The Don't Be Afraid To Polish Turds

I used to believe that if you had the time to find the right words, you could make anything that is interesting to you interesting to other people too. I'm not talented or experienced or hardworking, but the fact that I held this belief has been enough to make me a decent communicator. To me, that is the secret sauce - the ability to hang on to the hope that somewhere, somehow, there is a way to get your difficult message through. Without it, you're just going to be swimming in the same shallow pool of ideas as everyone else.

In recent years, my faith has been slipping a little. Lately, it always feels like there isn't enough time to write and nobody has the time to read or listen. I recently started making Tik Tok videos. I enjoy it tremendously, the same way I enjoy writing and performing stand-up comedy. They both teach me to keep my messages concise, which is a skill I'm still learning and I am grateful for that. However, they also have the unwelcome side effect of wearing away the optimism. I see people with unoriginal ideas getting  millions of views on social media and I think maybe I should opt for quantity instead of quality, which means I need to be more efficient in my workflow. I have been shutting down ideas pre-maturely because that's the most energy-efficient way to work. I didn't want to waste time trying anything weird. I only wanted to write jokes I more or less knew would work. Efficiency is the secret sauce killer. I have become the kind of writer I find boring. 

In comedy, we're often told to value the feedback of the audience and this is good advice but you can overheed good advice. Lately, I would bring a first draft of a joke to an open mic, perform it, don't get the laughter that I expected and then scrap the idea completely. Nobody wants to be caught polishing a turd. It's embarassing! So we will tend to avoid that experience. This is a mistake, because I haven't found the words and the way to communicate my idea properly yet. The audience might not laugh, or they might boo, or they might even tell me directly that they are offended by the joke and specifically demand that I avoid the topic altogether. That just means this draft is not working. They cannot decide on the final draft when neither they nor me nor anybody else have seen it yet. So it is my job and nobody else's to decide if the core idea is still worth exploring. If it is, then I will politely acknowledge their well-intentioned advice and then completely disregard it.

There are still original ideas out there. They haven't been explored because they look like turds. You'll have to polish a few to find the gems.