“I’ve started several businesses. Maybe 17 have failed out of 20. I fail quickly. I fail frequently. Entrepreneurship is a sentence of failures punctuated by brief success.”
The words of a successful/unsuccessful entrepreneur.
It makes me think of joke writing. For “business”, substitute “joke”.
A good stand-up show is all your successes in one place.
With stand-up and entrepreneurship, the trick is to find ways to fail that mean you can keep playing the game.
Hey there. You might be reading this because you know me, or you saw me at a gig, or Google made a mistake, or we’re family, but let’s face it…
I’m a nobody. Good.
Adolf Hitler. Jimmy Savile. Jeremy Clarkson. If history teaches us anything, it’s that Somebodies are the problem. They should probably be banned.
If you’re a somebody and you’re reading this, sorry but it’s not for you.
What’s great about my story is that it’s not: I was a nobody, then through persistence, I met Bill Gates in a lift, convinced him to fund me, and now I own an island. That’s the blog post a Somebody would write.
What’s great about my story is that it’s this: I was a nobody, then through persistence (and luck*), I found a way to do what I love most days of my life. And I’m still a nobody. And there are others like me. Isn’t that great?
If I can do it with all my nobody-ness – you can, too.
Have you heard of the post-industrial economy? In short, it’s this. You’re fired.
I’m hearing the smart people say that it’s becoming vital to figure out how to make it without institutions.
So. I’ll try and be as honest as possible about my experiences here, and maybe you can take something from them. Or add to them. You should ask if you want to know something specific. And take it with a grain of salt**.
*I will be publishing a definitive “how-to” guide about luck tomorrow.
**I will be publishing a definitive “how-to” guide about truth the day after***.
***I don’t even know if I’m telling the truth in this last footnote.
Update. I thought it was more important to do the truth post first. So these footnotes are a bit of a massaging of truth. I think this might be irony.
…is:
Good. (Enough).
Holding out for “Perfect” will leave you unpublished every time.
Just me, but I think we’re all anarchists, in that we hate being told what to do, but we’re also all masochists, in that we wish somebody would make things easy for us, and tell us what to do.
Total freedom is still scary to us. Mostly, we’re descended from serfs.
Because we hate being told what to do, but also crave being told what to do, we’re always constructing reasons to be obedient where they don’t exist.
Do you want to put your heart and soul into making something? Do you care enough about it to take the hits and get better at what you do?
Then don’t obey your fear of taking a creative risk. That’s an order!
Christian Reilly 