Alex of InSpresso shares how top performers like Louis C.K. and Dave Chappelle master skills: they record themselves, seek feedback, and learn from failures. Teaching 16 dance classes weekly, Alex analyzes each session to close the gap between his best and worst work. Marie Forleo advises trying many things first, then narrowing down using joy, money, and flow.
Chapters
It's the first time I've ever done this. How does it start again? I'm a dance extractor. Extractor. Extractor. Extract, people. Rise and shine, it's InSpresso time. Good morning, Believe Nation. My name is Alex and my one word is belong. I believe the world would be a better place if more people felt that they belonged. Let's start off the day right together. Grab your coffee and sip on today's message. Get experience. Over to you, Louis C.K. I wake up every morning, espresso keep me going. I wake up every morning.
Stage presence comes pretty quickly, depending on who you are. How to write jokes and how to generate material and know it's going to work, that sort of comes, you know, first 10 years you're building the skills. Yeah. But the skills are what? Timing, delivery? Yeah, timing and delivery and material. Material that works. Generating the jokes, 'cause most comedians, you write your own stuff, you come up with your own thing. Connecting with an audience, and then there's all sorts of other things that happen. Your top, your best show keeps getting higher and higher, that's the first thing. How good you can do keeps increasing, but then the really important thing is how bad your worst show starts coming up. That's— I think that's for any performer, you know? Your worst show needs to come up close to the best show so that even on your worst night, you're still— So, in the new season, your best show shouldn't— the worst show should be much closer to the best show. The margin should be like that. That's right.
Yeah.
How does that happen? Well, experience. It's just experience. It's just, you know, there's hardly any situation that I haven't seen, so— You know, when I feel an audience, you know, you get an instinct for things. Once you get really good at the skills and your bottom comes up, you're able to go try stuff that's probably not gonna work. And that's where you find— that's where you get more— that's where you get better and more interesting. When you're, you know, the good comics do that.
It's not enough to get just experience. You need to analyze it to get better. I love Louis C.K.'s message about making mistakes and getting a ton a ton of experience. What I found was missing from it is it's not enough just to get experience. I'm a dance instructor, and I want to be the best instructor in the world. I teach 4 days a week. Actually, I teach 5 days a week. I teach about 16 classes in a week, so I am always getting a lot of experience. But the thing I realized a couple months ago was occasionally I start coasting. When people are laughing, when people are having a great time, I relax and I don't push myself as hard. So yes, it's very important to have experience, to put yourself out there, to make yourself vulnerable, to make mistakes, but you need to learn from them. And the only way you can learn from them is to analyze what you're doing to get better. So I have instructors coming in watching my classes and giving me feedback. I record myself teaching classes, and the night of, I will go home and I will look through the video to see how I could have done better. So if you look at any famous comedian— Louis C.K., Dave Chappelle, Kevin Hart, Chris Rock— they don't just perform at the big stage. They go to the small stage. They perform in small crowds. They hone their material. They look at their audience to get feedback. What's funny? What's landing? It's not enough for you to go out there and make a bunch of mistakes because you will get better. But to be the best, you have to make sure you learn from your mistakes. You have to be active in your performance, aware of what you're doing, and looking for ways constantly to be the best. So the question of the day is, what's one area of your life you're coasting in? Please leave it in the comments below. I also want to give a quick shout out to David Chunky Sue. David, thank you so much for purchasing a copy of Evan's book, Your One Word. It really means a lot to us. Thank you so much for watching. We believe in you, and we hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is. We'll see you again tomorrow morning for another shot of espresso.
Who was the first guy that blew you off the stage?
I don't think I ever got blown off the stage. Oh wow. He's conceited. He's conceited. No, I felt some heat. In DC, at that time, you'd already left, but Teddy Carpenter, Teddy Carpenter was one of those ass dudes.
Killed it too, fun of him.
Yeah, Teddy Carpenter was one of those dudes that would like really bring it to you. I've took some Ls.
I'll tell you who got me. Remember Chris Thomas? Yeah. Yeah. Destroyed me. I'd only done standup like 4 times. And they were like, we're gonna put, you know, Chris Thomas by this time must have been doing standup like what?
42 years. Yeah. Like, yeah. He's 100 now. No, I'm joking. Yeah.
He been, yeah, he been doing it, man. And they, and they were like, Dave, we're gonna put Chris up next. And then the MC literally goes, you can go home if you'd like. Oh my God. And I was like, I'm staying. I bombed. It was the worst. I dry mouth bombed. You ever get bombed so bad that you get thirsty?
Part of that was probably, but you were like, I think, I think part of that was 'cause you were like a, a young comic, you didn't have the experience of knowing how to transfer that energy from one comic to the next.
Well, that's exactly it. It was a lack of experience. So cut to like years later, this is when we were all doing like Def Jam tours, Def Comedy Jam tours, and we were at Madison Square Garden. The show was Chris Thomas, Chris Tucker, and they made me close. Man, I murked that shit. But you looked ready then. That was my Karate Kid tournament night where I was like—
Has your process as an actor changed over the years?
I have learned from each experience.
Experience, you know, what works better than something else. So I think experience helps. It's helped me. I didn't really know what I was doing when I started, so it took a while for me to figure it out.
Did that help you in playing this role as a CEO? Experience?
I think all of the experience I've had in life, both in the film work and outside of it, has helped. It just helps to prepare me to think about a different kind of character.
If we go back to somebody who's in that beginning part of their career, I think the wrong advice to them would be, say, just pick one of those things. And that's what everybody says all the time. They're always like, oh, you have to focus. You have to just pick your niche or your niche. You've got to do that. And how are you really going to find that combination of factors of joy, money, and flow without expanding your options, without trying a lot of different stuff? So you did that. You did that in your career. I did that. And I think in the beginning part of really trying to figure out what am I good at, and also not just what am I good at, but what is going to be rewarded, you know, in the marketplace, you know, I said yes to a lot of different things. And so I always encourage people when you're starting out, expand your options. Do everything that you can to have a lot of different experiences. And then as you become more successful, as you have more experience, then you limit the options. Then you start being more selective. Then you start being like, "Okay, I am going to apply that litmus test more often. I am going to say, okay, I've got all these different things I could do. What is most aligned? Where can I have the most convergence? What am I really getting close to? How am I going to have the biggest impact in the world?" But I don't think you can necessarily do that when you're just getting started because you don't know.
Let me give you the one-word secret to happiness. One word. This is all you need to be happy. The most important word.
If you had to think of one word that's most important to you, or that sums you up, or that would be kind of like a little beacon—
Hey, Believe Nation!
If you want to know what the most important one word is for Tony Robbins, Gary Vaynerchuk, Oprah Winfrey, will.i.am, and Howard Schultz, I have a very special secret video for you. Check the description for details.
