There’s One In Every Crowd – So Why Fret?

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When it comes to distractions while performing, entertainers tend to feel the pea beneath the mattress. I wish I had a nickel for each time I directed my attention the one person in the audience who doesn’t seem to “get” it. One of the most-challenging aspects of live performance is learning not to focus on the disinterested man, the disengaged woman and distracting 3-year old heckler.

Every speaker and entertainer need to decide who in the audience they want to win over. One has a choice: to direct your attention to the gal in the front row who’s clearly not “rolling with it” or to the vast majority of the audience who is.

When you “have the floor”, it’s natural to be hypersensitive to the least little distraction. One example from memory: I was performing in a cavernous theater before a large audience when a woman in the front row began crinkling the plastic wrapper of the lozenge she had just placed in her mouth. It was barely audible to me, let alone the rest of the audience. I decided, however, that it was important to make her (and therefore the rest of the audience) aware of it and that would she kindly refrain from it?

The audience’s reaction: What the hell is this guy referring to? The fact is, no one in the audience was paying any attention to it because they were paying attention to me. I had earned their attention by being interesting – and I threw it away when I drew their attention to the busy fingers of the woman in the front row.

There will always be distractions from time to time – a glass will shatter on the floor, for example – which would be awkward to let pass without any comment. But unless you’re absolutely certain that something which occurs “outside the lines” requires commentary from you, nine times out of ten you won’t regret ignoring it.

Return to www.daviDDeeble.com or watch me juggle (now-banned) plastic grocery bags on The Tonight Show.

Achieving Goals and the Magic Question “What should I be doing right now?”

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We’ve seen it so often it’s practically a ritual: an athlete who just lost the SuperBowl or the Wimbledon final is asked what it’s like to come so far only to fall just short.

“It is what it is” the athlete replies.

The following day the athlete is chided in the media for the banality of his comment.

I don’t doubt for a moment that many of those who utter this phrase are simply parroting what they’ve heard others say in similar circumstance. But wisdom is never banal, no matter how often it is uttered.

The Stoic philosopher Epictetus advised that one say precisely those words when, for example, you break your favorite mug. “It is what it is” is a magical phrase which reminds us that most of what we think of as tragedy is really just that: thoughts.

Instead of thinking “I got turned down from the prom – I’m a loser”, tell yourself “I got turned down from the prom”. Facts aren’t nearly as scary until we begin characterizing them.

One book that made a very strong impression on me is Bunkhouse Logic by Ben Stein. Bunkhouses are the humble structures in the middle of nowhere which cowboys stayed in while transporting cattle from one part of the vast western frontier to another. Successfully delivering the cattle to their destination on time is the cowboys job: if he doesn’t succeed he doesn’t get paid.

Stein describes a scene in which a cowboy brakes his leg while goofing around or otherwise doing something he probably shouldn’t have been doing. Being a cowboy, he sets the broken bone straight, creates a splint and then repairs to the bunkhouse, starring up at the stars against the jet-black sky between the cracks in the ceiling.

His thoughts naturally turn to the fix he’s in. “Well, this is just typical”, the cowboy thinks. “When will I ever learn? I’m a fool. This is hard enough work when I’m able-bodied. What am I going to do now?”

Sound familiar? If you’re like me, you probably have a similar sequence of thoughts yourself on a daily basis. But only one of those thoughts is free of characterization. Re-read the paragraph and see if you can guess which one it is.

“This is too hard” or “I’m a loser” are characterizations. “What am I going to do now?” is the question asked by those who get things done 

We can hem and haw all day about how it’s too late to save for retirement or get married. About how we seem to be on a treadmill while others go from success to success. But success begins with a radically pragmatic question: “What should I being doing right now to accomplish my goal?”

When you find the answer that question, the next question is exactly the same ad nauseum, until you accomplish your goal.

When you become familiar with this tendency to characterize events, it’s not uncommon to vilify yourself for for doing so. But remember: doing so is just another form of characterization. Simply follow-up such thoughts with the “magic” (read: pragmatic) words “What should I be doing right now?”

