Dare to Suck
How to Chase Your Dreams, Part 1
The t-shirt read “Dare to Suck.”
I was sitting in my first day of Intro to Sit-com Acting at Lesly Kahn and Co., a well-known acting school in Los Angeles where my instructor had just handed me a pre-shrunk welcome gift.
Considering the provocative command, I asked, “And, why in the world would you tell someone that they should suck?”
The instructor, a working TV actor with more than a decade in Hollywood, had seen plenty of new students cycle through this classroom, so he knew how to handle the new cohort’s resident smart-ass.
“Lesly’s not saying that you should suck,” he replied. “She’s saying that you do suck—at acting—now, but that you are here to suck less through study and hard work.”
This was in 2006, during my first stint chasing comedy full-time. A lot has happened since then, and I outgrew the t-shirt a long ways back, but the words “Dare to Suck” have always stuck with me. When I re-committed myself to stand-up and writing eight years ago, I became fully aware of what living the DTS motto really means. The scary truth about any new pursuit or reinvention—artistic, athletic, or commercial—is that success lies on a distant shore, across a perilous ocean of struggle. If you want to “make it,” you must embrace the suck.
Mastery is a big deal for humans. Being really good at something creates a sense of well-being and purpose. It provides status, pride, a place in the world, and—sometimes—a source of income. Once attained, it is a great source of comfort.
So you’d think that an author writing about self-development would encourage his readers to figure out what they’re great at. But in his best-seller The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, author Mark Manson does the opposite, asking “What pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for?”
The first time I read this, my reaction was similar to my confusion upon receiving the DTS t-shirt. But like Lesly’s, Manson’s non-obvious advice makes perfect sense.
Mastery happens only after we invest the time and effort to get good at something (Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000-hours rule”). But practice means struggle, and because struggling is hard, we avoid tasks that don’t mean that much to us. Manson challenges us to identify the thing we care about sufficiently to suck at long enough to master.
Consider what it takes to learn a language. For a long time, I harbored the dream that, someday, I would learn to really speak Spanish, which I had studied in high school and college. Five years ago, after six months of using Duolingo to refresh my vocabulary, I stepped up and enrolled in una clase de Español. I picked up a lot pretty quickly, but only a few sessions in, I remembered why I had stopped studying Spanish 29 years prior: because it’s hard.
I had envisioned chatting with Messi after a match in Barcelona and delighting strangers with my bi-linguality, but I didn’t contemplate—nor was I committed to enduring—years of talking like a moronic pre-kindergartner until I broke through to fluency.
Manson contends that “Who you are is defined by what you’re willing to struggle for,” and this was an excellent example thereof. My unwillingness to tolerate the discomfort of speaking Spanish revealed that the goal just wasn’t that important to me. In the words of a former colleague, “the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze.”
Comedy, however, was another matter—boy was I willing to suck at that. Here’s my comedy class graduation tape from 2001. It makes me cringe. While there are some clever lines here, this is a person who sucks at comedy (what’s with my hand on my hip - for the entire set?), but you couldn’t tell me that because I was protected by determination and self-delusion.
That’s how you know. If you’re crawling over the broken glass of imperfection and you still find yourself thinking, “this is worth doing,” then that’s your thing. Your mission from there is to embrace the pain and keep going.
So dare to suck. Dare to fail. Dare to make no money. Dare to have no outward signs of progress. Dare to get rejected by gatekeepers over and over. And over. Keep daring, keep sucking and keep getting better bit-by-barely-perceptible-bit, until one day, the shores of proficiency appear on the horizon.
Sucking will set you free, but you have to want to do it. If you’re not willing to suck, your dream isn’t a dream - it’s a fantasy. Do something else.
UPCOMING SHOWS that I want people to attend. Tell your friends who live in these places!
May 4: ATLANTA - Best of Atlanta at City Winery
May 24: ATLANTA - with Rocky Dale Davis at The Punchline
June 23-24: CHATTANOOGA - Headlining The Comedy Catch
July 23 - CHARLOTTE - co-Headlining The Comedy Zone
