You're it (E)

0:00Margaret Mitchell came out of nowhere. Her very first published novel, Gone with the Wind, went on to become the second most popular book in the history of the United States, with more than 30 million copies sold. How'd she do that? Hey, this is Emily in the Bronx, and you're listening to a special archived episode of Akimbo.

0:28In 1936, books were hot. They were the dominant form of expression in a country that watched a lot of movies, but hadn't discovered television yet. And the heart of the book business was a small organization called the Book of the Month Club. In July of 1936, the Book of the Month Club decided to feature a new book by an unknown author. They brought it out around the same time that Macmillan, its publisher, brought out their edition. Within weeks, it was the fastest-selling book of its kind. Without the book of the month club, without that group of men who sat around a table once a month eating lunch and drinking brandy, without them choosing her book, it's quite likely none of us would have heard of Gone with the Wind.

1:23Margaret Mitchell got picked. After all, tomorrow is another day. It's part of a long tradition of getting picked. Years ago, a friend of mine, a lawyer, fresh out of law school, was biding his time at his job as a lawyer, hoping to make it as a screenwriter. Well, as you can imagine, lots of people around him told him to get back to work. It was never going to happen. And then one day the phone rang, and the voice at the other end said, it's Steven Spielberg's office calling. Do you think you and your writing partner could stop by and see Steven next week? He'd like to talk to you about some movie ideas.

2:09All of a sudden, his pipe dream wasn't that much of a pipe dream. He was getting picked. Unfortunately for Steve, no movie ever got made. And most of the time, when we wait in line to get picked, We don't get picked because the math isn't in our favor. But that doesn't mean we're not trying. Here's what happens at Juilliard. When you're three years old, your parents hand you a cello or a violin or a clarinet or a flute, and they tell you to go practice. And if you can tolerate it, they push you to practice some more. And then you start taking lessons, and then you start taking more lessons. and at the lessons, mostly what they're pushing you to do is to play the music as written.

2:59Play this classical music the way it's written because if you don't play it as written, you don't have the right skill and we need the skill because it's the only way we're going to hear the music. Of course, that hasn't been true in a hundred years because we know how to record the music. We have a record player or a CD player, or we have streaming. But ignore that and just play it as written. And if you're good at playing it as written, if you're diligent and you practice, maybe you can get in to a better teacher. And maybe that teacher can help you get in to Juilliard. And then if you practice for five or six or seven or ten hours a day at Juilliard, maybe you can stick it out all the way to the end and get a degree from Juilliard, and then you can go audition.

3:46And when you go audition behind a screen, so it's, quote, fair, unquote, maybe you'll get picked and you'll be the second oboe with the Cincinnati Philharmonic Orchestra. Maybe you'll get picked. And when I speak to Juilliard students, what I point out to them is that the math is not in their favor. That the number of oboe players that we need every year to replenish the number of open oboe seats, you can count on one hand. But the number of people who want to get picked to be one of those oboe players is dozens, if not hundreds. You can't win by playing it more as written than anybody else. Back to the book business.

4:33For years, we were snide and made fun of people who printed their book with a, quote, vanity press. A vanity press, you know, a press for people who can't get published by a real publisher. A press for people with more money than taste. A press that could support your ego at the same time it ripped you off. Why do we call it a vanity press? Why do we call it a confidence press? Why do we call it a generous press? Why do we call it an impatient press? Why do we care so much about getting picked? buried super deep into our culture is the image of the gates in front of Paramount Studios. Come on, few brains, shake a leg.

5:16We'll finish it in the morning. Well, I'm glad to see you're still here. I've always wanted to meet you boys. I understand you've been knocking them dead lately. Oh, we always do. Yep, we cover every angle. But I'm afraid you'll have an advantage over us, sir. What a kidder. As if he didn't know who J.B. Fletcher is. I only run this studio. And that brings me to the purpose of my visit. I want you to whip up a publicity stunt that'll make Mr. Voh famous overnight. Either you get through the gates or you don't. And if you don't get through the gates, don't even dream of making a movie. The other day, I was in a car driven by a production assistant, the PA as they call them, underpaid, under-respected people who work on movies.

