I had an email to send. A simple reply for a simple sweet note from a client. It wasn’t a groundbreaking piece of prose.

The question a robot would ask is “What’s the minimum viable action?” I find it little easier to ask something like “can I make it worse?”

Inevitably I’m delaying on something because it’s big. It’s way bigger than an email response. I have a bunch to consider as far as

• who do I want to seem to be?
• what is the best way to present that?
• what does the recipient need?
• is it weird to respond right away?
• is it weird to respond later?
• what do I want to do next with this client?
• and a million more!!!

I got to a moment where I noticed that feeling that it’s going to be a bigger deal if I don’t respond at all. I’m going to need to respond at some point. It might take me a lot of time to come up with the perfect joke response. So, I say “I’ll do it poorly” I jump in. Make a one sentence email that is kind, and not a masterpiece, but at the same time not as bad as I imagined it would be.

I thought if I let go of perfection, I would swirl into terribleness. I was wrong. I’m capable of writing a sentence. I have learned this lesson over and over. Making it worse is the best solution I have so far.

I did street performances across America. April 1, 2000 I started in New Orleans, then Boston, San Francisco. Later, L.A., Baltimore, New York, and more. Every city, I performed in tourist areas and every city had different audience types. These were basically the same people ( a mix of US and Foreign folks on vacation) Not only were people affected by the vibe of the neighborhood, they were affected by the culture of the city.

• San Francisco is bohemian and art-supporting
• Boston (Cambridge) is intellectual and culturally self-important
• New Orleans is dog-eat-dog and Bacchanalian and tied to tradition / voodoo / celebration
• L.A. is about brands / celebrities / known things
• New York brags the best theater in the world

When people are in these places, they join in with the culture because they believe in it. They believe not that they are part of it, but that seeing a street performer in Paris is magical art, but a street performer in Rio is poverty ingenuity.

So, this continues to all things that happen in a city. For locals too. We all believe it and go with it and participate. With Scot Nery’s Boobietrap, we started off selling tickets to a show, and ended up reserving people’s nights at an experience. In Chicago, people want to buy tickets to an interesting show. In L.A. shows are for people trying to meet an agent. Experiences are there for our enjoyment.

When we’re getting a local audience, empathizing is easier when we melt into the culture.

Maybe this sounds familiar.

I used to believe in magic. I was a child magician performing tricks I learned in books and bought in kits. The tricks were obviously not magic to me, but my hope was that I would get there. I thought the deeper I got into illusions, the closer I would come to the supernatural. Instead, I got even more clear about how all of us are fooled by the natural into seeing what doesn’t exist. It hasn’t made me jaded, but it has made me less into …

• spirituality
• luck
• magic
• astrology
• hero worship
• and more!

Although I’m very pragmatic and material, this hope for magic transferred into my career growth. I thought I would be great at entertaining and kinda do whatever I wanted and somehow, a leprechaun would grant me fame, unlimited resources, and fulfillment. I got some of that, but not via horse shoes and birthday candles.

Mystique hurts

I believe for us to be motivated to create, we need to be heroes in our own stories.

One way to ruin a story is to make some kind of magic show up that solves everything. The hero must solve the problem. The more agency the hero has, the better. The more the hero is alone, the better. The more the hero turns their flaws into strengths, the better.

The way to do the opposite of waiting for magic is to get specific about what we want to do, and find the path to that thing. We become the hero. We’re not waiting for someone or something to show up and fix stuff. We’re not the dudes in distress, we’re the damsels of design.

We didn’t publicize lineups or special appearances. We had a weekly show and we wanted to sell out every week. We succeeded.

Brand

The main reason to not promote the lineups was for building a brand. We wanted a show that people trusted. The message was, “No matter what week you come, you’ll get a great show!”

