Fool Mettle Alchemist

I was reading Seth Godin’s blog last week and he had posted this video:

Here’s what he said about it:

My favorite part happens just before the first minute mark. That’s when guy #3 joins the group. Before him, it was just a crazy dancing guy and then maybe one other crazy guy. But it’s guy #3 who made it a movement.

As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been taking one hour a night and devoting that hour to working on a project. I have about a dozen projects, and, all totaled, I believe they can be completed within a year.

Many of these projects are creative ones. Doing something creative, and putting it out there for the world to see can be scary. After watching the video, I found myself thinking about what it was like being on stage at USAO.

Our drama department put on some pretty damn good shows. They didn’t start out being damn good shows. Usually, they started out as awkwardly-delivered lines and half-understood scenes. But we would stop, re-read the lines, pick apart the scene, the words, we would try saying the lines a different way maybe, we would try out different blocking to see what worked best. We devoted ourselves to understanding the story, and the characters. And, by the time opening night rolled around, we knew what the hell we were doing. We knew how to make the audience laugh, and we knew how to make them cry.

And the reason the performances were good was because a group of people agreed to look foolish together, and to say that it’s okay to look foolish. This permission to look, and act, and be foolish is why members of an acting troupe can be so close to each other. Only by being willing to suffer through looking foolish can we develop our skills.

If you want to learn how to roller-blade, you have to be willing to look foolish. You’re going to scream, flail your arms about wildly, and fall flat on your ass. Somebody will laugh. You might be tempted to give up, but you shouldn’t.

Give yourself permission to look foolish, and over time, you’ll scream less, you’ll perform fewer gravity-induced gyrations, and your bruised ass will heal.

Now, that first guy in the video? He’s brave and/or crazy. The second guy? He’s also brave and/or crazy. But that third guy, the one Godin says turned crazy dancing into a movement? He’s the tipping point, the one that gave everybody permission to look foolish, to do the thing they wanted to do when they saw Guy #1 and #2, but couldn’t because they were too afraid. He’s the one that gave them permission to express themselves, and have fun.

But it all started because Guy #1 didn’t quit, and we need to remember that. So, if you have your own creative project, you and I, we’ll be Guy #1. Our friends? They’ll be Guy #2.

And let’s keep going until Guy #3 shows up, okay?

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.