I hired a village hall for my big idea, and nobody came

01Lived

In 2010 I built a personal development programme called Wish & Wisdom. I'd spent 25 years frustrated that nothing on the self-help shelf had any lasting effect on me, so I built my own: a structured system for finding what you actually want, and the route to it that fits who you actually are. I was certain it was a breakthrough. I loved every hour of building it. I was so confident that I rang BBC Three Counties Radio and talked my way into twenty minutes of airtime to promote it. I was nervous, but I did it, live, on one of the biggest local stations in the region. On air, I invited people to a Wish & Wisdom workshop. I hired a village hall as the venue. I set it up and waited. Nobody came. Not one person. I packed up, went home, published the programme quietly as a PDF, built a website for it, and never promoted either again. It sat untouched for sixteen years.