I had seen many comedy clubs fall into the trap of needing ticket-selling headliners to sell tickets. The trap is that you imagine you’re going to have Dave Chapelle perform and everyone will come, but usually you can’t afford Dave Chapelle and you need someone every week… so…

1. Spend all the money we have. Book a well-known comedian.
2. Good show, fun.
3. Book a TV show star who will sell tickets, isn’t super expensive, and will do “stand up comedy.”
4. They perform poorly. The audience doesn’t have a great time and is not interested in going to a comedy show again
5. Book a local radio DJ who has a following to do her “stand up comedy.”
6. Not good. Audience burned again.
7. Repeat this process because we can’t sell tickets to past audiences and we need to grab new ticket sales

Flexibility

One of the things we offered to our entertainers was cancelation. They could cancel any time from the show with no strings attached and no questions asked. This was a little stressful occasionally for me resolving last-minute voids, but it was a nice service to the entertainers.

If someone canceled, I didn’t have to explain to audiences why the lineup changed.

Celebs

We’d have celebrities and badasses drop in and do the show. I thought it was way more fun to surprise the audience with a celebrity drop in than to have the celebrity feel I was using them for their name. I was not using them for their name I was using them for their ability to entertain. I didn’t want people who were just randomly famous in the show. I wanted killers.

Rules

There was no rule that performers couldn’t share the lineup. They all had access in advance. I just didn’t want to do it, even when a potential ticket buyer asked me directly. I didn’t feel that it helped anyone.

This is not my rule for all shows, either. Go for it if you want to promote your lineups. I had several people tell me to promote the lineups and I didn’t hear anyone telling me the opposite, so I wanted to put that counterpoint here in this blog.

“Am I afraid of failure, or am I afraid of success?” The answer is easy.

You’re afraid of failure.

We’re afraid of failure. We’re afraid of public failure. Even when our work is private and we are “my own worst critic” we are trying to protect ourselves from public failure. We might think if we beat ourselves up enough we’ll never fail.

Failing in public evolutionarily means

1. we’re flawed
2. we’ll be rejected from our tribe
3. we’ll die alone under some little scraggly Sub-Saharan tree

So, we’re not facing the failure of losing some money on a book launch. We’re facing annihilation.

Bring on Success

Success to the same part of our brains is great. It almost doesn’t register since we’re so hard wired to look for danger instead of safety.

What does register is the next level of failure. If I have a successful book launch, I’ll be more public. The public will have more expectation of me. I’ll be able to fail more majestically.

This matters because of the process

I get didactic about these word choices because I think it helps to get surgical in our mindsets. If I decide I’m afraid of success, the only way to be safe from success is to stay small. If we decide we’re afraid of failure, we can take some approaches to deal with that.

• Set up goals where we’re likely to succeed
• Appreciate that success is what we want even though it might not show up on our radar
• Set clear benchmarks for success
• Understand that the fear of failure is biological and not intentional
• Let ourselves fail in certain ways while sticking to the priorities
• Celebrate our success

Fear of success is a humblebrag

Maybe “fear of success” was a phrase made to communicate that our feelings are complicated. Maybe it was a way to mollycoddle people who are paralyzed by perfection.

It’s like saying “I’m a nice guy. That’s why I’m single.” NO. You’re single because you don’t have boundaries and you don’t clearly communicate the wholeness of who you are, so your aggression comes out in destabilizing ways!

As creators, we need action. We can say “I’m afraid of failure.” Our egos can handle it.

If our biggest obstacle is also our goal, we will not gamify life. We will not get started. We will not flow.

Audiences are looking for curation. We have content out the wazoo. There’s plenty of it. We are actively trying to ignore all the content that doesn’t suit us. It’s a relief when someone helps us ignore and feeds us a simplified content stream. When someone steps up and says, “This is all you need. This is what you want.”

In making Scot Nery’s Boobietrap, that was the goal. We didn’t want it to be about the parts of the show. Instead it was about the show being a safe space to come and get the good stuff… like a trusted doctor or news source. We were a trusted place for entertainment.

There are two ways we, as entertainment creators, can serve as a curator.

1. Audience Tastes Based

We can respond to audience taste. This is why people love the algorithms. Algorithms track what we like already and try to bring us more stuff. A live entertainer can change what they’re doing to adjust to their audience in the moment.

