Chapter 19
Nobody knows anything. The longer my career continues, the more I am certain of this. People think they know shit. They have ideas about things. They have thoughts and theories, hypotheses, and past studies. Yet the more things I do and the longer I do them, I have come to discover that most everybody is making shit up on the fly. And that is a good thing.
The whole point of innovation is to create something new. If we are going to create something new, then we can never be certain how it is going to work out. At some point we have to take a chance and make decisions based on the information we have at hand, our past experiences, and our gut intuition. Sprinkle in some wishful thinking and luck and we just may come up with something that nobody else has.
Much like when you figure out that “nobody gives a shit” about you, realizing that by and large nobody knows anything is quite empowering. What can be incredibly intimidating is the idea that everybody else knows much more than you do about whatever it is you want to attempt.
Clearly there are experts in every field and people who've accomplished great things and have far more experience then we will ever have at the start of something. It can cause us to have immense self‐doubt in our own ability and lead us to quit before we ever even get started. I mean, everything has already been done by everyone everywhere, so what's the point? Might as well stick to the same old same old, and wait for that cold black cloud to come on down.
Don't you believe it, even for a second. There is always a way to do something new or different or better. There is always a way to compete. People like to say that for every Coke there is a Pepsi. There are also Dr Pepper, Polar Cola, Moxie, Jones Soda, Pascual Boing, Bundaberg, La Croix, Squamscot, Cheerwine, Brooklyn Soda Works, Lester's Fixin's Bacon Soda, and literally hundreds of others. There is always room for more if it is better or differentiated in some way. I'm sure at some point someone told the creators of Lester's Fixin's Bacon Soda that they were insane. Who the hell would want bacon soda, or buffalo wings soda, or ranch dressing soda? Yet they obviously believed in their own insanity and now they have a KISS‐branded line of colas. They may never be Coca‐Cola but that's not the point. They created something original and brought flavors and branding opportunities together in way others were not thinking about.
Even the biggest, most established brands or experts I've ever spoken with, when pressed, tend to concede that to a degree they still feel like they are making things up as they go along. I think that most of us, if we don't feel like an outright fraud, then there is a certain feeling of fooling most of the people most of the time. I mean, hey, if they are going to promote me and let me keep going then, sure, why not? Until they figure out that I'm faking it until I make it, then I will walk down the path as far as they will let me go.
The further we go down the path the more knowledge and experience we pick up, so by the time we reach a certain point we actually do end up knowing some stuff. And the best way to learn about anything is by doing it. You can study comedy all you want but until you actually get on stage and do it, it is nothing but high theory. This concept is true for just about everything; making soda, flying planes, creating an app or having sex. The true knowledge and thrill is in the doing.
Yes, I get it, you need to acquire the basic skills to pursue whatever it is that you want to pursue. In today's day and age, access to the initial information that you need about anything can be easily found. For most of human history it was the access to information that would stop or limit individuals from branching out of their small area of knowledge. If you were born into a farming family, you were most likely going to be a farmer. If you were born to a fisherman, that was most likely going to be your lot in life.
Hundreds of years ago somebody born into a fishing family who wanted to build beautiful churches most likely would never have access to even the basic information about architecture, engineering, and design. Nowadays there is open‐source everything. Want to build your own rocket to go to outer space? You can find that information online. Looking to dabble in mind control or maybe the dark arts? There is a how‐to guide for that. You just have to Google it. Once you start a general course of study to get the basics down, the key is to put what you are learning into tangible practice in some way, shape, or form.
Your first attempts will suck. They will. There is no getting around this. Your first rocket will blow up and your initial attempts at commanding people to do your bidding will be woefully disappointing. Everybody sucks at everything at first. That is perfectly okay. There are very few prodigies in the world, and if you are reading this book with this title, I have to assume you don't consider yourself one. I sure as hell know I am not. It makes no difference. The ability to do does not reside in the hands of a small minority any longer.
No longer do you have to feel that creating something is the domain of chosen virtuosos who have either been tapped by the gods or spent all of their time studying in their chosen field with the most eminent teachers available to them. If you have access to either of those things, then good for you. For the rest of us, sucking is the first step to greatness. Or at least mediocrity. Mediocrity leads to proficiency, proficiency leads to mastery, and mastery leads to excellence. It is heartening to know that the best of the best sucked at one point.
When we make shit up, the goal isn't to be instantly amazing at whatever it is we are attempting. It is to start the forward progress toward our objective. By giving ourselves permission to suck initially, we allow ourselves to create critical forward momentum. More than anything else the ability to sustain that momentum, over self‐doubts and haters and setbacks, is what is needed to keep us pointed toward our end goal. Sucking and being bad at something is a temporary state. At some point you will be better equipped. At some point the state of sucking will have come to an end.
Since nobody knows anything and everybody sucks at most things, this knowledge gives us the confidence to not listen to anybody and try whatever the hell we want. Yes, of course there are plenty of people worth listening to, who have experience in whatever it is we are trying to do that is worthwhile. But even the helpful knowledge and advice that someone can impart can only be proven valid if we attempt to implement it in some way. You can get all the great advice you want, but if you are never actually willing to try, you will never know if it was truly good advice or not. Advice not acted on is mere speculation.
As a general rule I don't give advice. I am always happy to discuss my experiences and to contemplate choices and potential outcomes, but I try to avoid giving outright advice. If we adhere to the theory that nobody knows anything, including myself, then the best we can do is to try to gain an understanding of my experiences and see how these might apply to you. You, as the receiver of my experiences, then need to apply what makes sense to you and ignore that which doesn't.
If you apply what makes sense and it works, great! If you ignore the advice because it doesn't seem to make sense to you, and that works, great! The reality is that both of those situations will be true at some point. Some advice will make sense and work for you. Some advice will not make sense and not work for you at all. There will be times where you feel like you need to do exactly the opposite of what is being advised and it will work out swimmingly. There will be other times where you will ignore the advice and will fail horribly.
The commonality in all of these scenarios is that you have to decide to do something. To test the theory one way or the other. Nobody can tell you the right way to become a comedian. They can tell you of the ways things have worked or not worked out for them, but ultimately you will have to see if those same experiences and choices have the same results for you.
So go ahead and get yourself a mentor or a guru or a sage or a seer or whomever it is that can share their experiences doing the thing it is that you want to do. While their experiences are very true for them they can't really know how it will be for you. That means you have all the power to go ahead and explore whatever the hell your heart desires or your head can think of. Nobody knows anything, we all just think we do. And that more often than not that is enough to make shit happen.