The Nerdist Way_ How to Reach the Next Level (In Real Life) - Chris Hardwick [14]
YOUR INTERNAL CHARLIE ROSE
Ask. Good. Questions. This may be the single most important thing you can do in your life. Instead of screaming “WTF???” every time something lame happens, ask more effective questions of yourself. “Why do I suck?” is useless. Your brain will answer you with something like, “Because you masturbated in a church that one time,” because it is wired to give you an answer no matter what. Make it work FOR you. You need to become a regular fucking Charlie Rose with your own mind. Would you agree that Rose is one of the most superb interviewers of our time? ( Just say yes.) It’s largely because he’s thoughtful and asks great questions. You can do this with yourself. Envision a round table against a black backdrop with you on one side and your failure on the other. Now interview it. “What REALLY went wrong? How could I have made this better? Was the hitch an unforeseeable one? What can I learn from this to improve future iterations?” Stare your failure in the face and grill it. Don’t blink. Charlie never blinks.
CHARACTERCIZE
What are some recent “failures” in your life?
What are some lessons you can pull from them?
Is Charlie Rose a cyborg?
BOMBING = GOOD
Bombing in front of a large group of strangers is probably the biggest nonlethal fear scenario humans have as a species. As a comic, I have been there and, truthfully, it doesn’t feel amazing. Bombing is probably the most succinct representation for failure there is. You try something ∙ you immediately know it doesn’t work ∙ you get negative feedback ∙ you feel awful. The BEST part is, you get to look into the disappointed faces of your audience and really feel their indifference to your work! [fistpump]
If you can get through bombing in life, many other things become breezy. If you have the “defective comic gene,” as I call it, you will still, for some crazy reason, get up and try it all again the next night. This may be because once you have bombed, you realize that (1) it’s not as bad as you thought it would be, (2) you live through it, and (3) you can figure out how to fix it for next time. In fact, bombing is ESSENTIAL in comedy. It keeps you fresh and on your toes. If you killed with the same jokes night after night and never attempted to grow as a performer, you’d get bored, the jokes would get stale, and people would stop coming to see you.
I use stand-up as an example because whatever creative endeavor you’re pursuing, you’re not going to bomb any worse than a comedian. With comedy, building a bulletproof set is all about tweaking on the fly and learning from your mistakes. The flip side is that when something you’re making isn’t going over, you have the opportunity to make it better. It forces your brain into a space of “OK! Let’s roll up our sleeves and make this shit work.” Usually, you come up with WAY better stuff than you had the first time. As far as that “dirty on the inside” feeling you get after a bad show—where you wish you could take some Comet and a scrub brush to your soul—it goes away! AND it builds character. No human ever became interesting by not failing. The more you fail and recover and improve, the better you are as a person. Ever meet someone who’s ALWAYS had EVERYTHING work out for them with ZERO struggle? They usually have the depth of a puddle. Or they don’t exist.
Besides, just because you bomb doesn’t necessarily mean you were wrong. Sometimes