5:57This was a documentary. She was driving me from one place to another so I could be in it. So to make small talk, I said, so what are you up to? And she said, well, I just graduated with a degree, and I'm going to make documentary films. And I said, so why are you being a PA? Why aren't you making documentary films? She said, well, I have a lot to learn. And by working with documentary crews, I'll learn more. And then one day, I'll be able to make a documentary. I said, well, what are you learning by driving me from here to there? Wouldn't you learn more if you just made a documentary? I said, well, I don't have any funding.

6:37I said, what do you need funding for? Why can't you just download some footage from the internet, edit it, make a documentary, and post it online? Isn't that the beginning of making a documentary? And if you did that, wouldn't it be good enough that you could share it with other people and then maybe you could get$1 ,000 to go make a small documentary where you have to rent something? Well, yeah, sure, she said, that's true, but I wouldn't get picked. I got to get picked if I'm going to be in this industry. Young friend of ours went to an Ivy League school. He'd wanted to be an actor his whole life, comedy mostly.

7:18He gets to school and he finds out they have an improv troupe. He applies, he auditions to be in the improv troupe. And when they post the results, he's 12th on the list. and only the top 11 people get in. I felt badly for him. And I said, why don't you start your own improv troupe? There's nothing stopping you from starting your own improv troupe. You don't need money. You don't need a badge. You don't need authority. All you need are people to do improv with. So back to the Book of the Month Club. The Book of the Month Club was a massive force to be reckoned with for more than 50 years. If Clifton Fadiman and the other judges who ran the Book of the Month Club picked you the way they picked Catcher in the Rye, it could change everything.

8:13Because a half a million people might get a copy of your book in the mail. Unknown books landing on the desks of eager readers. It meant a lot to get picked. And you couldn't even get picked there if you didn't get picked by an editor first. Get picked, get picked, get picked. How do you get picked by an editor? Well, you need an agent. How do you get picked by an agent? Well, it helps if you have a referral. Maybe you should go to some writing conferences. You need to get picked. But then, as always, the internet changes everything because the gate at Paramount has been replaced by the gate at YouTube.

9:00And the gate at YouTube consists of click here and then you can post your video. And I used to ride my bike almost every day, like from where I worked all the way downtown, all the way uptown with this huge heavy bag with like all my camera gear in it. And in this camera gear was like this burden. It was like this weight. I knew that that burden on my back was going to be what set me free, like what all my dreams could come true if I just believed in this thing. It's a whole new set of rules. It turns out that the gate at Random House and Simon & Schuster and Penguin has been replaced by the button that says, click here to publish to the Kindle.

9:44That the rules have fundamentally shifted and suddenly the gatekeepers, the gatekeepers don't have as much power or leverage as they used to. This year, Jeffrey Katzenberg, creator of animated movies, and Meg Whitman, former CEO of eBay, are teaming up and they've raised a billion dollars to start a new media company, one that will pay handsomely to make short, Hollywood-quality videos and put them online for a subscription service. It's an interesting duo because the mindset of eBay was, pick yourself. We're not going to decide what's going to be popular. We're not going to decide what's going to get marketed.

10:35That the very nature of eBay is, click it if you want it. Click it if you want to list it. It's an open marketplace. place, whereas Katzenberg lives behind the gate, the gate at Paramount, the gate at DreamWork. So which is it? Well, a key part of deciding who gets to pick has little to do with the permeability of our systems. The fact is that Margaret Mitchell couldn't have picked herself, even if she wanted to. She lived in a time where the only way to get a book in front of 30 million people was to get picked, and then to get picked, and then to get picked, and then maybe you'd win. Years later, Oprah stepped in and took over for the ailing Book of the Month Club.

