Where’s Your Follow-Up?
In the 1970s, the comedian Chris Rock grew up in a Brooklyn neighborhood surrounded by gangs, violence, and crime. He was asked how he avoided falling in with a bad crowd—”how did you avoid the trapping of gangs and gang activity?” “I don’t think it’s about ‘avoiding,’” Rock said. “It’s about, where’s your follow-up?…I wasn’t a gang follow-up guy. A gang is like anything else—you have to follow up.” To become a formal or informal member of anything—a local gang, a high school clique, a neighborhood book club, an online forum, or a crew that gets together now and again to play pick-up basketball, drink coffee, ride bikes, or recap the series after this or that show’s finale—Rock continued, “You have to follow up. You have to be at the meetings, you have to read the pamphlets, you have to watch all the episodes, you have to get the clothes—whatever the follow-up may be.” When there were opportunities to get mixed up with a bad crowd, “My follow-up wasn’t there. It’s like, ‘We’re going to go downtown and steal chains’—you know, I’m late to those meetings. I just wasn’t with the follow-up. So it was never really an option.” When he discovered stand-up comedy, on the other hand, Rock followed up. He went again and again to dive-bar open mics around the city. He stayed up to watch comedians’ stand-up sets on late-night TV. He got a microphone stand to put in front of a mirror in his house, where he would practice telling jokes. “That’s where my follow-up was,” Rock said. “My follow-up was comedy. That was my follow-up.”
The follow-up—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
One Day, You Will Have Followed Up For Forty Years
In the 1960s, looking for ways to fill time in his stand-up routine, the comedian Steve Martin decided to take up the banjo. To begin learning how to play, he got a book called How To Play The 5-string Banjo by Pete Seeger. One of the first lessons was how to make a C-chord. Martin put his fingers down on the strings and strummed a C-chord. “I couldn’t tell the difference,” he said. To him, strumming a C-chord sounded just like strumming with no fingers down on any of the strings. “I was not naturally talented,” he writes in Born Standing Up. But, he said, “I just stayed with it. And I kept saying to myself, ‘Well, if I just stay with it, one day, I will have played for forty years…Anybody who sticks with [the banjo] for forty years will be able to play it.” Martin stayed with it, and in 2001—after decades of follow-up—his banjo playing on the song Foggy Mountain Breakdown won a Grammy for “Best Country Instrumental Performance.”
Wow. There’s No Sign That You’re Going To Make It.
Both the author Michael Lewis and the radio personality Ira Glass are today among the best in the world at what they do, but they had a long conversation about how that wasn’t always true. Talking about how long it took them to find their voices as storytellers, Lewis and Glass traded stories about their early work. A couple years into making the Pulitzer Prize-winning radio show, This American Life, one of the show’s producers, Alix Spiegel, pitched a story similar to one Glass had made years and years earlier, at the beginning of his career. Glass suggested that they dig up the old episode to see if they could salvage anything from it. After they listened to it, Spiegel said, “Wow. There’s no sign that you have any talent for radio. Like there’s no sign that you’re going to make it. There’s just nothing good in here.” Not only was she right, Glass said, but he revisited other episodes from his archives and was struck by how, even in his mid-30s—15 years into his career—there was still hardly any sign that he had any talent for radio. Lewis laughs and says, “I think we shared this quality, in that neither you nor I cared all that much if there was a sign that you were going to make it. You were just going to do it anyway.” “Yes that’s very true,” Glass replies. “Yes, I liked doing it and I was just going to keep going.” He was just going to keep following up.
A Certain Kind of Personality
At some point in grade school, Greta Gerwig began to think that she might want to be a movie director. But as she became aware of a certain personality often associated with great directors—rebellious, forceful personalities, singularly obsessed with movies from an early age—Gerwig began to doubt whether she had that personality. When she was a kid in Sacramento, she barely watched movies. At school, she was “a real rule follower.” Throughout her teens, she was interested in so many things—trumpet, ballet, fencing, step aerobics, tap dancing, and on and on—that a ballet instructor told her, “You’ll never be a master of anything. You’ll be a dabbler.” “If you hear a certain criticism at a certain point in your life,” she said, “it sticks with you.” That criticism reinforced her own lingering doubts, and for nearly seventeen years, Gerwig held off on trying to become a director. “I thought that directors had a certain kind of personality and that’s what made them directors,” she said. Eventually, as I wrote about in more detail here, she went for it. She’s directed three movies so far: Lady Bird (for which she became the fifth woman ever to be nominated for Best Director), Little Women, and Barbie (the first solo female-directed film to gross over $1 billion). And in the process, she said, “I realized that it’s doing the work of making movies that gives you that personality.” No one is born with a certain personality, hardwired to be a director, a radio host, a writer, a stand-up comedian, or a gang member. It’s like anything else—where’s your follow-up? There’s your personality. (File next to what David Whyte says: “you are harvesting your identity in whatever it is you’re dedicating yourself to in the hours of the day.”)
The Single Most Proudest Moment Of Failure
When he was 17, in 1981, Quentin Tarantino dropped out of school and moved to Hollywood. He got a job making minimum wage at a video store called Video Archives, and every dollar he made went into making his first movie, My Best Friend’s Birthday. Three years into working on it, Tarantino showed it to a Hollywood producer. “Quentin,” the producer said, “what you need to do is…wrap this film in meat, go out into the sharkiest waters you can find, and feed the meat-covered film to the sharks.” Tarantino didn’t feed the film to the sharks. But he did tell his cast and crew that a huge chunk of the film was destroyed in a lab fire. There wasn’t actually a fire. It was just a way out of releasing what Tarantino realized was a terrible movie. Privately, Tarantino said, “I was very depressed.” “I worked for three years on this movie…And it ended up being nothing. Absolutely nothing!” Years later, after he established himself as one of the great filmmakers of his generation, Tarantino said, “Of all the accomplishments I ever did in the course of my life, the one I’m the proudest of is the two weeks after that movie failed. The fact that I didn’t quit after that movie failed is my single most proudest moment of character.” That he stayed with, kept following up—“I’m just proud. Everyone I knew would have quit. There’s not anyone I knew at that time—after donating three years of their life and having it not be good—who wouldn’t have quit.”
The Second Effort
“I am bold in taking the first steps,” the 20th-century Nobel Prize-winning novelist André Gide admitted in his journal when he was 21, “but I stop after the first effort; and you never get returns before the second effort.” Twenty-four years later, he marveled in the same journal, “I have never produced anything good except by a long succession of slight efforts. No one has more deeply meditated or better understood than I Buffon’s remark about patience [”Genius is but a greater aptitude for patience.”]. I bring it not only to my work but also to the silent waiting that precedes good work.” Genius is but a greater aptitude for the follow-up. You never get returns except by a long succession of follow-ups.