Stand-up comedian Red Richardson was never interested in stand-up comedy.
Aged 17, his first experience as a spectator was bittersweet. He and his friends watched a Frankie Boyle set on TV. In Red’s words, “Oh, this is so funny!” It was like magic.
His friend responded:
“Oh, actually my brother told me that he went to watch Frankie Boyle in Plymouth and it was the same jokes as this one.”
Red had thought that Boyle just got up on stage and spoke off the cuff for an hour.
There’s a similar sentiment with successful authorities. That they pluck pithy lines and previously unarticulated insight from their backsides.
I don’t think that’s ever the case.
Their creative process is a lot like that of a stand-up comedian.
Repetitive and modular.
In his book “Little Bets”, Peter Sims talks about Chris Rock’s process for developing new material. In preparing for an upcoming global tour, Rock will make around 40 to 50 appearances at a small local comedy club called The Stress Factory in New Jersey. There’ll be around 50 people in the audience. He’ll bring a yellow legal notepad on stage and take notes during the set. He’s look for the laughter, of course, but he also notices body language and pauses in the audience. Gradually, he’ll build the set around the five to ten jokes that draw hysterical laughter from the crowd. He iterates over several weeks to flesh those jokes out further.
I view the process for insight development as the same.
Where Rock has a small local comedy club, we have emails, tweets, LinkedIn posts, or YouTube shorts. Maybe webinars and small speaking events, too.
Authorities don’t go into a cave for 18 months and write a best-selling book. They develop a creative rhythm. The intention to publish gets them into a writing habit, through which they develop opinions and observations they didn’t previously have. They look for feedback from the audience in the form of likes and comments for broad signal, and DMs and email replies for deeper resonance. In doing so, they capture the one-liners and segments that land with the people they want to reach. Weave those together and they have a body of work.
Sometimes, an individual piece will gather more momentum than you could have anticipated. That’s what happened with Dorie Clark’s Reinventing You and Austin Kleon’s Steal Like an Artist. They were blog posts that drew significant attention and response online, and on the back of that resonance, the authors expanded those posts into books. But it’s important to note, they had a publishing habit. They didn’t wake up one morning and, out of the blue, produce a post that went viral. It was a sequence, a series of post after post after post, and one unexpectedly took off.
Or there’s the type of signature pieces from people like Carl Richards and Jessica Hische. They publish daily, and over the course of a couple of years, curate the individual posts and visuals that resonated most with their audience, and weave those together into a coherent body of work.
Market-defining authority comes from practice. It’s tried, tested, and modular.