11:28If Oprah picked your book, you won. Even a book that didn't do great by Oprah standards did great by every other standard. She was the chooser. I don't know what is true, and I don't know what isn't. So first of all, I wanted to start with the smoking gun report titled The Man Who Conned Oprah. But as I said, it's not just about the structure of the medium, the scarcity created by a limited number of channels, a limited number of movie theaters, a limited number of bookstores. It's not just the scarcity created by the permission asset that's owned by Netflix or the former Book of the Month Club.

12:12No, the biggest thing is in our heads. Years ago, we had a dog, a great dog, really smart dog, but we didn't have a big fence. So we got an invisible fence, and we trained the dog how to use it. The dog never once got shocked. The buzzer was enough to teach him, don't go near the edge. Don't go near the edge. That was the lesson. Well, here's the thing. After eight weeks, I turned off the invisible fence. I stopped replacing the batteries in my dog's collar. Didn't matter. The dog thought the thing was working. Well, the same thing is true for the mindset of someone's got to pick me. Recent college graduates, hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt who have spent an entire career getting an A, pleasing a professor, doing what was on the test, showing up where they're told.

13:12Then we expunge them into the world and we say, get a job. They say, where's the placement office? We say, well, we don't have a placement office anymore. They say, where's the line of people who want to hire compliant workers, well-dressed, well-spoken, compliant workers who want to get an A. Where are those people? We say, well, it doesn't work that way anymore, not for the good jobs. The good jobs are the jobs where you got to pick yourself. Yeah, maybe you're still getting a paycheck, but you're getting a paycheck because you're bringing initiative and creativity and insight to what you're doing, not because there's a manual.

13:51If you want a manual, you better go work for the manager at your local Chick-fil-A. We don't have a manual here. We're looking for people who pick themselves. And so this recent college grad says, maybe I'll go get an internship instead. And so the lines for internships are longer than ever before. Working for organizations that are struggling because all the gatekeepers that they depended on have left the building. It's a self perpetuating cycle and it's not helping people. Not starting your own improv troupe, that's a big mistake. Because every time the medium changes, every time the culture changes, we let the usurpers into the building.

14:36Man the gates, as Marc Maron would say. That the gatekeepers are under an enormous amount of pressure because they don't get the easy viewers on CBS anymore. All they get are the older ones who don't know that they've got lots of other options. And Oprah, Oprah's not picking books and making them hits like she used to. And Clifton Fadiman, he died in his late 90s, happily drinking wine, not picking the books that were going to win next. And Jeffrey Katzenberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg's going to try to build a new gate for a new form of media, but it's not going to be easy because bit by bit, people are learning to pick themselves to be able to say, here, I made this.

15:23And the magic of here, I made this is you don't have to say it to everyone. Only the people who are engaged with you are going to even hear you, are even going to see you. But then maybe, just maybe, the word begins to spread. So here's my advice, advice I've given many times to novelists. And as far as I know, not one novelist has ever taken my advice. If you've got a novel on your hard drive, blood, sweat, and tears went into it, your first novel, and you've pitched it to a thousand agents and to 30 or 50 editors, and no one wants to pick you, and now you're paralyzed rewriting and rewriting and polishing your proposal and working more on that book, I beg you, stop doing that.

16:11Take the book, generate a PDF, and email it to 50 people. 50 people who trust you enough that they'll read it. Not the whole thing, but a chapter. 50 people of good taste. And in your email to them, say, here's my first novel. If you like it, please forward it to other people. Here, it's free. I made this. If you like it, please share it. I'm picking myself. One of two things will happen. either your novel strikes a chord and it spreads and if that happens someone's going to call you up on the phone and say will you please write another novel I'd like to publish it or more likely that novel isn't going to spread and it wasn't as good as you thought it was in which case you should do exactly the same thing write another novel because there's no gatekeeper anymore Write another novel.

