My best jokes
Because so many of you are new here I’m going to play one of my greatest hits.
Here goes:
There’s no path
No map
For creatives.
Only a compass that doesn’t even always point in the same direction all the time. Like the one Jack Sparrow has in Pirates of the Caribbean.
It’s the same spirit that ‘Wolf-dog’ in ‘Call of the Wild’ has inside of him that gave the book its name.
A map is no good because no one has gone on your journey before you. And no one can follow your footsteps.
There is however a structure that seems to work. It’s something like a stand up comedian and their ‘Act’. And act is a precious and limited thing, normally measured in minutes.
The Act
How you create an act is you show up for 5 minutes.
Do your act.
Most of it will suck but if you’re lucky you get a few seconds of laughter. Keep that piece, rework the rest. The piece you keep is called Material.
Show up tomorrow.
Repeat and accumulate material until you reliably can get 4 minutes of laughter out of the 5.
Then expand your act. Show up to a place that will give you 15 minutes to do your act. Give them those 4 good minutes then work out what to do with the other 11.
This is how you build up an Act. If you show up a lot and repeat the process. In 10 years you might have a good hour of Material.
So many people fail because they show up to a place asking for an hour when they barely have one minute of Material.
There’s no map, but I use this standup comedy idea as a metaphor for my own creative journey. A system for progress. A story to tell myself as I continue to show up :)
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Thanks for signing up and letting me show up in your inbox, this is the kind of material I aim for as I keep showing up.