2. Curator Tastes Based

If I can find a creator or publisher who I like and trust, I only have to pick them once and they pick all my stuff for me. This is what people got at Boobietrap, or thru a radio host they like, or a small book store.

Focus

Whichever way we do this curation, it will take us focusing on an audience… Not necessarily a demographic or archetype, but a narrow band of people who will align with what we are serving so we can continue to be their trusted source.

Algorithms can focus down on individuals, and will eventually be able to focus down on times of the day and location of those individuals. AI will destroy us all, but until then, humans are better at certain parts of curation…

• dependability
• assumed benevolence
• coolness
• organic interfacing

Going solo

If we want to produce something and not just dish out content, this applies the same way. We are sorting thru the muck to bring our audience the right stuff. A magician can be the trusted source for the best magic tricks, or the best way to do a magic trick, or the funniest a person can be.

I started learning magic tricks when I was seven years old. We went to Disney World and all I wanted to do there was go to the magic shop. My mom bought me some tricks and I showed them to everyone before I practiced. I did my first professional show at age 11. I loved it. No other kids my age were doing it and it was so fascinating to see how the tricks worked and get a reaction.

I grew a fascination with juggling, unicycling, and a bunch of other stuff that gave me the same feeling.

To the outside world, magic and juggling might seem like the same thing but they generally attract different kinds of people. In trying to determine why I liked both of them, I came to think about professional athletes. I’ve been inspired and motivated by professional athletes. I don’t watch a lot of games, but I love highlight reels and biographies, and sports movies.

I love seeing someone great.

Seeing someone achieve amazing things in a specialty is beautiful to me. It’s powerful. It gives me more self-love. In magic, I realize, gave people the feeling that more is possible beyond what they see. In juggling, I gave them the feeling that a normal person could do more with their body. I love gifting hope. That has been my drive in so many of the things that I do. That has been the thing that makes me feel like I’m improving the world.

• I have a restaurant with a windy hallway. When my waiter brings you a salad, a few leaves of spinach will always blow off the plate. I lose the spinach and you don’t gain it.
• You rob my car. You break the window and steal the radio. I lose the radio and the window and I have to clean up the mess.
• I write you three drafts of a letter. I send you one. I lose three pieces of paper. You gain one.

This delta between what I lose and what you gain in a transaction is the transaction cost. It’s a constant question for me… how do I make sure my audiences get the majority of what I’m offering them? My best feeling in life is knowing that I’m serving someone well – that what I’m doing is being received. We don’t want to sing a song through a bad sound system, or tell a bunch of jokes that are mostly not the crowd’s taste, or tell a story that puts people to sleep.

When we’re underpaid for a job, I think this is the real cause of being bummed. We feel like we put a lot into something and nobody gained the results. A lot was lost.

Transaction cost is not bad and it’s not avoidable. Our job is to value engineer what we do to a point of getting the most spinach to stay in the salad. We do this by…

1. getting better at understanding what we do
2. empathizing with our audience
3. remembering what our goals are
4. honestly evaluating our work

I think it’s very tiring to look at a video chat screen when people are not looking at my eyes. When I’m in an online meeting, I want folks to be energized by the interaction. I also want to see their facial expressions so I can communicate well with them.

We don’t want to look up, down, or to the side. We want to connect with the camera.

Teleprompter / Beam Splitter

A teleprompter is a way to have a computer’s output (a monitor) positioned in front of the camera. It uses glass reflection to make sort of a transparent screen that the subject ( me) can see and that the camera can’t see. Usually this is used on TV for the person speaking to be able to read text while looking straight into the lens, but text isn’t the only thing that can be displayed.

We can use a teleprompter to show us the person on the other end of Zoom.

This is pretty great! Now, we’re looking at the person or people or pets directly. And they’re looking at the center of our eyes.

The teleprompter (sometimes called a beam splitter) is also helpful for me when I’m setting up the camera for other videos that include my face. I can see exactly what the picture looks like looking straight into camera.

