You’ve Gotta Find It Within Yourself To Say…
The entrepreneur Mark Cuban is frequently approached by people who are stuck. “They’re stuck in a job they don’t like. They’re stuck working for a boss they don’t like. They’re stuck on a team they don’t like,” he explained. “I just tell them, ‘Be great.’” “The reality of life is that you can’t just always quit your job. You can’t just always go to your boss and say, ‘Give me the promotion, or I’m out of here.’ So when you’re stuck, you’ve gotta find it within yourself to say, ‘Ok, this is where I am. And if I’m going to be here, I’m going to be great.’” The benefit is, first, “it always feels great to be great.” And, second, “if you’re great at your job, typically other people and companies find out, so it creates opportunities.”
Finding it within yourself to say, “Ok, this is where I am. And if I’m going to be here, I’m going to be great”—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
Just Ace It For Fun
Throughout his teens, John Mayer was stuck. He knew he wanted to be a musician and wished to spend all of his time practicing and playing music, but the reality of life was that he had to do other things. He had to go to school, he had to work odd jobs (he bagged groceries at a grocery store, pumped gas at a gas station, worked the cash register at a record store), and he had to endure people constantly urging him to be more realistic, to pick another career, to realize that the odds of a kid from a small suburban town making it as a musician were basically zero. “It was like going to a restaurant,” Mayer said, “and the waiter is reading the specials, going on and on, and you’re thinking, ‘I already know what I want. I don’t want that. I don’t want to hear about the lobster and how it’s cooked and put back in the shell. I just want the burger.’ I knew what I wanted. I wanted to go do this music thing. So that was actually one of the hardest times of my life—to have to be 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, when I knew exactly what I wanted to be doing instead. That was really tough.” Asked to fast-forward to the point where he was able to focus solely on music, Mayer said, “Wait, let me first also say: whatever job you have, just be the best at it on your way to where you want to go. Just be the best at it. I became assistant manager at the gas station. They gave me a pager! Just be great at whatever job they give you. Because it’s more fun to be great than to suck at it and talk about how much you don’t want to be doing it. Just ace it for fun.” Now fast-forwarding—in 2008, on stage in front of a sold-out crowd, before performing his song Wheel, Mayer told the audience, “I’ve had this guitar since I was nineteen years old. I was nineteen, and I worked at a gas station. I bought this guitar with the money that I made working at the gas station. And I remember saying one night when I was holding this guitar in my bedroom, ‘I know that I’m going to keep playing you in this room, and someday, I know that I’m going to play you in a sold-out stadium.’”
I Struck Out Again And Again
Harry Belafonte dropped out of high school at 17, enlisted in the Navy, served during World War II, and was honorably discharged in 1945. With help from the GI Bill and the little bit of money he was making as a janitor, Belafonte took acting classes at a drama school in New York City. Aside from a few school productions, Belafonte struggled for years to land roles. “When I went on auditions,” he writes in My Song, “I struck out again and again. ‘Nothing we’re doing has any Negro roles,’ each casting director would tell me.’” In 1948, Belafonte auditioned for a stage production of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice And Men, another predominantly white cast. For unknown reasons, after meeting Belafonte, the director decided to create an unnamed character—though “character” isn’t even the right word. This made-up entity would simply sing songs to give stagehands more time during set changes. Anyways, the director made up this role and offered it to Belafonte, who accepted. If Belafonte ever thought, like, ‘This is so ridiculous, I want to be an actor not a singer,’ or, ‘It’s so unfair that there’s no actual roles for black actors,’ or, ‘It doesn’t really matter how well I sing because no one’s really listening, they’re just waiting for the next scene’—he didn’t let those thoughts infect his performance on stage. On stage, he found it within himself to say, ‘Ok, this is where I am. And if I’m going to be here, I’m going to be great.’ Pretending “I was an actor, singing in character,” Belafonte said that he told himself every night, “these songs are key to the play, to understanding the story’s time and place.” One night, a few jazz musicians from The Royal Roost, a jazz club not far from the theater, were in the crowd. The jazzmen didn’t think much of the play itself, but they were blown away by Belafonte’s singing. Afterwards, they suggested that he start singing at the Roost. “I’m not a singer,” Belafonte told them. “What you saw me do was acting. It just happened to involve singing.” Still, they introduced Belafonte to the Roost’s manager who agreed to let Belafonte try singing during the intervals between acts. He received an ovation after that first intermission set and became a regular singer at the Roost—after a twenty-one week run there, Belafonte signed with a record label and went on to become one of the most successful and influential recording artists of the 20th century, releasing hit albums like Calypso (the first album by a single artist to sell over 1 million copies), winning three Grammys, and using his platform to publicly contribute to the civil rights movement while also using his financial resources to do so in a more quiet, behind-the-scenes way (for more on that, check out the “Share Your Load” chapter in Discipline Is Destiny).