For more about the philosphy of Epictetus, I recommend The Art of Living translated by Sharon Lebell. Another excellent book on the importance replacing characterization with action is the the incredibly simple (not simplistic) Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson, M.D.

Do you have thoughts on accomplishing goals? Leave them in the comment section below.

Return to www.daviDDeeble.com or watch something go horribly wrong for me at private party performance.

Event Planners And The Folly Of The “5-Minute Break”

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For many event planners, few things seem to make more sense than inserting a 5-minute break just before the entertainment is to begin. Attendees, after all, will have spent a good chunk of time sitting through a lengthy awards ceremony or something similar, so what could make more sense than inserting a “short break” to stretch their legs so that they can fully enjoy the entertainment that follows?

As it happens, it’s a terrible idea for all involved: for the speaker or entertainer, certainly, but most of all for the audience. Take the awards ceremony example: the employee-of-the-year award has finally been handed out. It’s is the culmination of the evening. The volume, energy and excitement in the room is at its peak. Now is the time to harness that energy and channel it into introducing the evening’s entertainment, right? Instead, you invite everybody to step outside for just long enough to have a cigarette.

And this is assuming, of course, that five-minutes after the break has commenced that everyone will have taken care of their business and is now settled in, which of course never happens. In reality, for most of those in attendance it takes five minutes to just to begin a break. (I lived in Germany for several years and even there a 15-minute pause is understood to mean closer to 20 minutes. You think you’re going to wrangle up 400 Americans in five minutes? Let me know how that goes).

Shortly before an event recently the planner gave me a run down of the evening. When he got to the “short, five-minute break” (not to be confused with a long five-minute break) before I was to be introduced, I interrupted him.

“About that five-minute break. Can we just skip that?”

“Sure. Why?” he said.

Then I read him this blog. Just kidding: I explained that in my experience all the only thing a short break accomplishes is the entertainer is introduced with no focus: people are milling about, standing in line for drinks with their backs turned to the stage, etc.

Then his eyes lit up as if I was describing something in his own experience. It turns out, I was: “Hey, yeah!” he exclaimed. “We had that exact same situation last year when we had a stand-up comedian at our event. Nobody was paying attention until about ten minutes into the show.”

Gee, I can’t imagine why.

Return to daviDDeeble.com or watch learn how I reinvented myself after a head injury forced me to become a comedic juggler after years of being a conventional one.

Positive Resolutions

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Happy 2015, everybody. On New Years Day everyone seems to be either hungover or jogging: so stay off or on the sidewalk, respectively.

If you made resolutions, I hope at least one of them was affirmative (like becoming more honest) rather than a litany of no-longer-can-do’s (like giving up smoking or drinking). When you resolve to quit smoking or drinking it’s very easy to look around and see nothing but people having fun smoking and drinking.

Of course, much depends on how you phrase your resolution. “Quit sleeping around” is very different from “Be loyal to my wife”. If you can formulate your resolution as a positive rather than a negative you find that doing so gives you to strive for, rather than striving against.

Nearly everyone benefits from having a little wind to their back.

Return to www.daviDDeeble.com or watch me deal with a 3-year old heckler.

Perfection: The Enemy Of The Better

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I enjoy minimalism. I’m also an advocate of it when it comes to personal growth – a little bit better at something or other over the course of your entire life and you’re doing pretty darn good.

Many people are impatient with small improvements over time because they have a perfectionist inside them whispering “If I can’t do a thing perfectly right now, what’s the point?” Whether the issue is saving enough money for retirement or getting married, the attitude is “It’s far too late for me”. And then a decade passes and you look at a photo of yourself from the present and think “Man, I looked great. If only…”

Perfectionism is ultimately a form of nihilism which allows it’s practitioners to say “What difference does it make?” And so your blog goes unattended for weeks (or months), you fail to finish anything you start, etc.

