Steve Martin learned performing through documenting & reflecting on his own work

Steve Martin's memoir "Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life" is a great document of a performer's growth from novice to superstar. The most fascinating sections deal with his teenage years, when, through experiences working at Disneyland and Knott's Berry Farm, Martin decides to pursue a career in show business. These are also the most fondly-remembered parts of his life (as opposed to his decidedly mixed view of the last six or seven years of his standup career, when he sold millions of records and sold out arenas across the country).

Martin's systematic desire to improve struck home with me. Even in his midteens, as he was honing his magic act, he had already developed a practice that most of us (at any age) could benefit from:

Following the advice in "Showmanship for Magicians," I kept scrupulous records of how each gag played afer my local shows for the Cub Scouts or Kiwanis Club. "Excellent!" or "Big laugh!" or "Quiet," I would write in the margins of my Big Indian tablet; then I would summarize how I could make the show better next time.

The habit of self-review continued as he shifted to comedy and became a small-time headliner in California clubs. And, in another lesson we can all learn from, he acted on what he learned, for example in this mistake story:

In case I ad-libbed something wonderful, I began taping my shows with a chintzy cassette recorder. I had a routine in which I played a smug party guy with a drink in his hand. When the bit started, the waitresses brought me a glass of wine that I would use as a prop. When that glass was empty, they would bring me another. One night I listened to the tape and could hear myself slurring. I never had a drink before or during a show again.

It's very easy to let moments pass, especially when they may be embarrassing or tell us something we'd rather not know. But in those moments, Martin shows us, are the data that tell us how to get better at what we do. "Born Standing Up" shows that substantial careers start small, and improve day by day over years - but only if we mine our ongoing experiences to learn and adapt.

Balanced self-awareness is essential to success

Camille Sweeney and Josh Gosfield wrote in the New York Times about the importance of self-awareness in achieving success ("Secret Ingredient for Success"). Sweeney and Gosfield are the authors of "The Art of Doing: How Superachievers Do What They Do and How They Do It So Well." In the article, they tell the story of renowned chef David Chang, who struggled after starting Momofuku Noodle Bar in New York City:

Mr. Chang could have blamed someone else for his troubles, or worked harder (though available evidence suggests that might not have been possible) or he could have made minor tweaks to the menu. Instead he looked inward and subjected himself to brutal self-assessment.

Was the humble noodle bar of his dreams economically viable? Sure, a traditional noodle dish had its charm but wouldn't work as the mainstay of a restaurant if he hoped to pay his bills.

Mr. Chang changed course. Rather than worry about what a noodle bar should serve, he and his cooks stalked the produce at the greenmarket for inspiration. Then they went back to the kitchen and cooked as if it was their last meal, crowding the menu with wild combinations of dishes they'd want to eat - tripe and sweetbreads, headcheese and flavor-packed culinary mashups like a Korean-style burrito. What happened next Mr. Chang still considers "kind of ridiculous" - the crowds came, rave reviews piled up, awards followed and unimaginable opportunities presented themselves.

During the 1970s, Chris Argyris, a business theorist at Harvard Business School (and now, at 89, a professor emeritus) began to research what happens to organizations and people, like Mr. Chang, when they find obstacles in their paths.

Professor Argyris called the most common response single loop learning - an insular mental process in which we consider possible external or technical reasons for obstacles.

Less common but vastly more effective is the cognitive approach that Professor Argyris called double-loop learning. In this mode we - like Mr. Chang - question every aspect of our approach, including our methodology, biases and deeply held assumptions. This more psychologically nuanced self-examination requires that we honestly challenge our beliefs and summon the courage to act on that information, which may lead to fresh ways of thinking about our lives and our goals.

We've written about this prescription over and over again on this site. Self-awareness is a key to success - and it involves scrutinizing our strengths, weaknesses, and deepest assumptions about the world. It requires viewing ourselves at a slight remove, so we can diagnose the things we must do to be successful.

