How quickly can you fail? How badly can you fail? Why would that be something you want to keep track of? Perhaps because you may not understand the better purpose of failure. One man did know about how to use failure to his benefit.
Johnny Carson has, by far, been the most successful late night talk show ever. What you may not know is how he started every day. He would sit with some coffee, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, a pad of paper and a pen. He would read each of the papers and as he read, he would look to write a joke. He would write over 50 jokes per morning. HOWEVER, the purpose of each joke was so that it would get thrown in the trashcan. Every morning he would write over 50 jokes just so that he could throw them into the trashcan. If something went wrong and the joke was so good that he couldn’t throw it away, it made it to that night’s monologue. And of course, during the monologue, if a joke bombed, again, he made light of it so that failure also became success.
How successful? You may not know this but Johnny Carson is the all time highest paid television performer ever. PLUS, in one of his last contracts, he negotiated not only to have the rights to ALL of his tonight show episodes ever, but also that NBC would create a deep cave in Colorado where all of his original tapes are safely sealed for all time.
What about you? Do you look for ways to fail? I was talking to an agent the other day who was seeking some guidance. I gave her an assignment. Get 100 people to tell you know. By looking for people to tell her no, along the way she will stumble across those that will say yes instead. If we look for new ways, new techniques, new systems, we may very well find a dozen that don’t work. And yet we may find 1 that is phenomenal. I just read an article of a drummer talking a bout a singer in the band. He said the singer brought a lot of songs and that 90% were “garbage” but 10% were magic. If we are willing to fail we can all create magic.
Now after Johnny left The Tonight Show, he couldn’t break that morning habit of writing jokes to throw away. Instead, he would fax the jokes to David Letterman and David would use it that night. When Johnny Carson died, David did a monologue of old jokes that we had all heard before. After he monologue, Letterman told the audience that all the jokes were ones he had previously used that had been sent to him by Johnny. A very fitting tribute.
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