Don’t Mind The Misses
When you’re aiming to innovate, you can’t take yourself too seriously.
This is a critical corollary to my recent pieces inspired by Seinfeld’s craft (Put Yourself Out There & Put In The Work). If you’re experimenting broadly like Netflix and Ogilvy, if you’re entertaining trivialities like Einstein and Elon Musk, then you can’t afford to take yourself too seriously.
You’re going to fail a lot.
Those are the odds. But by taking lots of shots, you dramatically increase your likelihood of a score.
As Michael Schur, SNL writer and creator of The Good Place, recently recounted on Tim Ferriss’ podcast, “I saw the greatest comedians of our generation bomb, week after week, after week. I saw Will Ferrell take huge swings and bomb. I saw Tina Fey take huge swings and bomb… Tina Fey’s batting average on that show in the six years I was there, was the highest of anyone’s. And she probably hit .400, which is great for a baseball player, and incredible for an SNL sketch writer.
But for most people, if you failed at your job, 60% of the time, you would be crushed.”
Schur insists that regular failures on SNL prepared him not only for a life in entertainment, but also to thrive in institutions more broadly. There’s a catch, though: it wasn’t only observing others fail that made such an impression; Schur had to taste failure himself, too. As he recounts it:
“There’s a specific kind of failure at SNL that is so painful and visceral, that I still — and this is not an exaggeration, it’s not, I’m not saying this for effect — I still have occasional nightmares about it, okay?…” As we see from even Tina Fey’s batting average, the painful, nightmare-inducing failure was not an occasional failure experience, but a regular fixture of life at SNL.
But far from scarring him, Schur found it incredibly helpful to be trained by failure:
“As painful as that is, what happens is if you can survive it, you get to the other side of it, then nothing bothers you. There’s literally no kind of institutional failure that can phase you anymore… In the creative world, that pain, that failure, that weekly sometimes failure, just absolutely thickened my skin to such a wonderful degree that I just realized, this doesn’t matter… I love that failure. I love thinking about it and keeping it close to my soul.”
The reality is, the numbers aren’t in your favor for early stage efforts. Not we shouldn’t do everything to the best of our ability, but to take disappointments personally is to miss the point: get back in the game, take another shot, and keep getting better!
The best way to bend the odds is to put more shots on goal. Don’t mind the misses.
Related: Put Yourself Out There
Related: Put In The Work
Related: Consider The Odds
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One of the defining contributions the d.school is helping teams ask themselves, “What kind of thinking is appropriate, when?” We call such clarity being “Mindful of Process.” And it can seem like semantics until you realize we need to show up in different ways.