Only a few hours after my last post about joke brainstorming, I found myself reading this interview with Ira Glass, where the host of This American Life makes a similar point about success through failure (emphasis below is mine):
I had this experience a couple of years ago where I got to sit in on the editorial meeting at The Onion. Every Monday they have to come up with like 17 or 18 headlines, and to do that, they generate 600 headlines per week. I feel like that’s why it’s good: because they are willing to be wrong 583 times to be right 17.
It kind of gives you hope. If you do creative work, there’s a sense that inspiration is this fairy dust that gets dropped on you, when in fact you can just manufacture inspiration through sheer brute force. You can simply produce enough material that the thing will arrive that seems inspired.1
The only way to become good at something is to first be really bad at it, a lot. Embrace failure! Write a whole lot of shitty jokes!
- The whole interview is from this fascinating interview series based on the book called Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error
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This could be the greatest post ever.
That book title looks awesome. I know nothing about it. But I read a book called “Celebrating Failure” about business. It had a couple good lessons I applied to comedy.
andrewjrivers
August 23rd, 2010
80 holds at the library on 23 available copies.
Now that’s gotta mean something.
andrewjrivers
August 23rd, 2010
[...] make lots of correctable mistakes is arguably the single most important factor in success, because progress comes from failure. This is true of big decisions as well as little ones. So… why not have several careers? I [...]
Stand-up comedy as a career decision | Creating a Comic
November 14th, 2010