Chapter 2 The Bullets Just over a decade ago, I was blindly struggling as a TV development executive at an emerging production company. My job was to take the germ of an idea and somehow get it on TV. I had to not only create and develop the premise for the show but also convince the network executives to buy it, pay to make it, and then put it on their channel. Every day was a battle trying to get the head of this or that TV network to see the value in the show I had just created. The pitch process was intense and difficult. But it was all I knew. A big part of the job was watching good ideas die because the network "didn''t get it." At the time, taking a show from the idea stage through the pitch stage was about a ninety-day process.

The idea usually only took two or three days to formulate, but it would take us weeks to prepare all the detailed written and graphic material, film and edit a so-called sizzle tape, and set and deliver all the pitches. Each pitch would cost us an average of $30,000 to take to market. We averaged about one sale for every ten pitches. In television, that was a solid average. One particular show changed my entire career. It led me to develop the 3-Minute Rule, and it''s why you''re reading this book. Getting Extreme My production team had spent three weeks in our cramped LA conference room, shouting in circles about how to best pitch this show. Three weeks and we hadn''t even started to craft the pitch deck or film the sales tape because we didn''t know how to pitch it.

We all knew it was a great idea. We just couldn''t figure out how to explain it to anybody else. It''s not that we all became stupid at once. We were just drowning in too many thoughts and too much information. Part of our issue was that the show we were thinking of was wildly complicated, probably way too expensive, had never been done before, and would take five times longer to produce than any other television show we had ever made. But it was a great idea! The six of us in the room--with dozens of years of TV experience--saw the beauty of this idea and how it all worked. In that room all the elements and ideas flowed in harmony and added up to a hit show. When it was just us, it was perfect.

But as soon as we''d bring anyone else in the room, it all turned into a jumbled mess. Each meeting would careen off onto another tangent and crash into confusion. This was unbelievably frustrating. My team was losing focus and enthusiasm, and I was losing them. I had no idea how to make this better. At the time we were an up-and-coming production company. Our claim to fame was that we were the producers of The Biggest Loser. This was a hit NBC prime-time television series airing around the world.

It was the first weight loss TV show, and with its overwhelming success, we were scrambling to come up with more shows about weight loss. (In Hollywood, when one show''s a hit, others like it are sure to follow.) We needed to crack the next evolution of this format before somebody else did. I knew in this conference room we had the next big hit. I could see it crystal clear in my head. I just couldn''t explain it. Slumped in my chair in that conference room, walls closing in, I was as frustrated as I''ve ever been in my life. I just couldn''t get it.

If I weren''t Canadian, I would''ve been shouting and snipping at my assistants. Instead I just seethed. I ate way too much cold pizza and got way too little sleep. It was at this moment I discovered the very core of what later became the 3-Minute Rule and the entire foundation of everything I speak, teach, and coach today. That moment is burned into my memory. Could It Be That Simple? I want to try to illustrate how messy and overloaded our original pitch for this show really was. It''s difficult because in hindsight I see it so simply and clearly that I have a hard time replicating the convoluted way it looked twelve years ago. But here is my attempt: The idea for the next great weight loss show involves looking at the casting tapes from The Biggest Loser, taking people who were too big to compete on the show, and, instead of making them compete to lose weight by tempting them with food and exercise challenges, letting them work through the struggles on their own.

We will help them when they need guidance, but it is ultimately up to them. Lasting weight loss takes time, so we''ll actually be filming them the entire time they lose weight. Since it will take a long time to film, we''ll have to condense a lot of time into little segments so you can see all of the progress in one hour. We won''t have them all in a house together, so all their stories are going to be separate, and they won''t know each other or work with each other. There will be no teams, no rivalries, no getting voted off the island. It will just be their individual stories, told from their perspectives. Note that if they aren''t losing weight in a competitive situation they won''t lose weight as quickly, and since these people are so big, the change will be more gradual. Since it would be too slow to carry over a series of episodes, and the audience would get bored, each episode will be devoted to one individual''s story of personal transformation--and the following week''s episode will focus on a different person.

There will be no connection from one episode to the next, nothing to have to remember from week to week. There were another five paragraphs about how we would actually film and edit the show and rotate crews to save cost over the year. And how we would hire one trainer for the year to travel to a different contestant each week and how we would need to bring in off-camera trainers to monitor the contestants because someone would need to babysit them or they wouldn''t lose weight. I also had to describe how these contestants would be living in their own homes and not on a ranch or "reality house," so there were things we would need to do with their jobs and lives to make sure we could film the important aspects, all year long. Are you unimpressed and way confused? Good. It was even worse in real time. When we ran our mock pitch meetings, this explanation would take about eighteen minutes. I felt like I said everything I wanted and had relayed all the relevant information, but nobody could possibly stay interested or focused for that long.

Most times I''d get interrupted in the middle with questions about parts of the show I hadn''t had a chance to explain yet. I was dreading the idea of getting in the room with network presidents on this show. The network pitch room is a cold, ruthless, unforgiving setting with a very difficult audience. Meetings start with smiles that last about ten seconds. If you''ve ever watched Shark Tank, that no-nonsense attitude and curt style was patterned after a TV network pitch. If I couldn''t win over employees in my own company, how was I going to win over John Saade or Andrea Wong at ABC? I actually ached to just give up. I''d done that with hundreds of ideas in the past. I would pitch the show around internally and if people didn''t "get it," we''d just move on.

I have no problem with people disagreeing with the viability of an idea or thinking it won''t sell. But in this case, they were judging it without actually understanding it. It was making me crazy. Luckily for me, I didn''t give up. In a moment of pure frustration, I decided to try again with a completely clean slate. So I returned to our large development conference room and asked the team to write down every statement that described the show on individual Post-it notes in blue Sharpie and then stick them on the wall. At the end of the exercise we had at least a hundred on the wall, so many that it looked like a vast yellow flag with graffiti on it. Each tiny Post-it could only fit a word or two because we needed to print large enough to read them from across the room.

So the words or phrases were originally meant to just be placeholders. biggest contestants jogging one year start fat sweat remote cameras end thin compassion thin dreams life saving trainers grueling obese single episodes transformation diets exercise weight lifting carb counting cinema verité And more . Our goal was to arrange these bullet points in an order that made sense and that anyone could follow. But we were continually arguing because each Post-it note idea would spur the room of voluble TV producers into yelling out the details--often all at once. They ended up circling endlessly, chasing their own tails. I tuned out the yelling in the room and focused on the words on the wall. They overwhelmed me. The wall was filled with everything I wanted to say, but I had to find just what needed to be said.

One by one, I began to eliminate the words that weren''t necessary to the core concept of the show. Eventually I found myself with just seven Post-it notes in the far corner of the wall. overweight too big entire year one episode start fat end thin transformation It was like cracking a code, or seeing the solution to a puzzle appear. For the first time, I saw how to explain this idea appear before me with perfect clarity. I stood up and yelled out the door to my assistant: "Jimmy! Get me J.