Cameron Fink’s Post

Transcript

Jehan Casinader, a guy in New Zealand a journalist, speaker, he's got quite a profile he put up an amazing post last week that said, ���If everything is practice, nothing is wasted.��� Oooh, that's super cool! It���s just this beautiful frame where if you speak to a half-empty room, well, it was practice. If I fluffed my lines, made a mistake, well, I was practising. And it's a beautiful way to look at encouraging yourself to do things that you don't feel ready for. And instead of saying, ���Oh, I'm not quite prepared enough,��� or ���I don't think I'm ready for that opportunity.��� If you say to yourself, Well, if I go into this with the intention of learning from it, yeah, Yeah. If I go in with the intention of growing from the opportunity. It reduces the pressure to be perfect and in fact, It's more likely to make you good. Yeah. And people that actually essentially do that as a way of life are buskers, because buskers are often incredible performers precisely because they don't really practise, at least not in their room. Their practice is walking down to Bourke Street or wherever their haunt is, and they stick out their case and say, ���Yeah, give me some money if you want.��� And then they play the music or give the performance they were going to give, whether they were doing it in their room alone or whether they're doing it to an audience of possibly one or two people. Yeah. Or no one! Or thirty people or a hundred people. Yeah, there's these three different people that busk out the front of the Woollies near here, which is not a highly trafficked area. And sometimes you walk around the corner and there's just this dude strumming away singing to himself, but he's out there performing. And then when people do walk past, or often what you'll find is it'll be a 3 to 8 year old kid who's kind of fascinated by what they're watching and they stop, and once one person stops, it's more likely that a little crowd will form. But buskers are essentially saying that I'm just always going to be performing/practising as a way of life, which is, I think, what you're describing. And practising to a half empty room. or when you don't get it quite right, is actually better practice. Yeah. If the only time you were ready was when conditions were perfect. Well you're not setting yourself up for equipping yourself to have the skills to cope when things go badly. And so.. That took four sentences to say one sentence���s worth of ideas I���ll sometimes say a thing and then finish. And then just say it again. And then just be like, ���What was the second one for??��� Practice! It���s practice. But I love the idea that by being willing to do things that aren't perfect or exposing yourself to a risk for something you aren't necessarily prepared for or don't have experience with, that's actually more valuable --Yeah. --than doing something you're completely capable of already. And going into it with the expectation that that's what's going to happen. You go into it expecting that it won't be perfect, expecting that you'll make a mistake, expecting that there will be things you learn you learn during the process that would have been helpful to know while it was happening. I've always loved the saying ���Experience is that thing you gain��� ���right after you needed it��� Which I think might even be a Mitch Hedberg That line is genius in its simplicity and worthy of a stand-up comedian. And if you go into it with that expectation as well, I reckon you're less likely to be derailed by those things. You go in knowing this joke might not work, that exercise might not work, this interaction might fall flat. And when you go in expecting that, at least some of it will probably go wrong. When it does, you���re just like ���hmmm!��� Righto! Moving on. Yeah. And if you're thinking about how this might apply to the thing you're doing next, what do you think the prescription is? It's all very well and good to just say this. Oh cool! I'm going to go do this thing that makes me feel really vulnerable or I feel really exposed. How do you coach yourself into it? You and I often talk about the the difference between perfectionism that's useful or perfectionism that's not or knowing when you're really good or being really humble. And there is something about knowing how much you can afford to risk or knowing how far you can afford to push your own envelope so that even if you make a bit of a meal of it, you haven't totally tanked. So that if you try something and it doesn't quite work, you've pushed it to the degree where if it worked, it would have been amazing and now that it hasn't, well, you can still recover it and you'll be okay because you're within your Goldilocks zone. And the people there are still getting value. Correct. You haven���t jeopardised their experience. Exactly. And so what you've done is exposed both yourself and them to the risk that it could be amazing or at the very upper echelons of what you could be capable of and you're also not exposed yourself for them to the risk that it would be below like pretty good. And so I think the things to take on or the degree to which you stretch yourself is is it going to put me in a position where I can still at least recover it if the wheels fall off a bit, And if you're any good doing something a bit risky makes everything better. Yeah. The adrenaline, the thrill of taking a bit of a chance or trying something new, or and explaining while you're doing it. If you give yourself permission by saying to the audience or your crowd or your workshop or your people-- --Yeah Hey, this is going to be a new thing. We're going to see how it goes. Then there's nothing wrong with that. BUT I've seen Colin Hay, the musician, many, many times. Is that the Men at Work guy? The Men at Work guy. And he tells a great story between songs he absolutely loves it and he's clearly practiced it. So I see him say the same stories again and again and I don't care because they���re so good. It's part of the show. It���s part of the show, and one time he tells a new story of something that happened recently and he hadn't quite nailed the delivery --And you���re just like, oh. --and he gets to the end of the story and the audience is just and he goes, ���Well, this is why I tell the same old shit��� And him doing that actually elevates the rest of it. Yeah. He���s risked the right amount. Yeah, I love that. And this is a world famous professional performaner, so it's not exactly a comparable experience but the right ratio of taking a bit of a risk, good thing. Yeah. And I also think if you're going to watch a movie, would you prefer to just guarantee getting a kind of average one or just coin flip on either it's absolutely incredible or utterly terrible In some ways for the movie, there's not a lot at risk. I'd rather maybe see something amazing and equally, whatever your thing is that you do that's good or pretty good or really good, I reckon a lot of your audience would actually prefer to take a bit of a risk that a part of it might fall flat so that some of it might be absolutely amazing. And what they're-- they don't have any control over that. They're banking on you to have the courage to expose yourself to the risk that it might PFFT. But if you never take that courageous step where you guaranteeing that your audience, whatever it is you're doing, is just going to get something that's... pretty good, which is not really good enough. No. And if everything is practice nothing is wasted. Thanks Jehan!