Eminent Lack of Interview Reflection

To try and find someone to interview about Godtfred Kirk Christiansen for my eminent person project, I initially reached out to people who work for LEGO, starting with Godtfred’s grandson himself. As I didn’t know how to contact Chairman of the Board Thomas Kirk Kristiansen, I decided to try and send the email I had for him to his investment company (I added a disclaimer at the top saying I was trying to reach Thomas). After no response, I moved to the next best person, the Chief LEGO Historian for the LEGO Group, Kristian Hauge. When he didn’t respond, I reached out to the other Chief LEGO Historian Signe Weise. Finally, there was a response, which essentially asked me to stop emailing people associated with the LEGO group, as they don’t do interviews because they don’t have the time. They did provide me with some resources. While I had already researched these and knew about them, this showed me that these were the resources that LEGO considered accurate and up-to-date, which bolstered my confidence in them. They also provided me with someone else to email, an editor for Blocks magazine named Daniel Konstanski. They said that he had done many articles on the history of LEGO, but he did not reply either.

After I was told not to email anyone associated with LEGO anymore, I kind of reached a conundrum. Information on Godtfred Kirk Christiansen is quite sparse online, and it is easy to see almost all there is within a short amount of studying. Godtfred’s Grandson or employees dedicated to studying LEGO history were my best bet at gaining information in the interview that I could not find anywhere else. I felt like if I were to try and continue reaching out to people to interview, it would become futile because their knowledge would be from regular research just like mine. Knowing this, I decided to dedicate my time to researching and understanding Godtfred’s life, so that I was very familiar with it, which would in turn make all the eminent projects easier and better.

Before this realization, however, I put in a great amount of effort to secure an interview. I personalized each email to the person I was sending it to, saying why I believe their insight would be useful to me. I explained the project to them, explained why I chose Godtfred and explained why I needed to do an interview. I gave a short snapshot of when I was free to do the interview but didn’t add too much as it would be unnecessary and make for extra reading. I was sure to thank them a few times, but by far I think one of my best strategies came at the beginning of the email. I summarized my request, the offered them more context. That way, they would feel like they have an idea of what they were getting into before they read the entire email. Also, it is sort of an odd request out of context, so I hoped presenting it first would draw them into learning more.

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