ReThinking: Ed Helms on growing through failure

0:00So, Ed, I'm so excited that you're here. You're basically the most popular character in my class. We analyze a lot of office videos. Oh, wow. Like how not to run a business. Yes. Yes. And how not to interview for a job. Uh-huh. And how not to pretend to help your coworkers. There's a long list of Andy Bernard offenses. Oh, that's so funny. Well, I am not Andy Bernard. I mean, I play Andy Bernard, but I'm a different person than that. I hope I can convince you of that today. Hey everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to Rethinking, my podcast on the science of what makes us tick with the TED Audio Collective.

0:42I'm an organizational psychologist, and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.

0:53My guest today is Ed Helms. He's probably best known for playing Andy Bernard on The Office and Stuart Price in The Hangover movie series. He's also the host of the narrative podcast Snafu, which covers history's greatest screw-ups, and he's the author of a new book by the same title. I invited Ed to the Authors at Wharton series to talk about overcoming failure, lessons from his time on The Office, and what we can learn from some of the most astounding mistakes in history.

1:27We know you for your successes, but I can only imagine your life was full of failures for you to be so into snafus. Never failed. Next question. Reporters ask crazy questions, and some of them are, like, incredibly invasive. And I've just started being like, pass. Well, it's fun because the reporter, especially if they've kind of crossed a line or asked something like really invasive, they're like instantly chastened because there's it's like no one realized you can do that. You can just pass on a question. Pass. And then the reporter's like, oh, oh, OK. Next question. So anyway, that's my new trick.

2:11And I also recommend it in job interviews. It's a total. Yeah, it's a total power move. Someone's like, tell me about yourself. Pass. And the boss is like, wow, that took a lot of guts. But no, to answer your question, where do I start with my own snafus? Show business is just a festival of failure, truly. And then I started in stand-up comedy, which is just punishment, truly. In order to get anywhere with standup comedy, you really have to learn to love bombing and love failing and sort of see it as like just building your calluses, you know, building your toughness as a performer. I was very lucky.

2:59I moved to New York City right out of college, and I found a cohort of people who were also super passionate about comedy. And there was this kind of funny hierarchy, almost like a college class. As freshmen, you come in and you're wide-eyed and terrified. And what you learn from the older kids is that love of bombing because you're getting off after a terrible set or someone heckled you and got the best of you. And you come off stage and you're mortified and they're high fiving you. Congratulations. You sucked. Yeah. No, truly. Strong bonds are forged in pain, right? And in shared experiences that are difficult.

3:40And there are obviously so many horrible examples of that throughout history. But comedy clubs is a fascinating little microcosm of that too. Okay, so I want to talk about building those calluses. First, tell us about the worst stand-up bomb you ever had. Okay, so there are so many. But probably one of the biggest ones. There's this big comedy club out on Long Island in Levittown called Governors. And that was like Jerry Seinfeld came up through there. and a lot of big comedians routinely played there. It was a huge room and they packed people in and it was like a very different vibe. It's very Long Island.

4:23It's very different than New York City. So I got one of my first opportunities to middle there, which means like to do the 30 minute set before the headliner. I'd never done a 30 minute set and I didn't really have 30 minutes of like reliable material. Anyway, I get up there right out of the gate. I'm struggling. And somebody starts to heckle me. And I just threw back the lamest response. Like, who's this guy, a brain surgeon? And there's like a big laugh around him. And this buddy's like, he is a brain surgeon. He's literally a brain surgeon. And at that point, like, I lost. I just lost. The crowd won.

5:11Neurosurgeons are the worst hecklers of all the surgeons, I'm told, by my cousin who's a neurosurgeon. What goes through your mind? What do you feel coming off stage having just flopped that badly? Well, like I was saying, you kind of try to train yourself to love bombing and to sort of value that experience. But there are times where it's undeniably brutal and undeniably painful. And especially in a situation like that where I'm the outsider. I'm the visitor, and I have not established any credibility in this space. It's devastating. It's the physical feeling of it that's so hard. Like, it just, it's pain.

5:50It feels like physical pain. It sounds like, I mean, like a breakup almost. Like, you're getting rejected in the same way as if someone dumped you. I think there's something to that. Yeah. I'll tell you one more quickly, which was a bigger scale, which was after I got onto The Daily Show, I suddenly had so many more opportunities as a comedian. And now I'm like Ed Helms from The Daily Show. So my booker manager was like, I got you. You're going to headline Mohegan Sun, which is a huge casino in Connecticut. And I get up there and I'm doing an hour set. And I have a brutal night. I'm so anxious on stage.

