#191 - What's worth trading when you fail?

And what's absolutely not

1979. Jerry Seinfeld was twenty-five. He had been doing comedy for four years. Less and less, he saw himself as an up-and-coming comedian. He felt it was time to test out his burgeoning self-image against reality. In his words:

And New York was really, in those days, still very much the minors to L.A., which was the majors. And so I went out to L.A., and people talked, that I was coming, and that I was one of the hot guys coming out of New York.

The Comedy Store in LA was the hub for the funny ones. And here was a promising comic coming to the big league. Well, we all know this story. 

And The Comedy Store was the club in L.A. that you had to break into, that was the club, and the guys that worked there and the women were killers. I mean, these people made the room just shake with laughter. It was very intimidating to go on there. And I went on there, and I did very well. And in those days, you would call, and they would give you spots if you were good, and I would never get spots. I would get like one spot a week, and one spot a week is like one push-up a week. It’s like, forget it. Don’t even bother. And so I asked to meet with Mitzi Shore, who was the owner of the club and the person who ran the whole thing there.

Mitzi Shore ran things at The Comedy Store. She was a scout, a booking agent, and owner of the place that comedians around the country saw as a launch pad for successful careers in comedy. Shore had no misgivings about her role in the comedy scene. She refused to pay comics whom she brought on stage, and over the decades, gracing her stage have been a pantheon of names—Richard Pryor, David Letterman, Jay Leno, Robin Williams, and Jim Carrey. In this group she probably didn’t include a certain climber who was gaining altitude on the East Coast with his observational comedy: Jerry Seinfeld.

And she said to me, “You’re the kind of person that needs to get stepped on, and that’s what you need. You need someone to step on you, and I’m going to be that person.” And she said, “If I had four spots available and you called in, I would give all four spots to this other guy.” She mentions this other guy. And I sat there in her office, and I nodded.

I nodded, and I said, “Well…” I won’t mention the name of the guy she said she was going to give the four spots to. I said, “Well, if maybe he can’t do all four, I’d be happy to take any of the ones he can’t do.” And I walked out of there, and I never worked at The Comedy Store again. 

For a comic with any kind of aspiration, Seinfeld compares not working at The Comedy Store in LA to wanting to be a baseball player (or tennis player) but not playing at the majors (or grand slams). What would you do if you just blew your chance at testing yourself at the premier venue for your profession?

A failure of this proportion is seldom an event. It acquires the rights to closing down anything remotely interesting and fun in your life for just enough time for you to consider your negativity habitual and hence for it to become invisible to you, though not to your friends who are simply left wondering, “What the hell happened to this guy?” Failing like this can leave you grounded, like a bird with a broken wing.

And so from there, I went from — I hope it doesn’t sound immodest — from being absolutely at the top of the heap in New York City to playing at discos in the basement in L.A., to like eight people. But my resentment and hostility to her, I would say I was a three day a week guy in terms of my writing discipline in those days. And I went from three days a week to seven right there. 

It’s been a couple of years since I first heard this story and on more than one occasion, as I have considered my own life pursuits, I have wondered about Seinfeld’s response. He didn’t pander to Shore in the hope of turning things around with her. He didn’t turn to other similarly aggrieved comics and ask them to support him in his fight. He didn’t give up comedy thinking it wasn’t possible for him to break into the LA bastion while Shore was guarding it. He chose the one thing in his control. And gave up everything else. 

I don’t know what Seinfeld thought his chances were after being denied by Shore. I know that he didn’t allow what he wanted in his career and life to be held hostage by whether or not—at that moment—it felt possible. 

Seinfeld’s solution to the Mitzi Shore problem was unusual. His response to the provocation was the opposite of any kind of utilitarian advice. It was not: make hay while the sun shines. More like, run more when it rains. People don’t take this route. Perhaps because they have a general idea, a concept even, for what they want. Not a clear vision. Seinfeld was working toward something. He saw it like a picture. He was probably adding a coat of paint to it after every two-minute gig in some ramshackle basement.

What happened after Seinfeld went from writing three days to seven days a week?

The Tonight Show saw me, and every comedian in the world wanted to get on The Tonight Show in the ’70s and ’80s. It was the only way out of the clubs, to real gigs, was to be on The Tonight Show. The clubs was, you’re working for free. Free. Zero. That’s not really the object. The object is to get paid. The object is to be a professional. So when you’re on The Tonight Show, you’re going from the service road to lane one in five minutes. 

Five minutes to hit peak tempo in lane one but an eternity of seven-day weeks plodding on the service road. Most of us don’t have that kind of patience. 

The difference between a friend and an enemy is that when it comes to our enemies we expect to be paid back immediately. For a friend we are prepared to give without knowing the time frame for payback. Most of us treat time as an enemy. Seinfeld didn’t. 

How many times did Seinfeld rehearse his three minutes of material for The Tonight Show?

A thousand times, a thousand times.

Few, if at all, get to nine-hundred and something reps and give up. Most give up before they hit twenty or less. Let’s not waste time on this, they say to themselves. 

When the price we need to pay for something we say we want goes way up, it only makes sense to stop wanting it. It seems obvious to cut our losses. The first thing you must trade, in such a situation, is what you want for your time and energy. I have written at length about the value of quitting and about opportunity costs—what you can leave behind has the power to free you up. The implied wisdom being that when the cost of what you’re giving up surpasses the benefits of what you’re continuing to pursue, you should quit. Lest it remain unsaid—when you’ve found the thing that gives your life the most meaning, nothing is a sacrifice except giving up on it.

If failure can make a broken-winged bird of you, maybe flying is not what you wanted to do. Your situation and your failures would become a lot more palatable once you know what you want. And when you know what you truly want, the only failure is not trying for it.

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👋Hi! I’m Satyajit and my purpose in life is creating. I have been the happiest when I have made something from scratch. When nothing existed before and then through me something came into this world. Writing is the main medium of creation for me, though I also use my skills as a decision-making trainer to help create leverage in my clients’ careers and as a coach to create shifts in perspective in my clients’ lives.