of submitting 200 more [interview] requests, I was going to submit 300 more requests. It took me a year to get these first three shows on tape, but I landed an interview with Ed McMahon. I landed an interview with Leeza Gibbons and Timothy Dalton, and it snowballed.
To have a late night legend on my first show was a tremendous thrill. And I remember when I got that interview I thought about that guy who discouraged me so much and I thought to myself at that moment, 'I just proved him wrong, and I'm going to continue to prove him wrong. And maybe one day in my first Emmy acceptance speech I'm going to mention this guy.'
You are quoted as saying, "I've always said that people can fail in projects but there's no excuse for them to fail in life." What is your idea of success?
Success is satisfaction. It is just that simple. I believe if you set a goal...something that will provide satisfaction to you...and you accomplish that, then you are the most successful person in the world.
I believe the same advice applies to just about anything, and that is to become successful, you've got to be focused, you've got to be determined, you've got to have a strategy. But more than that, you've got to have a clever approach. To just say to a kid, 'Be determined and you'll get there'—I believe that is highly insufficient advice. You've got to find a way to stand out from the crowd.... I combined a novel approach with a determined heart and I succeeded.
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