It involves "facing actual circumstances," instead of what we wish would happen, as Justin Menkes described in "Better Under Pressure: How Great Leaders Bring Out the Best in Themselves and Others."

It involves a balanced look at our successes and failures - unlike Lafley & Martin.

It may even benefit from Paul Schoemaker's "deliberate mistake" - an action taken counter to your own sense of what will work.

You cannot control external factors. As the Buddhists say, you can only control what you do and how you react to things that happen. By cultivating self-awareness (including by tracking and evaluating the things that don't go to plan)

Daniel Kahneman: It's "more enjoyable to identify the mistakes of others"

More wisdom on mistakes and self-knowledge from one of the best books of 2011, Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow":

It is much easier, as well as far more enjoyable, to identify and label the mistakes of others than to recognize our own. Questioning what we believe and want is difficult at the best of times, and especially difficult when we most need to do it, but we can benefit from the informed opinions of others.

Part of what I'm trying to figure out here is if we can make it a little easier to look inside ourselves, to get a better idea of what we "believe and want," so we can make better decisions and sidestep avoidable mistakes. Another objective is to get us to think about how to make better mistakes, so that given our difficulty in truly knowing what drives us, we can find that out by trial and error with lower cost to ourselves and others. Finally, by sharing others' mistakes, I hope you can learn more about your own situations and maybe take that learning into account in your own decision-making.

Check out the complete collection of our Kahneman-related posts.

The Power of Confronting Your Own Weakness

I recently read a headline from Harvard Business School Working Knowledge that intrigued me: "Learning From My Success and From Others' Failure." It's a very important paper and I will be posting in more detail on it later, but what struck me immediately upon reading the abstract was the finding that learning from others' failure is easier than learning from one's own failures.

Then I read "The Crucible of Leadership" from the great Jerry Colonna as published in Fred Wilson's AVC blog. Among the many gifts of that post was a powerful story, which read in part:

Take as an example a client I worked with intensely over the last few weeks. She and a co-founder have been killing each other (okay, I have a flair for the overstatement…still, they have both been getting sick with a host of ailments—migraines and stomach problems). The arguments had gotten so bad that neither could stand to be in the same room with the other. Even I was exasperated. During one late night call, I asked my client to forget, for a moment, whether her co-founder was right or wrong. “I don’t care who’s right,” I said with my voice rising. “The only thing we have to focus on is what are you supposed to be learning from this.”

There was a long silence. I thought, “Okay. You’ve really pushed her too far. You and your woo-woo ‘lessons in the pain’ crap.” But then: alchemy. She opened up. “This is really shameful to admit,” she began, “but I know I’m a pain in the ass because I have to be right, all the time. I know it’s wrong but I can’t stop myself.”

And with that we had something to work with. I pressed her: Given this tendency, what do you really believe? What values do you hold? What kind of company do you want to build? And what kind of adult do you want to be?

Over the next few weeks, on guard for her need to be right, we carefully went to work changing her approach to the co-founder. For her, the crucible moment came in facing her shame, acknowledging who she really has been and as a result she got to choose how she wanted to manage and who she wanted to be.

We forge our truest identity by facing our fears, our prejudices, our passions, and the source of our aggression.

I would add to that last sentence "our weaknesses." Learning from mistakes doesn't only mean learning from others' mistakes. It means learning about ourselves, our deepest weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Is it harder to confront and take these lessons to heart? Of course. Jerry Colonna's client is a great example of that. But the rewards are manifold. The client is now able to confront this persistent and damaging situation with her partner, and can take this knowledge of herself into all her future interactions.

The lessons from our own failures "leave a deep imprint," but are also lessons that serve us the rest of our lives. Don't settle for only learning from others' mistakes. If you do, you're only halfway to where you need to get.

The Dalai Lama on self-knowledge

From "The Dalai Lama's Little Book of Inner Peace: The Essential Life and Teachings":

It is more useful to be aware of a single weakness in oneself than to be aware of a thousand weaknesses in someone else. (p. 257)

[Photo from Wikipedia]