The Daily Discipline
A mentor of mine was good friends with Robin Williams. He told me how everywhere Robin went, he carried around a yellow legal pad, and he was always writing down ideas. Sometimes pieces of the day's conversation wound up in bits on stage, that night!
You know who else is really into yellow legal pads? Jerry Seinfeld. In fact, that's the premise of his entire book, "Is This Anything?" which is a collection of everything he's ever written down on those pads. One of the things that most struck me in his fantastic conversation with Tim Ferriss was his description of his daily writing process:
"What’s in front of me is I’m usually about 15 or 20 pages of stuff that’s in various states of development. And then there’s a smaller book of just really, really random things. Like, when you’re on a cell phone call and the call drops, and then you reconnect with the person, they’ll go, “I don’t know what happened there.” As if anyone is expecting them to know anything about the incredibly complex technology of the cell phone, they offer this little, I don’t know if it’s an excuse or an apology. They go, “I don’t know what happened there.” So anyway, so I don’t know. So that’s an example of something in that, my little tiny notebook, that I don’t know what to do with that...
"There’s something stupid and funny about that to me. That’s the very, very beginning. So then I’ll write something about it. It’ll be, if I’m lucky, it’ll be a half a page or a page on a yellow legal pad and I’ll write that. Then in the session the next day, if I get around to it, I will see it again and I will see what I have and what I like and I don’t like. And as any writer can tell you, it’s 95 percent rewrite...
So I have two phases. There is the free-play creative phase. Then there is the polish and construction phase of, and I love to spend inordinate... amounts of time refining and perfecting every single word of it until it has this pleasing flow to my ear. Then it becomes something that I can’t wait to say. And then we go from there to the stage with it. From the stage, the audience will then — I imagine, it’s a very scientific thing to me. It’s like, 'Okay, here’s my experiment,' and you run the experiment. Then the audience just dumps a bunch of data on you, of, 'This is good, this is okay, this is very good, this is terrible.' That goes into my brain from performing it on stage. Then it’s back through the rewrite process and then new ideas will come...
And it’s just work time. It’s just work time. Which, and I like the way athletes talk about, 'I got to get my work in. Did you get your work in?' I like that phrase."
(Full transcript of this incredible conversation here)
I love that phrase, too. "Did you get your work in?"
We can see how someone who traffics in comedic ideas needs to have a daily discipline of documentation; but do we see how folks who supposedly traffic in commercial ideas should, as well?
Hopefully the point about reflecting on experimentation isn't lost on us, either. If we don't close the loop on our experiments, we harvest a fraction of the learning. And of course, the fact that such experiments are also a great source of fresh material.
But first, it starts with getting the work in.
What about you, have you gotten your idea work in today? Do you have a practice? A routine? A quota? I'd love to hear how you get your work in.
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