Making difficult things look easy
Charles James Fox was accustomed to say that he hoped more from a man who failed, and yet went on in spite of his failure, than from the buoyant career of the successful. ‘It is all very well,’ said he, ‘to tell me that a young man has distinguished himself by a brilliant first speech. He may go on, or he may be satisfied with his first triumph; but show me a young man who has not succeeded at first, and nevertheless has gone on, and I will back that young man to do better than most of those who have succeeded at the first trial.’”
The comedic genius in stand-up comics is often marshaled as the spontaneous ability to spring up funny phrases wherever they are; but the hard work and preparation that goes behind every joke, line, and punchline would stagger the mind.
Before they become relatively good, they have to do what they call “bombing” several times over during their career. This means completely failing at their object of making the crowd laugh, they often get booed off the stage, or get met with blank stares after delivering a punchline to a joke they had been working on all week.
They get accustomed to having their self esteem totally crushed night after night. This is the first challenge they have to overcome.
“Your palm sweats, your heart starts racing, you suddenly feel you need the toilet when you don’t. You want to do everything but stand in front of that crowd,” says one comedian. “You just have to get used to it. You do it every night, week, month, however long it takes until you can nail it and land those jokes.”
The funniest of their jokes are revised over and over again and honed in front of audiences, sometimes over the span of years. They never really know if a joke will work until they’ve tried it on stage, and even if it works on one audience, it’s not a measure of certainty that it will work on another.
One famous comedian says he measures the success of a joke by playing the recording afterwards, scoring the laughs in the audience on a scale of 1–10.
“We spend our nights waiting hours for 5 minutes of stage time,” says another. “Then we listen to recordings of those sets later to figure out why a joke worked or didn’t this time. Did I skip a word? Was my facial expression wrong?”
Courtiers in medieval times had to keep the support and favour of the ruler in order to remain relevant. To do so, they had to be skilled not just in arms and athletics, but also in music and dance. It’s obvious then that they had to train relentlessly to attain proficiency in so many fields.
But in an environment which valued entertainment and intrigue above all else, it was important that courtiers not be seen exerting conscious effort into the deeds they performed.
This added value to their performances and allowed them to keep the favour of their patrons. The Italian courtier Baldassare Castiglione thought that this quality — the ability to display a certain nonchalance — was the hallmark of the ideal courtier. The idea was to make every movement and statement appear to be effortless and without thought. He called this sprezzatura.
The trained observer sees sprezzatura as a sign that the individual has put in the work. The individual has attained such a level of mastery that he is able to conceal his movements and make difficult things look easy. But to the untrained eye, the performer is simply talented and his acts are that of genius, and thus he says to himself, ‘here, there is no room to compete.”
“Dying.” Says Bolt, when he explains what it’s like to train like him. “Everyday you’re just dying,” he says.
“People say ‘oh it looks so easy, you make it look effortless,’ Bolt continues, “but it’s really hard work before you get to that point. There are times when you run and you just wanna stop, you just want to give up and say to hell with this I wanna go home. Some days you wake up and remember you have training today and your body just tenses up and you’re like ‘God I don’t wanna go,’ but you gotta go, it’s hard. A lot of people don’t know how hard this is.”
“We are not used to seeing you suffering,” says a reporter to Bolt in the documentary film I Am Bolt. We see an exhausted Bolt laying flat on the floor, doing drill after drill of grueling 200m sprints under the direction of his coach Glen Mills, in preparation for the upcoming Olympic games in Rio 2016.
“That’s why you guys are here,” says Bolt under short breaths, “You’re here to show the true story.”
“You mean this here is the reality? You mean the competition is not the reality?”
“Listen…” says Bolt, with a knowing grin on his face, “The competition is the easy part, the work is done behind the scenes.”
When Bolt’s father was asked what he thought of his son’s training sessions, he responded by saying that he cannot watch it and recalls one particular session where Bolt was training so hard that he was throwing up after every drill. “I really felt bad for him,” he says. “I didn’t know he had to work so hard, that was some hard training, that’s why I prefer not to be there because it’s not easy to watch him train like that, it’s really tough to watch.”
Bolt’s conscience speaks to him sometimes: “Don’t do it,” he jokes. “Stop running. Retire. Go play football. Go play golf.”
It is not ease, but effort,” writes Smiles, “ — not facility, but difficulty, that makes men. There is, perhaps, no station in life, in which difficulties have not to be encountered and overcome before any decided measure of success can be achieved. Those difficulties are, however, our best instructors, as our mistakes often form our best experience.
Read more in my new book! The Trials And Triumphs of Hyperachievers
