Unpacking
I was recently traveling with my girlfriend to Vienna, flying out of Dallas with a layover in Frankfurt. In Dallas, for some reason, we could access a mobile boarding pass for the Dallas-to-Frankfurt leg, but not the Frankfurt-to-Vienna connection. At the airline counter, the agent couldn’t print them either, saying it was because the Frankfurt-Vienna leg was operated by a different airline. She said this happens all the time—we’d just need to stop at a transfer counter in Frankfurt, where they’d be able to print the boarding passes without issue. Still, my girlfriend was visibly stressed by the boarding pass glitch. Coincidentally, the day before, I had read this paper—Unpacking Unpacking: Greater Detail Can Reduce Perceived Likelihood—about breaking down broad categories, large-scale events, or vague, looming possibilities into their specific, component parts. So, there in the Dallas airport, I tried to unpack: What’s the worst that can happen?We get to Frankfurt and they have no record of us, she said. We have receipts, I said. We’ll go to the transfer counter, like the woman said, and they’ll print the passes. What if they don’t speak English and we have trouble communicating? she said. Someone there almost certainly will speak English, I said. And if not, we’ll use ChatGPT or something to translate. What if the flight to Frankfurt is delayed and we miss the connection? she said. We wouldn’t be the first people that’s happened to, I said. Airlines have systems for that—they’ll get us on the next available flight, and we’ll get there as soon as possible. Through this back-and-forth, the looming catastrophe unpacked into a series of manageable, familiar scenarios, and soon, she was laughing at the absurdity of the vague, shapeless dread that had been stressing her out.
Unpacking—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
The Coffee Beans Procedure
The psychologist and writer Adam Mastroianni meets a lot of people who are unhappy with their jobs. When he asks them what they think they’d be happier doing, many of them say something like, I’d really love to run a little coffee shop.“If I’m feeling mischievous that day,” Mastroianni writes, “I ask them…Where would you get the coffee beans? Which kind of coffee mug is best? How much does a La Marzocco espresso machine cost? Would you bake your blueberry muffins in-house or would you buy them from a third party? What software do you want to use for your point-of-sale system? What about for scheduling shifts? What do you do when your assistant manager calls you at 6am and says they can’t come into work because they have diarrhea?” The point of the Coffee Beans Procedure is to unpack the vague, idyllic fantasy of running a little coffee shop into its actual day-to-day details and challenges. If you can’t answer those questions and/or find them interesting, “you should not open a coffee shop, because this is how you will spend your days as a cafe owner. You will not be sitting droopy-lidded in an easy chair, sipping a latte and greeting your regulars as you page through Anna Karenina.”
We Make The Money During The Day
The comedians Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld were once talking about what it takes to make it comedy. Just weeks earlier, Rock told Seinfeld, he was talking to a struggling comedian. After years of performing stand-up comedy several nights a week, the comedian told Rock, he was still having trouble making money, landing gigs, and building a following. So he asked Rock—one of the most successful comics in the world—for advice. “What do you do during the day?” Rock asked. The struggling comedian was confused. Do you write? Rock asked. Do you work on material? Listen back to your set from the night before? Stand in front of a mirror and work on your delivery? Study the craft? Read books? Do you seek out and build relationships with bookers, producers, or club owners? Do you create content on social media to help build a following? The struggling comedian admitted he didn’t do any of those things. “But,” he said, “I’m doing a set tonight.” Rock shook his head, side to side, as if to say, Not this again. It’s a mistake he sees time and again: thinking that the profession involves little more than getting on stage as many nights as possible. In reality, Rock told the struggling comedian, when you really unpack the profession, most of a comedian’s work happens during the day. It’s writing, refining and developing material. Practicing setups and punchlines. Cultivating relationships. Building a following. Going door to door, coffee shop to coffee shop, friend to friend, stranger to stranger—whatever it takes to get people out to a performance. “In comedy,” Rock told the struggling comedian, “we make the money during the day.” Still sitting there listening, Seinfeld nodded in agreement. “Yeah,” he said, “we collect the money at night, but we make it during the day.” “That,” Seinfeld added, “should be the code: you make the money during the day, and you collect it at night.”