In a post-internet world in which the appetite for new information is constant, the costs of stinking up the place on a regular basis have never been lower. The world isn’t even riding on your success. That the world doesn’t care about your failures is a great consolation.

So you wrote what might be the worst serious attempt at a blog post in the history of the internet. (Consider describing it as such and posting it to Tumblr). So what? Life – and your work – go on.

When America’s Got Talent! invited me on their show I thought “Sure, why not?” I did entirely on my own terms, what more could I ask? The audience at the taping seemed to be mostly 13-year old girls. Not exactly in my wheelhouse. I went on to become the only performer on the history of the show to be buzzed off by merely describing my act.

The point is I don’t regret it: I don’t have time to.

Return to www.daviDDeeble.com or learn more about my corporate presentation on YouTube.

Seek Growth, Not Change

Screen Shot 2014-12-25 at 8.12.03 PMSpeakers too mediocre to talk about virtues talk about values; speakers too mediocre to talk about values talk about change.

Presentations about “obstacles to change” are nothing-burgers because “change” as such is neither good nor bad. Becoming a father constitutes change, so does infanticide. Being neither good nor bad, change as such is the seemingly-safe route for the speaker who lacks the courage or qualifications to talk about growth.

Obstacles to growth (be it personal, professional or organizational) is a legitimate topic because growth, unlike change, is a virtue. Speakers tend to avoid talking about growth, however, because it is verifiable, measurable and has an aroma of free-market competitiveness which the corporate world is desperate to avoid.

Change, conversely, has a patina of virtue which affords organizations the opportunity to engage in moral exhibitionism while avoiding a naked exploration of new ways to increase marketshare.

Do you have thoughts about change? Leave them in the comment section below.

Return to www.daviDDeeble.com or learn more about my corporate presentation here.

The “Change” Nothing-Burger

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That change as such can be good or bad was once so well understood as to be axiomatic. Previous generations, naturally, were no strangers to change. But the notion that change is good in and of itself is an entirely new idea.

It’s also a very lucrative one. I once attended a workshop for speakers which confirmed this. The head of an lecture agency was asked by an aspiring speaker (itself an curious phenomenon) “What topic would you say is hottest among event planners?” The woman from the agency responded with one word, spoken with laconic certitude: “Change“.

President Obama famously centered his election campaign on change and today,  much to his consternation, it remains as popular with voters as ever.

Change, it turns out, is not the mixed-bag our forebears were so ambivalent about. Far from being a mere constant – the more things change the more they stay the same – change has been elevated into a modern virtue. This is taken for granted in the speaking community, where no bill of goods is meant to receive less scrutiny than the importance of overcoming obstacles to change.

Change, we are now made to understand, is a necessary good. Self-styled change agents “show up and shake things up”, enabling us to see “new possibilities”. If change often seems distasteful it is only because, like chastity,  you have not yet been taught to embrace it.

At the heart of this conceit is the belief that change should be embraced everywhere and at all times. Overcoming obstacles to change no longer means shaking free of bad habits but, rather, to slay the Great Enemy – the status quo (a term which has been vilified in service of change myth).

The morality tale spun around change serves as a very useful nothing-burger, allowing talks to be given, books to be written and self-styled experts to be ordained with little or no effort or thought.

When the usefulness of soberly assessing change becomes as widespread as ritually celebrating it, then we’ll really have something to talk about.

Do you have thoughts on change? Leave them in the comment section below.

Return to www.daviDDeeble.com.

Climate Change We Can Believe In

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Al Gore upon discovering he must share his private jet with his hairdresser’s entourage.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A version of this post was originally published at Ricochet.com. Visit my ricochet.com archive here

I used to believe that the sole role of government is to deliver the mail and defend the shores. I now realize that this is asking too much.

Speaking of the mail, I love the U.S. Post Office. It’s like the DMV with stamps. Have you noticed that you never see Post Office and DMV employees in the same room at the same time? I’m beginning to think they’re the same guy.

