On Sunday night, while watching football and eating steak tips at Evan’s place (BTW: I realized what a complete dork I was when I found myself watching the Colts vs. the Broncos only because one player was on our fantasy football team!), I had an idea.
I really like interviewing people. I’m a curious person, and I always like learning new things. I’ve always been a “how does that work?” kind of guy. And I’m really interested in what people do with their time. And since interviews are always interesting and give a different perspective than a simple surface interpretation, I thought: why not interview “regular” people?
And by regular, I’m not saying that, if I interview you, you’re not extraordinary. Instead, I just am referring to people you see every day. People you pass by, but never really get to know. Everyone has a story, and everyone is much more interesting than the one-dimensional role we see them in. At least that’s the theory.
Now, some people that I find interesting have blogs or web sites. So, here’s my idea. I’ll post 10 questions/answers here on TellHimFred.com, and if the interviewee has a site/blog, I’ll have them post the full 20 question interview. That way, they’ll get a little additional traffic, and (if they do have a blog), you’ll be able to see what they’ve written. So, say there’s an interview you find interesting. You read ten questions here, read the full interview on their site, and then you’ll be able to “get to know” the person a little more by reading their site.
Of course, not everyone interesting has a blog. In that case, I’ll make a new page here, where you can read the full interview, and I’ll give the interviewee access, so they can respond to questions.
With all this said, and my latest brainstorm public, I’d like to know who you’d like to see interviewed. For the first one, I’m biting the bullet and practicing what I preach. When discussing the idea with Evan, I asked “Who would you interview?” With an evil grin, he said “You.”
Yeah. So, not to be too much of a hypocrite, I agreed. I mean, if I’m going to convince people to submit to an interview by some random blog guy, I better be able to say “well, I did it.”
So, any thoughts or suggestions are very welcome. Please let me know what you think!
5 responses so far ↓
1 StinkWeasel // Oct 31, 2006 at 9:53 am
Good idea…bring it on.
2 KTina // Oct 31, 2006 at 3:38 pm
So are you going to ask the same questions to each person? Or personalize them? Who’s picking the questions? FUN
3 Barry Freed // Nov 1, 2006 at 9:05 am
They’ll be personalized.
4 Interviews with Regular People (IWRP) « Dev McGuire // Nov 2, 2006 at 4:16 pm
[...] Recently, Nate had come up with brainstorm to Interview Regular People. Most of us never get interviewed, but do have interesting things to say regarding topics such as news, politics, music, interests, etc… [...]
5 StinkWeasel Stories » Interview with a Chimney Sweep // Nov 6, 2006 at 5:35 pm
[...] My friend Nathan had this idea to do ‘Interviews with Regular People‘. You can read his first interview here. He mentions a chimney sweep in his blog entry and I just thought that was the strangest thing because we had our chimney swept just last week and I ‘interviewed’ the chimney sweep. I, too love to here stories about how people ended up where they are. My interview with the chimney sweep went something like this: Q: How did you get into the chimney sweeping business?(I’m going to paraphrase since I didn’t record him) A: I used to be a horse track farm manager in Salem, NH then my wife and I moved to Virginia where we were into fox hunting. We used to hunt on Liz Taylor’s farm. I always wanted to move back to New England but the horse industry was really going down hill. My wife was able to get a job at the hospital. One day I saw an advertisement to “Be your own boss. Become a chimney sweep.” So I sent away for the $1,300 package, studied, cleaned all my friends chimneys and here I am. I’ve been doing this for over 20 years. [...]
Leave a Comment