Ohhh, I See How This Works
In just about every interview I’ve read or listened to, Jerry Seinfeld says some version of, “the most seminal event of my career happened in 1976.” For a comedian in 1976, getting invited to perform on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson—a late-night talk show on NBC—was the equivalent of an athlete getting drafted into the pros or an actor getting cast in their first Hollywood movie. Getting on The Tonight Show, struggling, and not getting invited back—that was the equivalent of getting cut from the team or never getting cast in another movie. When a comedian got invited to appear on The Tonight Show, they’d typically have about 40 to 60 minutes of material in total, and the show would give them a five-minute slot. So the first time, they’d use their absolute best five minutes of jokes. The second time, their next best five. The third time, their third best. “And I saw comedians get on The Tonight Show,” Seinfeld explained, “do well, go on again, do not as good, go on a third time, struggle, and you’d never see them again.” “That was something you noticed?” he was asked. “I noticed that, as a young man in 1976. I went, ‘Ohhh, I see how this works…This is really a writing profession.’” Unpacked, Seinfeld said, “standup comedy is really a profession of writing. So I realized I have to have a system for continually coming up with material.’ And so I set about creating that for myself.” In a book by the comedian George Burns, Seinfeld read that every day, Burns would sit down with a pad and a pen and work on jokes for at least two hours. “Which I had never heard of,” Seinfeld said. “I didn’t know anybody that did that.” The comedians he knew all did essentially the same thing: they’d carry around a notebook and randomly jot down ideas to test and refine on stage. “Everybody was just kind of doing it on stage,” he said. “And I think to this day, most comedians do that—they catch hold of an idea and take it on stage.” After noticing the trend of comedians doing increasingly worse on The Tonight Showand reading about Burns’ writing routine, Seinfeld started doing what most of his fellow comedians didn’t do—every day, he’d sit down with a pad and a pen and work on jokes for at least two hours. “I thought, ‘if I’m gonna get on The Tonight Show three times a year and crush every one of them, this has gotta be a serious endeavor.’ Because I loved it so much. And I didn’t want to get kicked out. I saw so many people get kicked out.” Writing for at least two hours every day, he said, “I found I was coming up with a lot of stuff,” he said. “And I started progressing and going past people.” In 1981, he was invited to make his first appearance on The Tonight Show. He did well, got invited back a second time, a third time, and after making frequent appearances on the show over the next eight years, in 1989, Seinfeld got his own show, the sitcom Seinfeld, on NBC. “If you go from that moment in 1976 to when I got the TV series,” he said, “and I roll a blank sheet of paper into a typewriter, I was not intimidated by that because I’d been looking at blank sheets of paper for years by that time. I knew how to write.”
Anxiety Uses Your Imagination Too
Meg LeFauve was a very anxious kid. “My grandfather used to say that’s why I had curly hair,” she said, “because I worried so much.” And her dad called her “Moody Meg” “because I was very anxious. And it was this very negative thing to have anxiety.” But as she got older, LeFauve started writing, wowing her teachers with her ability to write highly imaginative and original stories. Over time, LeFauve started to unpack what her anxiety really was, coming to see that her ability to write inventive stories was tied to the way her mind could also spin worries into overwhelming, catastrophic narratives. That her anxiety was a kind of misplaced, misapplied, use of her powerful imagination. “It was when I started writing,” she said, “that I realized that I have a very big imagination. And that the downside of that is that anxiety can use your imagination too…That’s why I was a very anxious child: my imagination was just taking things and making, you know, cataclysmic stories all the time.” By unpacking her anxiety in this way, instead of making cataclysmic stories all the time, LeFauve learned to channel it in more productive directions—like writing the Pixar hit movies Inside Out and Inside Out 2, about the inner life of a girl named Riley, who learns to embrace the full spectrum of her emotions, appreciating that even those she once perceived as negative, like anxiety or fear, can be used to move her life in the right direction. “That’s what’s in the movie,” LeFauve said, “because that’s what happened to me…Like my anxiety—I’m done with being judgmental about my anxiety. I’m done with condemning her and saying that she should go away…I’m done with that because my anxiety is a very big part of why I am who I am and what I’ve been able to accomplish and give to the world.”
The Real Life Of Appearances
“There is an undercurrent,” Robert Henri writes in The Art Spirit, “the real life, beneath all appearances everywhere.” A boarding pass glitch, running a little coffee shop, the profession of stand-up comedy, stress, anxiety—when you unpack just about anything, you usually find that they aren’t what they first appear to be.