On This Yes, The Future World Depends
When he was 5, Jeremy Strong started acting in community theater. In high school, he got crew jobs on movie sets, writing letters to filmmakers whenever he heard they were filming near his home in Massachusetts. In college, he performed in student productions, and after graduating, he moved to New York City. He worked odd jobs—delivering room-service in a hotel, shredding documents for a construction company, typing manuscripts for a playwright—while relentlessly auditioning for roles in film, theater, and television. For nearly a decade, he landed only bit parts, often playing unnamed characters and appearing on stage or screen for seconds. “I was having a hard time,” Strong said. “I was out at sea, really, really struggling.” Eventually, he confronted the reality that he might forever be stuck playing small roles in small productions with small audiences. “There’s a Wallace Stevens poem,” Strong said, “where he says, ‘after the final no, there comes a yes. And on that yes, the future world depends.’ And that was certainly true for me at that time. You know, I had to accept that my dreams ultimately might not happen the way I wanted them to…And I had to ask myself, will you still commit to doing it then? Will you still commit to doing it when you realize it’s not going to look the way you imagined it would? And I remember feeling, ‘Well, yes, I’m going to commit to it because I enjoy the work, whatever work I can get.’” And on that yes, Strong’s future depended. In 2011, Strong got yet another small role in a play “in a 60-seat theater above a falafel stand” in New York City. Night after night, he committed to just being great, and on one of those nights, the great casting director Avy Kaufman was in the audience. At the time, Kaufman was leading the casting for Lincoln, Steven Spielberg’s upcoming historical epic starring Daniel Day-Lewis. So impressed by Strong’s performance in that tiny, over-a-falafel-shop theater, she cast him in the film. “And that was a life-changing thing,” Strong said, as Lincoln led to bigger and bigger roles in movies like Zero Dark Thirty and The Big Short, and eventually his breakout as Kendall Roy in the show Succession. “It also reinforced that belief in just committing to just doing good work. If you do that, eventually, somehow—you know, somehow—people will find you.”
Sooner Or Later, We All Have To Do Things We Don’t Want To Do
Early in his military career, fresh from a grueling frogman exercise—a high-stakes drill for Navy SEALs and Underwater Demolition Teams—William McRaven got word that his unit’s commanding officer wanted to see him immediately. Racing to the commanding officer’s office, McRaven imagined the possibilities—a promotion, some praise for his tireless work ethic, or maybe even the call to lead a mission of great consequence. Instead, the commanding officer tasked McRaven with building a Frog Float for the upcoming Fourth of July parade. “A Frog Float?” McRaven asked. “Yes,” the commanding officer replied. “A big green Freddie the Frog, puffing on a cigar, carrying a stick of dynamite. The folks in Coronado will love it!” “Yes sir,” McRaven replied. Frustrated, he headed to the locker room. There, another of McRaven’s higher-ups with decades of experience in the Navy sensed his disappointment. After McRaven explained the situation, the seasoned officer said, “Let me tell you something…I’ve been in this Canoe Club for almost thirty years. Sooner or later, we all have to do things we don’t want to do. But if you’re going to do it, then do it right. Build the best damn Frog Float you can.” Those words left a lasting impression. “Throughout the rest of my career,” McRaven writes, “I would be asked to build a lot of ‘frog floats’—asked to do those menial tasks that no one else wanted, those tasks that seemed beneath the ‘dignity of my rank.’” He took on the tough, unwanted jobs and approached them as he would a high-stakes mission. “I found, in my career, that if you took pride in the little jobs, people would think you worthy of the bigger jobs.” Over time, McRaven proved himself in every task—no matter how small—and eventually found himself leading the very missions he once dreamed of. From commanding special operations units to overseeing the raid that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden, McRaven’s commitment to excellence, even in the most modest of tasks, paved the way for the larger, high-stakes missions that defined his career.
I Want To Kill Every Time I Do Anything
Backstage a few hours before hosting the 2005 Oscars, Chris Rock was handed a phone by a crew member. “And it was fucking Michael Jackson,” Rock said, “just calling to wish me a good show.” Asked if the call put extra pressure on him, Rock said that it didn’t change anything, that he approaches everything the same way. “I want to kill every time I do anything,” he said. “I want this interview to be better than every other interview you’ve done. Like I always tell people: you can’t always control if it’s a hit, but you can always try to be great.” The reality of life is that you can’t always control who your boss is, what team you’re on, the roles you get, the stages you perform on, the assignments you’re tasked with, or the “frog floats” you’re asked to build. But you can always try to be great. You can always say, “Ok, this is where I am. And if I’m going to be here, I’m going to be great.” And being great is more fun (and more likely to create opportunities) than being bad and talking about how much you don’t want to be doing whatever it is that you’re doing.