Here’s some stuff cussing expresses
Please use swears unsparingly, but have fun with them.
Many folks are drawn to entertainment as a way to fit in. They feel that they were an outsider, except when the stage happened to them, or when they had some kind of art to share.
When this feeling comes up for us again with our audience, it can really screw us. The thing that makes our creations great is the connection, not the specialness of us. I’ve had this hit me when I’m going on stage for a big corporate event or two. I think, “These people all have jobs. They’re normal. They’re in sales and they are around other sales people. They want to hang with sales people. They don’t want to watch this show. I don’t fit in here.”
With this kind of thinking, I’m a mess. I have no power, I have nothing to offer them. So, I can change my thinking to, “These people have never been in this place before, they’ve never experienced what I’m about to do. They don’t know how to deal with it or each other in this situation. If they think they know, they are going to be surprised. I’m going to help them fit in.”
I’m just a person. They’re people. We’re connecting. We’re together. I’m doing my part.
Being decisive is what we do in design and what we do in entertainment. We take responsibility for making decisions for our audience. Then, we can guide them along like happy sheep to a wonderful place, an important experience, or a fulfilling message.
I used this meme before and here it is again…
We notice things in order because of the hierarchy of letterforms presented in the meme. The headline is the king, then it descends down to the serfs of letters. Good graphic designers guide a viewer through what’s important first, second, third and on and on. We make intentional decisions and use empathy and psychology to help make a message absorbable.
In the western world, we scan a document top left to bottom right, but things (like big headlines) can disrupt that flow and create a new path. Disruptions are stimulating and make observance fun / engaging. This is true with entertainment also. Some people want to make entertainment that is top left to bottom right, but the badasses always look for ways to get people looking somewhere else first. They might not be comfortable with their audience being uncomfortable, but they know that it’s worth it.
When people ask me generally if I have any tips on how to make it in showbiz, I generally answer them “Don’t do it.” If a person doesn’t really really want to do it, it’s not worth it. I definitely wouldn’t recommend my path in my career even though I love it and I’m grateful for it. It’s rough and I tried to be DIY with everything for a long time. Here’s a picture of me in 2003 with my haircut and clothes that I did myself.
We might be afraid of self promotion and getting salesy. We might be afraid that everyone will distrust us because we talk about what we make… but forget going big. Do we even go little? Have our people heard from us? Do they know our current thing? Do they know how to get our stuff?
I unsubscribe from lots of email newsletters. Maybe 6 a week. I like getting some, but I’m very picky about my inbox because I try to get it empty by the end of the day. I am subscribed to Apple’s email list. It is complete advertising for their products. I like the way they communicate. I like to know what they’re doing next. So, I stay on the list. They keep sending me things. They don’t need to push anything on me because I already buy the things I want from them. They just need to let me know what’s available.
So many creators I know are not talking about the thing they love. There’s nothing on their social media that conveys that they have a project now, that they’re available now for hire, that they have something important coming soon. They are obviously purposefully avoiding telling people about that thing that they spend all day and night thinking about.
The people that follow and friend us probably want to know what we’re doing with our lives. They probably want to be advocates, encouragers, and evangelists for what we do because that’s easy and rewarding. They are on board with our mission and they are ready to receive something great.
Letting people know the next step or the next part of our work is awesome. We don’t need to say over and over “buy my book,” but we can say what the book means to us, exciting news about the book, what it feels like to write a book, that we would love it if someone bought another copy of the stinking book, though.
Just let people know now. Later, we can work on getting over our fears of big promotion.
We create a vast lavish room of luxury for our audiences. We make wonderful safe place to explore the entertainment we create. This room has it all. It’s great. So much of ourselves.
The issue with getting people into the room is the door. The door is small. Someone feels safe stepping through a door into our our room because it’s a small step. It’s a light commitment. If we try to just get them in the room and skip the door, they’re not going to enjoy being pushed through the wall. If we try to make the whole room the door, the room’s going to suffer.
So, we have to make the door something easy. We don’t have to show our audiences everything in our room. We don’t have to express the entire place. We need to give them something small and appetizing.
A door with a fresh coat of paint and a welcome mat and a functioning door nob seems lame for the wonder we know is beyond. It’s very hard to be so elegant. It might seem like we won’t get the validation we want, or we might loose the interest of the people we want. The opposite is true. If we make a good door, we are performing a generous act. By pigeonholing ourselves, we are giving people an easy portal to the fruits of all our genius and effort.
The door and room are metaphors. I hope you got that.
I used to have this impression that every high-level artist is the same. They function in this beautiful interesting way where they turn it on and you can just see the work flowing.
For instance, I thought every great actor, would have an approach and work ethic in common even though their presentation on camera was different.
I was cast in a TV special called White Hot Holiday. Taraji P. Henson was the star. Taraji reminded me of my wife in her style of work. Even though she’s intense and fierce in some of her roles, she was super super sweet to everyone on set and maybe a little nervous in anticipation of her scenes, then showed up very precise. Nailed everything with consistency and awareness, then went back to her chair to prep for the next scene. This is how I thought everyone would be.
Terry Crews came on set like Wayne Newton. He was smiling, high fiving people, joking, and prepared. Sets are usually pretty quiet during setups and it’s a lot of clatter of things moving around. There’s communication, but it’s mostly very practical and polite. Terry changed the room. It was like, “Hey we like doing this stuff, and isn’t great Terry’s here. He’s everyone’s friend. I don’t remember him looking at the script. He was ready, loose and dependable. Not as precise as Taraji, but not really a bad take.