Big Monitor Behind Camera

An alternative idea is to do the opposite. Instead of putting a virtual monitor in front of the camera, put a big one behind it. You can blow up the zoom window on that big monitor and, although the camera will be in the the middle of your field of view, you can still see most of your victim’s face.

This seems to work for people. It requires space for a big monitor / TV but it won’t require as much hardware to hold up a heavy teleprompter. Another benefit is that you might be able to get more detail on the bigger monitor like if you’re doing a group chat and you need to read everyone’s names off the screen.

Add Eyeballs

I don’t know if this one works at all, but people are doing it. It doesn’t give you an opportunity to see your opponent’s face, but it might help a little bit as a reminder to look at the camera, and it might soften your face a little while doing so.

Put some representation of eyes near the camera lens.

I’ve seen…

• plastic eyeballs
• drawings of eyes
• eyes cut out of magazines
• googly eye stickers

The most appealing lighting does two things.

1. It’s clear what is being depicted
2. The subject is in it’s ultimate state

For a portrait or a zoom call, that means 1?? we can tell what the person’s face looks like and 2?? that person is healthy and attractive.

When a light source is reflected in the eye like a mirror, it shows (clearly) that the person has wet eyes (healthy).

This reflection is called the “catch light.”

Maybe you’re not the type of person who’s ever run into a glass door. I am that type. There was something in front of me that I didn’t see and didn’t know it was there.

1. It surprises me mid stride
2. It might hurt a little bit
3. It stops my progress
4. It makes me question my ability to perceive
5. It makes me feel dumb
6. It must be dealt with (either I need to go around or move it)

One of my favorite things is having a list of things to do in a day and knocking them out one at a time. It is rare that it works out smoothly, but when it does… ah! Bliss!

Almost all projects, no matter how experienced we are, have tasks to achieving them that we don’t see in front of us.

• I go to get my car registered, there’s no line to wait in. I’ll be in and out in 15 minutes… except I find out I have to get my smog test done.
• I’m going to perform a joke about snowmen. It’s gonna kill. I tell my wife the joke thinking she’ll laugh and she tells me it may be offensive to a group of people.
• I want to paint letters on a sign. I plan for it to take 45 min… and I realize that the surface isn’t prepared right and it will just soak up the paint.

We smash into invisible steps in a process = glass tasks

Just like a glass door, it can really break our flow physically, mentally, and emotionally to come across these glass tasks. I feel like labeling them and adding them immediately to our todo lists can help us to get to flow again.

deal with it mentally

1. The glass door always existed there.
2. It was not possible for me to see it until I felt it.
3. It’s something I will take care of.
4. Just because it’s surprising, doesn’t mean it’s a waste of time.

Make it visible

Writing it down on a todo list makes the glass task visible. Not only is this good for future trips through this kind of project, it also helps us remember that we didn’t waste our day doing nothing. We did a task that needed to get done.

I have a guest over. A new friend whom I admire. I want to show him love and give him goodness and share with him who I am. First thing I do is apologize for the house being messy.

My highest intention is generous, but my first action is based on scarcity and fear. I either don’t want him to feel uncomfortable, or (more likely) I don’t want him to think that I think it’s okay that my place isn’t neat, or maybe I just want to be humble about how clean I am in my house. I’m focusing on lack. I’m focusing on problems and triviality instead of on what I can provide. That’s how I lead this visit. Then, it goes to a bunch of other hustling around to do this or that, getting the conversation going with a bunch of complication. Cognitively pointing in every direction except the real direction > love.

This is how many entertainment people think when doing new projects. This is what hangs us up. We’re thinking about how to put out fires. We’re thinking about how to avoid criticism. This leads us to doing a bunch of stuff that’s confusing, off topic, and distracting. That leads us to prioritizing the fire escape instead of the foyer.

It’s complex for our audiences and that’s not what they want. Our audiences want clear, simple, fulfilling leadership.

If instead, we keep focusing on what we want to give, and what we have the most power to give, it becomes very simple. It’s very hard work to stay in a generous and abundant mindset, but it’s very important work.