Next morning, with barely any sleep, I stood there in The Temple, the magical building at the highest point of Necker Island.
In front of Richard Branson, fifteen top entrepreneurs and a camera that is livestreaming to millions of entrepreneurs.
Even though I hadn't slept, I thought I'd be fine. You just perform when you're there, right?
Wrong!
I talked way too fast and delivered the shortest ten-minute talk in history. I was done in six minutes.
But there were four minutes left, so Joe asked if there were any questions. Several hands went up.
One of them? Richard Branson.
He said, "Interesting speech. Maybe you can help me with something:
"I spend more than an hour a day reading and answering my emails. What can I do about that?"
I jokingly said, "Then you need to organize your business better."
For the rest of that week, something special happened. Participants kept coming to me with questions. They were intrigued.
They wanted to know more. Every day, new questions. In the end, I'd talked to almost everyone about it.
That's when it hit me. Back home in the Netherlands, I couldn't get a single person interested in this idea.
But here on Necker Island, surrounded by the top one percent of entrepreneurs?
They were all over it. Every single one of them understood immediately.
This wasn't a nice-to-have. This was the missing piece they'd been looking for.
Halfway through the week, TJ, one of the participants, came up to me. "I think you have a chance of winning that $65,000 prize." I dismissed it.
After such a poor presentation? But he said, "Maybe so, but everyone is talking about it."
The last dinner arrived. The winner would be announced.
I was nervous. Even though I didn't think my chances were very high, I'm competitive.
Halfway through dinner, Joe took the floor to reveal the winner.
I had won.
My presentation on Internet Fasting had earned me a prize worth $65,000 and a trip to South Africa.