The Art of Making Sh!t Up

Chapter 7Facing Failure: Be Wrong to Be Right

Sometimes you have to be wrong to be right. Making shit up also means that plenty of shit goes wrong. One of the hardest things to get comfortable with as a leader as well as a creator is admitting that you are wrong. It can be a scary thing, and, let's face it, doesn't feel good. You can feel pretty damn stupid at times.

Failure is an undeniable part of any creative process. There's no such thing as a perfectly formed and executable idea. Where something begins is never where it ends, no matter the initial spark of genius that ignites the idea. Iterating, failing, and advancing the concept are all part of the process of making stuff up.

There are many experts who can speak on the various different ideas around failure – failing fast, failing forward, failing early, and failing often. I come at it from the perspective of playing make pretend on stage and trying to get people to laugh at my nonsense. While I agree with every one of those types of failure, only in comedy do you experience all of those again and again, night after night in front of people who immediately let you know that you are in fact failing. A comedian failing on stage is not a theoretical endeavor. It is a very real and tangible thing. And it can leave marks.

The beauty of this kind of failure is that like real bodily injuries you start to build up psychic scar tissue. I have never met a single person in this industry who has not bombed on stage. Anyone who has ...