The Human Struggle In One Word
If he ever sensed even a slight bit of discord among the cast and crew of his TV series “Seinfeld,” Jerry Seinfeld said, “I was fearless in rooting it out and solving it.” If anyone seemed to be having a problem, “I walk right up to them and go, ‘Is there a problem? Let’s talk about this.’ Because I don’t like discord. I don’t like it. I cannot stand it.” Asked where he learned this proactive approach to conflict resolution, Seinfeld said, “I don’t know…I just feel like if you break the human struggle down to one word, it’s CONFRONT. And so, I approach everything that way.” Confronting—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
Anticipation Is Scarier Than Confrontation
In the movie Jaws, you don’t see the shark until 1 hour and 21 minutes into the movie. “Rather than seeing the shark in every scene,” director Steven Spielberg said, “I played a lot of the fear from the people in the water, from seeing their legs kicking, from the point of view of the camera moving along the surface of the water.” It just goes to show, my friend Cole Schafer said, “that anticipation is scarier than confrontation.”
So As Not To Kid Myself
Before he could take his daily half-mile swim, before he could go fishing on the Gulf Stream, before he could eat breakfast, read, or reply to letters—Ernest Hemingway confronted “the awful responsibility of writing,” or as he put it other times, “the responsibility of awful writing.” Under a gazelle head mounted on his wall, in plain sight, he kept a large piece of cardboard titled, “So As Not To Kid Myself,” under which he charted his daily writing output. “Hemingway’s goal was to write five hundred words a day, and he would post his daily output on the chart,” Tony Castro writes in Looking For Hemingway. “Ernest would remain in his bedroom when the maids came by to clean after he had finished working, just to keep close watch that they didn’t move his papers or touch his work chart.”
The Inspiration Lags Behind The Confront
Before he was the lead singer, guitarist, and songwriter of the White Stripes, Jack White was a chair upholsterer. “When I was an upholsterer,” he said, “sometimes you’re not inspired to reupholster an old chair. It’s just work and you just do it because you’re supposed to. And eventually, you look at it and you say, ‘that’s good, that’s pretty good.’” In upholstering and in songwriting, White explains, the inspiration lags behind the confront. “Not every day of your life are you gonna wake up and the clouds are gonna part and the rays from heaven are gonna come down and you’re gonna write a song from it. But if you just get in there and just force yourself to work, maybe something good will come out.” (File next to Robert Greene’s definition of creativity: “Creativity is a function of the previous work you put in.”)
Ability Lags Behind The Confront
On October 10, 2001, the future award-winning comedy writer B.J. Novak tried stand up comedy for the first time. It was a disaster. Novak was terrible. After he got off stage, the emcee said to the crowd, “takes a lot of courage to get up on this stage.” For the next three months, Novak couldn’t work up the courage to get up on another stage. Then he had an idea. If he paid for stage time at various comedy clubs for two weeks straight, he would have not choice but to confront the stage. “I couldn’t make each night a referendum on whether or not I should do it,” as he put it. Regardless of whether he did well or not, the next night, he had to get back up on another stage. And as he forced himself to confront the stage night after night, he got better and better which made it easier and easier to get up on stage. It’s a virtuous cycle— “If you do 20 jokes and 3 of them get laughs—well, those are the 3 you keep. And then after a while, one of them always does well—well, that’s your opener. And then a second always does well—well, now you have a closer…And it evolves that way. I was bad for a while. But night after night, you evolve and get better.” Similar to inspiration, ability lags behind the confront.
No Loitering. Get To Work
In another interview, Seinfeld said, “my motto is ‘No loitering. Get to work.’ … It’s like going into the gym every day. You know how you walk in everyday and you go, ‘oh geez, I gotta do this again?’ … But then once you get going, 30 minutes into your workout, you’re okay.” Whether it’s the blank page, the stage, or the gym, Seinfeld says, “that’s life: it’s a high confront. It’s a very high confront. You master the confront, you’ve mastered life.”