Film Courage: What is the will to risk?
John Vorhaus, Author/Speaker/Artist/Screenwriter: What is the will to risk? Somebody asked me
“Do you think anyone can be funny?” and I said “I think anyone can be funny, I'm not sure everyone
is willing to risk being funny,” because the will to risk implies the will to fail.
If I try this and it doesn't work there will be consequences. If my fear of consequence is quite
great then my will to risk is quite low because the fear of negative consequences bad outcomes
will keep me from taking chances as an example you might be terribly funny and you might want
to do stand-up comedy but you have to have the will to risk to get from the floor to the stage,
even if it's only six inches, that's a big step up and the only way you can take that step is
if you can bring your mind around to the idea that this outcome doesn't matter. It might be a
bad outcome it might hurt me emotionally but for the sake of my goals it's a step I have to take
and that the whole math of it is if you have a clear sense of your goals and you can link
those goals to actions, then the combination of goal and action will give you the will to risk
because you will see quite clearly. In order to achieve this goal I have to take this action.
I understand that there's a risk of a possible negative outcome but I also understand that if
I don't take this action, I can't achieve that goal and that's a known bad outcome.
So I fight against theoretical or possible bad outcomes with the knowledge that taking
no action is itself an undesirable outcome for me it won't advance me toward my goals
do you think some people have a natural just sort of like the a propensity to be up in front of a
crowd it doesn't if they fail if someone throws a tomato at them it's not the end of the world
I think some people have that quality naturally some people acquire it a lot of us are
I don't want to say that we're programmed in our youth but I'll just tell you about my own
experience as a youngest child youngest of three I was counted on to be funny you know it's the
little one I was the cute one and there was a lot of positive reinforcement directed at me
for taking comic risks as a consequence I grew up feeling pretty comfortable with taking not just
comic risks but creative risks of all kinds mostly because I had already acquired some experience in
trying some things that work and trying some things that don't work in my book the comic
toolbox and this is kind of one of the things that I'm known for I establish What's called the rule
of nine which says says for every 10 jokes you try nine won't work and you think well that's a
terrible bad average I'm only getting it right one time out of ten that's horrible it's not
because it tells you two important things one is you're gonna get it wrong much more often than
you get it right getting it wrong is the norm and the other thing is if you have 10 jokes
and you only need one to work then you don't have to invest a hundred percent of your ego in
any one joke you can basically distribute all of your ego across 10 jokes and any joke that fails
only costs you ten percent of ego and then that one joke that does work that's what you need to
advance toward your goals and anytime you advance toward your goals your ego feels much better
so we can say what falls out from this is for someone who's operating in creative spaces we're
always operating in an ego space we're always engaged with whether we know it or not engage with
the question of how does this circumstance make me feel what I try to do is focus on a different
question how can I use this circumstance to advance toward my goals I find that if I operate
with that question in mind the fear falls away the insecurity falls away the the the will to risk
advances because it's clear that no matter what's going to happen I'm going to gather information
and it's going to advance me toward my goals one way or another so the ultimate outcome of this is
I'm going to do a better job I'm going to create better products I'm going to win more acclaim
and it turns out from moment to moment as writers or creators we are uh serving our ego and the
minute we stop serving our ego and serve the work instead try to make the work as good as it can be
then the work becomes better and better and better we achieve more we attain more
and our ego feels that much better all of which boils down to to serve the ego ignore the ego and
save your ego for the award ceremony hahaha but you know they say that most people fear
uh the biggest fear is public speaking I'd rather stand up in front of a group of people on a topic
I know nothing about and be booed off the stage then let's say walk across the Golden Gate Bridge
on a windy day which I've done in a class trip and couldn't make it so some people have certain fears
that that seem normal and you know public speaking I guess is considered a normal fear I I use a
metaphorical structure for my fears I imagine that the inside of my brain is outer space
and my fears are present in here and there in outer space they manifest as black holes they
suck all my energy and they they warp reality they do a lot of bad things and since they're
black holes they feel dangerous to me so I avoid them fear is fear of rejection let's say
as an example or in my case fear of not hearing adequately so my experience of this is if there's
a black hole that exists and I don't confront it then it exists and it dominates but if there's a
black hole that exists and I confront it doing no more than saying I acknowledge this black hole I
acknowledge the presence of this fear that kind of sucks the air out of that balloon the black hole
goes away and I have more freedom of movement in my own mind that's why I use that metaphor
and that's what I'm attempting to serve not to deny my fears or even really make them go away
just to acknowledge their presence and manage them effectively as part of my overall job of being as
successful or creative on entrepreneur as I can what if a writer is afraid they will embarrass
themselves and maybe especially embarrass themselves in front of a group of their peers
strangers it's like whatever but yeah strangers is like whatever
but oh my mom's in the audience or Marge from accounting well it's Marge from accounting.
