Happy Accidents

1 How to Harness the Power of 
Positive 
Collaboration

Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness.

– Carl Jung

In the beginning, it was dark. Literally, we couldn’t see a thing. There we sat – Frank Ford, David Wilk, Troy Grant, and David Ahearn – in a dingy, rundown apartment. The electricity had been cut off, and so too had our dream of the future. Hours earlier, three of us (Ford, Wilk, and Grant) had been fired from a comedy club where we had worked for two years for little to no pay to bring an ­essentially unknown comedy club from obscurity to a ­citywide hit.

But that night, we were asked never to come back. Ahearn, for his part, had one month earlier walked away from a career in stand-up comedy due to his own issues with management. On the surface, this might sound like a cast of whining, unemployable troublemakers who just couldn’t get along with the powers that be. But there are two sides to every story. And this is our story of how a few Happy Accidents and the power of the philosophy of “Yes, and” changed our lives and led us down a path that might sound almost too good to be true. As comedians, the four of us would go on to create one of the most successful improvisational shows in the country.

But in this dark room on this rainy night (yes, it was a dark and rainy night; the pun is not lost on us), we were exceptionally close to the unemployment line and a hell of a long way from the president of the United States. And you know what? We were genuinely ...