The Road to Mastery: Experimentation

"Do you think it's funny?" I ask my audience of one, who happens to be my best friend, Garrett.

We're in my living room, and I've just delivered the entire five-minute stand-up comedy set I plan to use to audition for our middle school talent show the next morning.

"Yeah dude, hilarious," Garrett says with a straight face.

In retrospect, if you have to ask someone if they think your jokes are funny, they probably don't.

The school gym the next morning seems enormous, and the walk to the center of the court, where a solitary microphone awaits me, takes forever. There's a smattering of teachers in the stands, one or two students on the talent show committee, and me.

I fumble with the corded mic, trying to work it off the stand. Feedback breaks the deafening silence in the room. I can't get it loose, so I decide to just start.

My set meanders from weak setups to half-baked punchlines, earning a few pity laughs along the way. The climax is a story about meeting a Goliath of a kid from Tillamook at a leadership conference dance, confusing him for a teacher, and telling him, "You shouldn't be dancing with kids!"

It doesn't land.

I finish my set, and the teacher who called me up thanks me for my audition. I walk out flustered and confused. Everyone in my classes laughs at my jokes. Garrett assured me it was funny. I've spoken in front of the whole school countless times at student council events. What happened?

As I make my way out of the gym, I hear someone behind me yell, "Boooo!"

Before I can process the experience any further, I run into Garrett, who had been watching from behind the bleachers.

"Sorry man," he says, putting a hand on my shoulder. "That looked pretty rough."

I decide in that moment that stand-up isn't my thing, and I've spent the last twenty years agreeing with my eighth-grade self.

Last week, in The Road to Mastery: Apprenticeship, I introduced Robert Greene's stages on the road to mastery. The first, apprenticeship, is where we observe, practice, and seek feedback.

Eventually, though, we have to move beyond simply learning from others. Greene calls what follows the "Creative-Active" phase. It's where we begin experimenting with what we've learned, trying new approaches, and developing a style of our own.

This phase requires two things: curiosity and repetition. Curiosity asks, "What happens if I try it this way?" Repetition gives us enough chances to find out.

Looking back at my stand-up audition, I did neither. Last week, I wrote that failure should be a ruler, not a dictionary. It should tell us where we are, not define who we are. Eighth-grade Jason didn't follow that advice.

That audition wasn't proof that I couldn't do stand-up. It was the result of one experiment. Instead of learning from it, adjusting, and trying again, I turned one data point into a conclusion. I stopped being curious about why I had bombed and simply accepted that stand-up wasn't for me. Worse, I never gave myself the repetition necessary to find out if I was right.

One bad experiment became a twenty-year conclusion.

Think back to something you've tried only once and afterward decided, "Not for me." What haven't you asked about that experience? What else is there to learn? Is it possible that another repetition of the experiment might yield a different result?

I still don't know if stand-up comedy is for me. After twenty years of saying otherwise, I'm realizing I probably don't have enough evidence to know.

Maybe it's time for a second experiment.

Fact

Our brains tend to generalize from past experiences, especially negative ones. A single painful failure can shape what we expect from similar situations in the future, even when that one experience isn't enough to predict what will happen next time.

Action

Run Experiment #2. Retry something you abandoned after one bad experience, but change one variable this time.

Question

What would you try again if you weren't afraid of getting the same result?

Quote

"Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes." - John Dewey