What are we doing and why?
You can’t make good food without good ingredients, but people try all the time. (Image by RitaE)
On a recent episode of WTF with Marc Maron, the host interviewed good old Jerry Seinfeld.
Jerry loves to be prickly and contrarian. Often, when Marc would ask him a direct question, Jerry’s answer would be simply, “No.” Reluctantly, he’d elaborate.
No, Jerry doesn’t believe comedians need to reveal anything about themselves. They just need to be funny.
No, they don’t need to have had crummy childhoods. They just need to be funny.
No, they don’t need to have something larger to say about society or the human condition. They just need to be funny.
As much as I love getting into the nuances of creative work and parse the career foundations of the greats, I found Jerry’s stance satisfying. While there’s plenty to say about the art of comedy and different ways to interpret Marc’s questions, Jerry’s not wrong: The foremost job of the comedian is to get the laugh. If that doesn’t happen, everything else is irrelevant.
Ironically, it can be really difficult to nail down such simple (and sometimes uncomfortable) truths. What is a thing for? How do you measure its effectiveness? What am I really trying to accomplish, and why? Does anyone care?
If we don’t have clarity about what we’re doing and why, we’ll drift around trying everything and getting overwhelmed. We won’t know when we’ve accomplished our goal.
On the other hand, when we know exactly what the vision is for success, we can create a plan to head straight there, saving lots of time and energy even if our plan includes a lot of really intense work.
For instance, my first couple of years as a music teacher were spent mired in confusion. I was teaching public school and attempting to broaden students’ horizons about music. After school, I would teach lessons in piano and guitar.
And successful outcomes for both of those projects were incredibly vague. What did it mean to broaden students’ horizons? Was that the highest and best use of instructional time? What did it mean to teach someone how to play an instrument? Did we — parent, student, and I — agree on that definition?
In fact, I lasted only a year in my public school position because broadening students’ horizons was unsatisfying to me and I couldn’t figure out what else to do with 500 kids, in groups of 25, in 45 minutes per week. Boy oh boy, if I had given that some thought beforehand, I would have saved a lot of people, including myself, a lot of hassle.
Meanwhile, as a piano and guitar instructor, I simply followed what I had been shown, which was a lot of trying to get kids to practice and lecturing them when they had not done so. After all, how could I teach them the instrument if they didn’t practice?
However, as I got better at the craft of teaching and integrated more of what I had learned from my best teachers and coaches, I realized that my goal wasn’t to try to get them to practice. If I really wanted to teach a kid an instrument, which would take a few years, the best thing I could do would be to make each music lesson an enjoyable experience. Then, they would keep coming back, sticking with lessons long enough to gain some skill, which would make the lessons even more enjoyable.
Ironically, that’s exactly how I could have been successful teaching public school, too.
Making lessons and classes enjoyable is still quite an undertaking. I still would need to figure out what made lessons enjoyable and how to measure that. But skipping the practice lectures would be a good start.
These days, I still try to get to the heart of what matters. And like old Jerry Seinfeld, I have strong opinions about this process. Often, we ask the wrong questions or make assumptions about things that we should spend more time carefully considering. We may be overlooking opportunities to make our work easier, more effective, and more fun, all at the same time.
I may come off as a curmudgeon or a know-it-all when I challenge a young adult on a question related to his career, express skepticism about a social media tactic that a business client wants to try, or poke at a lesson plan that a teacher on my team has created. But it opens up a collaborative process in which we pursue clarity together, arriving at fresh insights that expose the underlying truths that had been obscured.
Comedians need to be funny; singers need to convey emotion; teachers need to build a bridge to meet students where they are; and those of us who undertake a project need to have perfect clarity on what it’s for. What’s the next step in figuring out yours?