Tyler Perry was amazing. He had a gravitas to him but was very friendly and ready to act. He was asking for lines, he was going wherever he wanted. He was changing the lines whenever he wanted, he was wild. I think one time the camera operator couldn’t follow him. He was funny and fun and off the rails.
Each of these people were doing amazing things. Each of their performances were powerful and useful to the production. They were acting. They were doing their jobs really well. As well as you would hope. I’m sure many directors and editors and other crew would usually prefer that all the actors have the same workflow, but that isn’t how people are. There’s no factory that outputs entertainers. We all come from our own paths and bring our strengths however we learn them.
This moment on set with some greats wasn’t about how we all bring something different to the arts. It was about how we all bring the same thing ( in this case stellar acting ) in different ways. When I find someone else’s method or their career daunting to me and feel like I’m doing it wrong, I remember that there’s no wrong way.
We gotta move! Our own decision fatigue can be holding us back from giving our audiences what they need.
When I go to a restaurant with friends, the most important thing to me is the friends. I know if I spend all day looking through the menu options I will…
My usual technique instead is to look at the menu. When I see something that looks good, I stop reading and choose that.
I think it’s helpful to examine how many of our decisions can be about good, not perfect. How many decisions can we just choose to check off the list and let them go. Ed Catmull (of Pixar) in Creativity Inc says something about the creative process being millions of decisions. Let’s make those things easy on ourselves if possible.
With everyone developing more of a social consciousness, and with our society making opinions more and more important, there’s a ton of flack going around.
I’m not really into taking unsolicited feedback. It’s usually off track. I love getting solicited feedback from people who know what I’m doing.
Flack usually comes from a person’s personal yearning instead of from their desire to help.
With Boobietrap we got a lot of flack for different things because we were available to a lot of people. We also got some flack probably because we were doing things in new ways.
Most of the content of the flack was valid and sensible from the flacker’s perspective. We even got flack for not including enough women or diverse people in some of the shows. Just because they were right didn’t mean we wanted to listen to it.
The best way to respond to flack is to listen and let them know that they were heard. Getting defensive, justifying, or any other response is not usually very effective.
I didn’t want to make changes to things because of flack. I wanted to make changes to things because of intention. We did respond to the diversity issue in Boobietrap, but we didn’t respond to the flack. We responded to the issue before we got the flack.
We all need to work from our intentions. What do we want? Sticking to our intentions, though it takes responsibility, gives us power and gives us a voice. When we got flack for our business model, or our time limit, or our booking style, or our whatever, we knew that people may be responding to why we’re different, but we’re different on purpose. That’s the point.
I make fun for a living, but I don’t want to hear it when I’m buckling down to make something happen. It’s so hard to accept my advisors saying to find joy, to live life, to savor sweetness when I have stuff I NEED to get done.
The helpful vibe is fun. When we’re getting serious, we’re getting slow. I don’t want to hear it in the moment. I want to hear a practical system for total control of the situation.
One of the problems I have with the word “Creativity” is that it is often used to mean boundless imagination. People think they don’t have it, or they think they need to be freed from bounds to achieve it. What it really is is making stuff. Creating. And if we’re waiting or shaming ourselves, we’re not making.
The problem is, sometimes there aren’t enough problems. If we are free to imagine a lot of stuff we can do, it’s paralysing. Our brain is looking for the problem to solve and there is not clear problem.
We need to make things concrete. Let’s say we have to write a book, but we don’t have a budget, a deadline, a topic, an audience, page count, or a genre. Most likely we’ll be glad to have the freedom, but will quickly feel put on the spot.
The easiest solution is to make limitations. When someone says they want to make a new stage act and they ask me how to start, I say “which show do you want your stage act to go in? ” If they want it to work in Scot Nery’s Boobietrap for example, they’ll immediately be dammed up. They’ll know…
You might call these limitations or problems or puzzles. Whatever they are, if our projects are boundaryless, they’re not projects. They’re messes and it’s very hard to feel fulfilled in them.
Creating clown bits is pretty limitless. Clowns are not restricted to even logic, so anything goes. Stefan is really good at just getting something going. He doesn’t care about making something good at the beginning. He knows he’ll make it good later. He just has to make SOMETHING to start. So, when he’s directing, he’ll just say “Walk over there, pick up that box. Cry into it. Then pull out a pickle, sit down and eat it.” Those actions don’t matter very much. They’ll probably change later, but it gets the clown working, making, and moving. Then, the clown has the challenge of “How can I make this little action of eating a pickle funny?”
The original pattern are just the lines on the sport field. Those lines are boring and bland, but that doesn’t make the game boring — theres still a lot that can happen in that game. At the same time, the game wouldn’t be fun without those lines.
This is the annual time for my facebook friends to post about how we all need to support local businesses or small businesses. This is my annual time to ask small business owners to find more ways to support their customers. This is way more important.
Our businesses are community services. We are here to do some good work. That’s why we get fulfillment from what we do. The more we serve the more fulfillment we get. We will not get more fulfillment from people charitably giving us business for things they don’t want.
As we find new ways to serve, we also get more security for our pursuits because we’re able to get exponentially more revenue and impact in the world.
Please support local customers… and small ones.