I'm going to answer your question but first I'm going to go around about a little bit of story
I was in Prague in the Czech Republic doing a comedy writing workshop and it was a multi-day
thing and I was just getting started I was midway through the morning on the first day
and I'm at a point in my lecture and I just lose it might have been jet lag might have
been I don't know something that I thought I understood very well I suddenly couldn't make
head and her tail stuff it was a story structure and I was trying to communicate and I just found
that I couldn't and I had a kind of a freak out moment and I it wasn't bad and I acknowledged I
said to the audience so you guys let's take five minutes I've lost the plot I need to find it again
and that was the moment and we took a break and I came back and started teaching something else
tonight we went the whole group went out for drinks and dinner and my wife was there she was
traveling with me and she was part of the party and later she reported to me that she talked to
a lot of different students and they all said the same thing that moment when he fell apart
and acknowledged that he'd fallen apart that's when he won our allegiance because we thought
if that guy can fail this expert can stand in front of us and fail so visibly and own it and
transcend it and move on that's a big relief to us because now we're not afraid of failure we've seen
the boss failing we've seen the maestro failing that leaves us free to manifest our own failure
I have since used that over and over again as a strategy if the room is tough if people
are feeling uptight they're not ready to take chances yet I just fail, I fail on purpose I go
someplace crazy I go out on a limb that I know I'm not going to arrive someplace good and just
crash on on purpose so that people can see me modeling failure and feel better about their own
failure now back to your question can you repeat it please because I was uh tell me tell me again
the questions you asked is a writer afraid they will embarrass themselves and embarrass themselves
in front of a group of their peers okay to be writer's room okay so there I am embarrassing
myself in front of a group of students each of them is worried about embarrassing themselves
in front of their peers it's a comedy writing Workshop they're supposed to be funny stakes
are high pressure is high they're not going to do well I'm going to instruct them to lower pressure
by embracing failure I always tell people in these circumstances if you must fail and you will fail,
fail big if you have a magnificent failure at least you created something that was magnificent
and if your goal is to fail big then failure doesn't scare you anymore but in terms of
this idea of I'm afraid of the negative response to the people around me I think a lot of that is
what I call cartoon emotion we have emotional states that exist without giving too much thought
to them and the emotional state we're in right now is people are going to hate me people who
love me will hate me that's on on on the on the bedrock that's what we're afraid of if I write
this romantic novel if I write this screenplay if I do this stand-up comedy routine and it goes bad
which it will because I'm a loser then everybody who loves me will hate me I'll be that much more
of a loser we can see that this is a lot of kind of self-fulfilling prophecy toward a negative
outcome a vicious circle we can turn it into a virtuous circle simply by saying I'm going
to have this experience and I'm going to collect this outcome I'm not going to have expectations
on whether it's going to be a good outcome or a bad outcome try for a good one but not
marry my ego to a good outcome and what's going to help me in this is the understanding that people
who love me actually love me they're rooting for a good outcome and if it happens that I don't get
a good outcome the only one it'll really bother is me because I'll feel like I'll let them down
they're prepared to give me charity they're not going to condemn me for trying something
that didn't work out they're on my side so in the moment where I am attempting a creative
act trying to throw it out the window and see if it lands I need to remind myself the audience is
not in conflict with me they want the same thing I want a good outcome a funny joke a good story a
good movie experience whatever we're all on the same side we're not against each other and that
also will help me step over that fear barrier and into the experience that I want to have
so if someone would like to win the empathy or the sympathy of a crowd should they knock the
microphone off the podium for a second and then apologize or drop their papers it's a perfectly
valid strategy I've seen stand-up comics trip getting up on stage it never fails to
get a laugh because of what we talked about slipping on a banana peel in a sense making
yourself the target in a sense this is stand-up comedy 101 make yourself the target in my book
the little book of stand up I talk about your first five minutes what are you trying to do
with that precious first five minutes of comic material that you trying to generate one thing
you're trying to do is define yourself another thing you're trying to do is to build audience
allegiance and you can do both of those things by telling jokes about yourself that matter
I might say look at me I haven't had a bad hair day in 25 years
and it's my way of saying I'm bald everybody knows you're bald I don't carry any issues with me about
baldness but I could certainly use the appearance of having those issues to win audience allegiance.