But give the federal Leviathan this: it’s sterling treatment of veterans, taxpayers and lawful immigrants should have earned our confidence in taking on the simpler tasks like managing the earth’s climate.

It’s true that every model currently relied upon by climate profits – ahem, climate prophets –  failed to predict the past 17 years of climate stasis (itself evidence of climate change). Indeed, current climate models were no more accurate in predicting the last decade-and-a-half than most leg models. None of this is to suggest that climate models are without value: at least one has shown some promise in predicting the American League Central (odd years only).

But the answer to global warming does not lie in more-accurate climate models. What our policy approaches lack most is imagination. What this moment requires is a bold, Kennedy-esque vision. I propose that by the end of this decade, we send a climate scientist back in time to the Ice Age to warn our ancestors of the impact of fossil fuels on the climate – and then return him safely to earth (or Academia, whichever comes first).

Return to www.daviDDeeble.com.

There’s Nothing Like Telling A Joke For The Second Time

How I work is I write down my thoughts, edit them down to size and then tell them to audiences as if they had just occurred to me. It’s sort of like acting in a play which you also wrote.

One of the challenges of performing new material is maintaining the same demeanor (i.e., feigning the same confidence) as those jokes which are time-tested. It’s like suddenly bluffing in poker after a long series of hot hands.

It’s very gratifying to try new material which receives the desired response. But in stand-up comedy the real rush comes from a new joke’s second telling because you know the audience will place a coda of laughter at the end. As a result, my anxiety is replaced with anticipation, uncertainty with confidence. Instead of anticipating and observing the audience reaction my mind is free focus on my delivery, which enhances my confidence, which increases the audience’s enjoyment, and so on.

It’s a virtuous cycle.

Thoughts, comments or angry retorts? Leave them in the comment section below.

Return to daviDDeeble.com.

 

The Bureaucratic Mindset

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It’s a long boring story but the upshot is my itinerary had me flying, in one day, from Bismarck, North Dakota to Denver to Phoenix to Los Angeles and back to Denver. That’s right: four flights between Bismarck and Denver with a layover in… Denver.

None of this was anybody’s fault but simply a result of separate reservations made to accommodate a changing schedule.

Checking-in at Bismarck Municipal airport, I explained to the United representative that since Denver was my “final destination” that I would only be taking the first flight, thank you very much, and that she should therefore only check my bag to Denver and not to LAX, which would have required me to collect my bag and re-check them to Denver (owing to separate reservations).

“You’ll lose your return flight” she explained. She said it in such a way that suggested less full-disclosure than “I’m not sure I can do that”.

My instinct was confirmed when, after gamely poking at a couple of computer keys for a couple seconds, she summarily informed me that it couldn’t be done. Before I could explain to her (in a way that would keep her dignity intact) that it could, in fact, be done, another United representative who overheard our exchange took up my cause. “Just go to bag management”, she said, pointing to a key on her computer.

Not surprisingly, the first representative’s can’t-do attitude remained unfazed. She implied that it could, in fact, be done, but that it would be “illegal” for her to do so. (For this I gave a small prayer of thanks that anything so hilarious could be uttered in Bismarck, North Dakota).

It become immediately clear that I was dealing with one of those bureaucratic souls whose can’t-do attitude blinded her to what should have been obvious.

Happily, uncharacteristically, competence reigned as the other representative took over while the Fearful One looked on with the resentment those who can’t have toward those who do. She was advertising her own refusal to learn anything from this experience – and the self-loathing that accompanies such refusal.

Within two minutes I was headed toward security with ticket in hand.

Whenever I encounter someone with the bureaucratic mindset I am reminded of a line – I think it’s Hannah Arendt’s description of Adolf Eichmann – that “He was less concerned with what pushing the button meant than with pushing it well”.

I arrived safely in Denver and my bag did the same only a few minutes later and the sun has since continued to set in the west and rise in the east.

Do you have experiences with the bureaucratic mindset and a can’t-do attitude? Share them in the comment section below.

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