Jerry Seinfeld, Seth Rogen, and Maria Popova (Mini-Think #3)
Seinfeld's key to improvement, Rogen's recipe for success, Popova on creativity
Today’s thinkers technically are varied— a comedian, an actor, and a writer—but are all, at their core, writers. This is something I’ve found in common amongst great thinkers.
“I don’t know what I think,” Joan Didion said, “until I write it down.”
But the topics are several: on getting better, on persevering, and on creativity.
Let’s get it.
(1) Seinfeld’s two-sided strategy to get better
In 2017, Jerry Seinfeld did a Harvard Business Review interview to promote his newly successful show, Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.
The whole thing is great, but I especially like his response to the question:
“As a live performer, how do you improve?”
You have to know how to encourage yourself to be confident and courageous when you’re creating new material and also how to be harshly critical and go, ‘That’s good, but it’s not good enough—take it out.’ I don’t like to be so critical that I get depressed, but I get close. Managing that is the toughest part of the profession. Most of the time when comedians come off the stage and you ask them, “How was it?” they say, “I hate myself.”
Three years later, Seinfeld added to this idea in an interview with Tim Ferriss.
The key to writing…is to treat yourself like a baby, very extremely nurturing and loving, and then switch over to Lou Gossett in Officer and a Gentleman and just be a harsh prick, a ball-busting son of a bitch, about, “That is just not good enough. That’s got to come out,” or “It’s got to be redone or thrown away.”
So flipping back and forth between those two brain quadrants is the key to writing….It’s just all nurturing and loving and supportiveness. And then when you look at it the next day, you want to be just a hard-ass. And you switch back and forth.
My take: I think this applies to making anything, not just writing. You need to be positive and enthusiastic to make something. But you also need to adjust to reality and feedback. Henry Ford was proud of himself with his first ‘buggy’ and optimistic about its future. He had to be, because hardly anyone else was. But he also kept on himself to get better, as he knew it wasn’t ready for the public. So he made better and better models, until finally, he got the Model T, and the world finally saw what he saw.
(2) Seth Rogen’s common denominator of success
Seth Rogen started working on a screenplay with Evan Goldberg when they were 13. They finished a handful of years later in the late 90s, but the movie wasn’t made until 2008. No one would make it, until someone finally did and it was a hit.
It was called Superbad.
This Superbad story is a good example of how Seth Rogen is living proof of advice he gave on
‘s Podcast, Diary of a CEO, a great interview in its entirety.Bartlett asked Rogen what he thought was the key to his huge success. Rogen answered matter of factly: don’t quit.
If you don’t quit, you might make it. And if you quit, you definitely won’t.
And I think after all the years I’ve seen people make it and not make it, the only common denominator is that.
My Take: Listening to Rogen say this, you know he believes it, and that maybe it’s the first time he’s said it out loud. It’s like he was coming to the realization in front of us.
When Kevin Hart wanted to quit, his mentor Keith Robinson had similar advice for him, though Robinson was less subtle. “It ain’t gonna happen overnight,” Keith told Hart. “It takes time. So until it happens, don’t fuckin’ bitch about it.” “Perseverance,” Steve Martin said, “is a great substitute for talent.”
Bottom line: You either quit, or you hang around long enough to—probably— get it right.
(3) Maria Popova on ‘combinatory creativity’
A Bulgarian immigrant and bookworm, Popova noticed that all anyone ever thought about was their industry. So she started a Friday email sharing non-agency things she'd learned from timeless thinkers, ranging from love to neuroscience, from string theory to friendship. Thinkers like Aristotle, James Baldwin, Patty Smith, and Rachel Carson. That email became a blog in 2006—now one of the most read on the web.
In a talk she gave for Creative Mornings in 2011, Popova explains how creativity comes about.
has called, the “combination of slow hunches,” Popova continues:In order for us to truly create and contribute to the world, we have to be able to connect countless dots, to cross-pollinate ideas from a wealth of disciplines, to combine and recombine these pieces and build new castles.
Kind of LEGOs. The more of these building blocks we have, and the more diverse their shapes and colors, the more interesting our castles will become. Because if we only have one color and one shape, it greatly limits how much we can create, even within our one area of expertise.
I like to think of it this way: We take information, from it synthesize insight, which in turn germinates ideas. And then we take these ideas, ours and those of others, we toss them into our mental reservoir where they sit and sort of just float around until one day they float into just the right alignment to click into a new idea.
My Take: If you read The Marginalian (formerly Brainpickings)—and you should— you’ll see that Maria was a great inspiration for OGT. It would not be an exaggeration to say that she changed my life. Not the least of that change was due to the infinite sources and ideas I got from her, which I recombined, and made my own.
My hope is that that OGT can carry a bit of that torch, if only one flame of it—one ember—and helps you put together your thing.