17:08If you like writing novels, if you have something to share, if you want to make a documentary, if you want to do improv, if you want to solve interesting statistical problems, if you want to do marketing, then go do it. If you want to do marketing, don't wait to get a job working for Marketing Incorporated. Go find your favorite charity and volunteer to do marketing for them. Go ahead, do marketing for them. Go find an interesting project. Put it on Kickstarter. Go do marketing. We are not our resume, not anymore. We are our work, the work we've chosen to do, the work we've put into the world.

17:47This imbalance between no gatekeepers, but lots of people unwilling to pick themselves, it's not going to last forever. There is no better moment to pick yourself than right now. Because after all, if you're not willing to pick yourself, who will. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.

18:35Hi, this is Vasilis from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is... And that completes my question. I deleted all the deletionists' questions because I wanted to answer this one instead. An honest question about sunk costs and where we go next. Hi, Seth. It's Itamar from Tel Aviv, Israel. Why don't you ask a question about your episode, Ignore Sunk Costs? in that episode you gave an example that kind of hit close close to home um for me i'm 35 years old i'm a lawyer i've been a lawyer for a couple years now and i don't really know if i'm going to be a lawyer in the future so let's say the next 10 20 30 years thing is i've invested some costs into being a lawyer i went to four years of law school did a one-year internship a study to take the bar.

19:29And ignore the sum cost is a good advice. I mean, the fact that I put time and effort into it shouldn't really hinder me from maybe pivoting and doing something else in the future. The question is, how should I really go about it? How do I know what I want to do if not being a lawyer? It's kind of a general question, but that's the question. Thanks. See, it's not really about sunk costs. It's about the curse of the 21st century. And that curse is the curse of freedom, the curse of choice. Because yes, we are all marketers. We all have the ability to connect to more than a billion people. So what should we do?

20:16Adam Smith talked about the means of production. Karl Marx pointed out that the person who owned the means of production had all the power, and the worker was just a cog in the system. So what is the means of production? It's your laptop. It's that device with the keyboard, the one where you get to do your work, where you have precisely the same tool as everyone else. And so each of us owns the means of production. Every artist has the same Photoshop. Every musician has the same keyboard. Every lawyer has the same law library. That really turns the tables on us because it means we have to choose.

20:59We have to choose where we will put ourselves on the line and be able to say, I made this. Because it's getting more and more difficult to find worthy work where someone else owns the means of production and simply tells us what to do. So back to the challenge of the law degree. The law degree, so many people discovered, was the easy way out of undergrad. Because out of undergrad, you're not sure what to do. You look the freedom in the eye and you blink. And so the thing to do is the thing you're good at, which is school. You're good at school, go do more school. And three or four years later, you're done with that.

21:39And now you have to go earn back all of those hundreds of thousands of dollars of tuition money that you have spent. But that's okay because you can go to the placement office and get picked. You can get picked to work for a law firm. Now, the law firm may pay you a lot of money, but they get something in return. They get 2 ,500 hours a year of you grinding and grinding and grinding away. And after seven years, that gets old. And after eight years, you might not be partner. And then what? And then it's all a sunk cost. You did it. It happened to the you of yesterday. It is a gift from the you of yesterday to the you of today.

22:20And now, what will you choose to do with it? What you can choose to do with it is embrace it tightly and continue to do it more, even though it doesn't feed your soul, even though there isn't any growth in it for you. There might be for some, but not for you. Or you could look at it as the gift that it is. The one that gave you some savings, the one that gave you some reputation, and the one that gave you some wisdom. So with that gift from your past self, what will you do with that wisdom? Because if you have the freedom to use it any way you choose, how will you choose? So if your question is, how can I be sure?

23:04The answer is, you cannot be sure. You weren't sure when you went to law school, but someone else took responsibility. They said, give me that money and we will be sure. But now you have to take the responsibility, the responsibility that comes from not knowing, of simply choosing to serve, serving an audience, a group, people who will pay you for the work you do. in the process of serving them you might find your calling but if you don't look for it you never will thanks for listening we'll see you next time