Howard doesn’t want to be on TV.

Last week I found myself sitting in my car long past midnight listening to Howard Stern interview celebrities, everyone from Chevy Chase to T.I. Did you know T.I. was smart? All we hear about is the arrests, but after ten minutes on Howard I was a fan.

And last night, worried about running down my car battery, I heard Howard’s interview with Perez Hilton. Who is also intelligent. Guess you’ve got to be smart to make it. But you don’t pull teeth with Perez, he coughs up anything and everything, like meeting men on Grinder (it’s an iPhone app which plots the location of other gay men). And Perez said he’d sell his Website, half of it anyway, to a legitimate TV producer, that’s his goal, to get on television. And that’s when Perez turned the tables. To Howard. Asking him how long he was going to do this.

And Howard said he wanted to be on the radio since he was five, it was all he ever wanted to do. He was happy. He didn’t need a TV talk show. He looked forward to coming to work.

It’s so hard to make it. Listen to Stern enough and he’ll talk about starting out in Hartford, all the markets he endured, working under those who didn’t get him, admitting he wasn’t always so good. But he kept on keeping on because of desire, because of the dream. It wasn’t about money, it was about being on the radio.

Now I wonder if Howard could be as good as Barbara Walters on television. I think he’d blow her away. Then again, his 10,000 hours are in radio, it’s a different medium, it’s intimate, you hear it instead of see it, there’s a whole theatre in your mind. But Gladwell told me you get credit, if you switch directions. You don’t start completely over, it’s not like Howard would need 10,000 hours more to be great on TV. But he’d probably need more time than you think… Because it’s a different skill. You sit on your couch and laugh at the presenters, the talking heads. They may be bad, but if you were beamed into the studio you’d have flop sweat, you’d stutter, you wouldn’t know where to look…it’s a skill.

What skill do you want to have? Who do you want to be?

I’m not saying you’ve got to start right after you’re born, but so many of our elite practitioners had a dream, a desire from a very young age. They were not pushed by their parents, although they may have been influenced by them. They just wanted to be this one thing.

Howard knew the call letters of every radio station in America. He memorized them from books his dad brought home. Not because he deemed it necessary to become the King of All Media, but because he was just that interested, he couldn’t get enough.

The pros make it look easy. But don’t believe it is. Even if you could hit the basket, try doing it during the playoffs, like Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant. They don’t choke under pressure, they’re even better in competition!

You’ve got to want it. It’s got to permeate every cell in your body. Because it’s just that hard to make it. The pitfalls are plenty. The setbacks are huge. The abuse is heaped upon you. You must have an inner light that keeps you going no matter what.