Louis CK honors George Carlin

In this video [1], he explains what happened "somewhere along the way". TL;DW: He failed at being a successful comic by telling the same jokes for 15 years, then got inspired by and emulated George Carlin, threw everything away and started over. His story is not only inspiring, it transcends comedy. The idea that a mixed but passionate reaction is better than a lukewarm one applies to startups as well as entertainment. [1] [VIDEO]

Here's 10 mins or so from Louis CK at a tribute to Carlin: [VIDEO] He says his first hour of comedy took 15 years to build up, and he hated all of it. Then he heard an interview with Carlin where he said every year he threw all his old jokes away and would have to come up with a new hour of material, forcing him to get to the core of what was important and real (or something)... And that's when Louis says his career took off.

Since I'm not willing to pay for an app just to listen to one podcast, the "2 hours of new material every year" bit (I'm assuming) is also explained in Louis CK's speech about the late George Carlin. [VIDEO]

This kind of reminds me of something Louis CK said during this talk about George Carlin: [VIDEO] He talks about how he got good at standup after 15 years of doing the same thing. He threw away all his material (material he'd been working on for 15 years) and just started trying different things. Then he started throwing away his material every year and creating new material. He noticed that he got better and better by doing this. This also reminded me of another anecdote I'd heard somewhere where you have a pottery class with 20 students. The class was split: 10 students would make a new sculpture every day while the other 10 would have to produce only 1 sculpture for the class (which of course would represent all the extra planning and execution that went into the solo sculpture). At the end of the quarter, the 10 people who made something new every day and then threw it away were far better at sculpting, while everyone in the other group made something kind of shitty and spent a lot of time doing it. So maybe it's not "lack of planning" quite so much as willingness to kill your darlings, again and again.

If I'm being honest with myself, the "Happy Birthday" pre-written text forces me to choose something else to write as my personal message. Yeah, it's frustrating in the moment that the exact sentiment I want to express (have a happy birthday) is already taken and repeating it seems lazy, but when I think about it: it's lazy to just express such a generic sentiment anyway. Asking them to think on the year, and to look ahead, maybe reminding them of some things they've done and achieved is not only nicer to receive, it's nicer to write too. I don't hate Hallmark for this (though I do in the moment that I'm confronted with this random creative challenge). Lois C.K says this about George Carlin: [VIDEO] > So I was doing it at a Chinese restaurant called Kowloon in Boston, it’s August, Massachusetts, and I was sitting in my car after the show just feeling like, “This was all a big mistake, I’m not good enough, and I felt like my jokes were a trap, and I listened to a CD of George talking about comedy and workshopping it and talking about it seriously, and the thing that blew me away about this fellow was he kept putting out—specials, every year there’d be a new George Carlin special, a new George Carlin album, they just kept coming, and each one was deeper than the next, and I just thought, how can he do that? And it made me literally cry that I could never do that. I was telling the same jokes for fifteen years, so I’m listening and they asked him, “How do you do all this materia