A motivational talk using comedian Steven Wright's career to show why creative professionals should focus on wins, not failures. The speaker argues you're being unfair to yourself by dwelling on setbacks when your work has real value.
This is part of the Audio Insights I publish for my private coaching clients every weekday and I thought you'd find it helpful. So here we go. Hope you enjoy it. Steven Wright is one of the most unique and hilarious comedians to ever hit the circuit. He's known for his lethargic voice and his slow and deadpan delivery of ironic and philosophical one liners. In 2017, Rolling Stone magazine ranked him as a 15th greatest comedian in its list of the 50 greatest stand up comics. If you haven't heard any of his comedy, take a few minutes to watch some of his bits on YouTube. They're really great, very different. It's unique stuff and still to this day, hilarious. I tell you all this because as successful as he became, Stephen almost didn't make it in his comedy career. In a recent episode of the Joe Rogan Podcast, a few of Joe's comedian guests were telling the story of of how in the late 1970s, right at the start of Stephen's comedy career, he got a shot to perform at a very respected comedy club in Boston. It was open mic night and he had just five minutes, just five minutes to perform. The story goes that the audience laughed hysterically at only half of the jokes. The other half generated awkward silence. When Stephen's five minute set was over, he went backstage, collected his things, and was on his way out to the back door of the club when the club owner stopped him and said, hey, where are you going? Stephen replied, I'm out of here. I suck at this. They only laughed at half my jokes. The club owner looked at Steven in disbelief and said, are you crazy? You have two and a half minutes of excellent material. See you next week. And so began the career of one of the best comics of all time. Turns out that in comedy, as with many other art forms, when 50% of your material is excellent, especially at first, that's a great start. That's fantastic. Actually, scratch that. It's not just a great start. It can land you at the very top of your game if you keep at it. Look, being in business where you sell your creative talent, that's not an easy path. You already know that some of your work will be very well received, some will be okay, and some will get pretty negative feedback, often from what feels like left field, completely unexpected. It's hard not to take those things personally, both the good and the bad. But how often do we completely distort reality because we focus all our energy and the attention on the bad stuff, the negative feedback, all at the expense of the good feedback. And the praise the happy clients. When that happens, we need to remind ourselves that we have look, being in business where you sell your creative talent, that's not an easy path. You already know that some of your work will be very well received, some will be okay, and some will get pretty negative feedback, often from what feels like left field, completely unexpected. It's hard not to take those things personally, both the good and the bad. But how often do we completely distort reality because we focus all our energy and the attention on the bad stuff, the negative feedback, all at the expense of the good feedback and the praise the happy clients. When that happens, we need to remind ourselves that we have the proverbial two and a half minutes of excellent material. And try not to focus too much on the other two and a half minutes that just fell flat. Because in order to produce excellent work, we will invariably produce some material that just doesn't quite hit the mark. You can't have all the good stuff without the bad stuff. But the good news is, as we get better and more experience, that ratio will shift. Might be 5050 early in your writing career, but improves to 60, 40, 80, 20, 90, 10 and beyond. But look, wherever you are in this journey, whether it's half of your stuff that just doesn't land well or only 5 or 10%, whatever you do, be fair to yourself. There's nothing wrong with you. You are producing excellent work and it's important that you focus on that fact more than you have been. Change the conversation you're having with yourself and be proud of the fact that you belong to a very exclusive club of brave and courageous souls who put themselves out there every day and share a piece of themselves through their work. Well, that's it for today. I hope you enjoyed the episode. And just a quick reminder to grab your free copy of my latest book Earn more in less time. The proven mindset, strategies and actions to prosper as a freelance writer. You can get your free copy be@b2b launcher.com or you will also find the detailed show notes to this and all my other episodes. Enjoy and have a great day.