6:30It's coming across. It's a terrible night. I had three or four more nights to go. at this booking, Mohegan Sun puts a newspaper out under everyone's door, like a little Mohegan Sun newspaper. And someone had reviewed my show in this newspaper that went under everybody's door in the morning. Like Ed Helms from The Daily Show had a hard night in the comedy room and just this like, you know, deconstruction of my failure. Anyway, lots of stuff like that. When are those low expectations helpful, though? Both of those instances, I didn't feel prepared. But when you feel like you've done the legwork and the homework and the preparation and you've put in the hours and no one knows who you are and you know you've got killer jokes in the chamber, like ready to fire, that's, yeah, that's when it's an advantage to not be known.

7:32So talk to us about the process of getting there, because I think a lot of people would crash and burn like you did and say, forget it, I'm done. I get that this could be a growth experience, but I'm not confident that I can get good enough at this that it's worth the pain. Where did that confidence come from? It wasn't confidence. It was just a belief that I was doing the thing that I was put here to do, weirdly. and and and so i that sort of allowed me to punch through some really difficult times and again i really could rely on the community i always tell people they're like how do you get into comedy like how do you forge how do you break into these spaces or any kind of showbiz thing which i think to a lot of people who want to be in show business feels insurmountable or terrifying.

8:24I always just say, start by finding your cohort. Surround yourself with people who agree that what you want is awesome. Because otherwise, especially if your aspirations are a little bit out there or unusual or the thing you want to do is not widely considered to be like a great career move, you're going to get so much resistance. And it's just friction. It's not even necessarily people telling you you're making a bad choice. It's those little things like, oh, that's what you want to do. But when you're surrounded by, when I was with my comedian friends, it was like, it was no question we were all sort of doing the right thing.

9:10And that is so galvanizing and such an important way to find support. So it sounds like you're talking about people sort of mildly judging your career path. Or just telling you you're an idiot. Especially I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia. Nobody knew a comedian. Nobody knew an actor. And so I kept all of my aspirations totally internal as a kid because I knew that I would just get laughed at or eye rolls or kind of like, good luck, buddy. And that stuff is awful. When did you know that this was what you wanted to do? Early. Eight or nine years old. Wow. Yeah. What was it that hooked you? It was Saturday Night Live, which is, I think, a lot of comedians answer.

10:02But I didn't understand it, but I just loved the energy of it. There was something about that live show with the audience. and Eddie Murphy was on when I was a kid and I loved him. He was like everything I wanted to be. He was so spontaneous. He was so present. And I could tell, I looked, you know what it was? I looked at him and I was like, he's having fun. He's having so much fun. And I like, I want that fun. Okay, so this is an interesting contrast with where your career then went. So let me just, I feel like a disclaimer is needed here. So I once made the mistake of doing a cameo on a TV show called Billions.

10:44And it was the most boring day of my life. Oh, yeah. Like seven and a half hours of retaking a two and a half minute scene. Yeah. And you're on take 23 and you're like, I don't even think even the director can see a difference at this point. Like we could have shot the whole season. Sure. In the time you're wasting. You don't have any of the audience energy. You don't have any sense of like I'm growing. I'm connecting with other people. I'm producing entertainment. like they're going to see it months later. Yeah. How in the world does somebody who like got such a rush out of doing standup comedy want, like how could you ever want to be in a TV show or a movie?

11:19I'm usually asking directors for more takes because I just love to explore and think about like, is this as funny as it can be? Is there another bit of like topspin I can put on this or a little bit of like a side angle? And I'm constantly changing my takes, take to take. I see endless novelty in it. Wow. And that is such a thrill. But I try to bring that pursuit of comedic perfection, which is completely unattainable. But that's the fun.

11:54Okay, so let's talk a little bit about The Office. Sure. What were your biggest lessons from being on the greatest show of its time? This is a little bit of a cheesy answer, but I was so proud to be given the line in the very last episode of the series. I wish there was some way to know you're in the good old days while you're actually in them. And I just got chills saying that because I did know working on that show that I was in something so special. Those are the good old days. It's like the lesson is to just like love the mundane. If you're in a good place, like cherish the mundane because that's where nostalgia is built.

12:39It's not built in the big moments. It's built in the small moments. I was reading some research on this recently about how mindfulness is the opposite of flow. Interesting. Where when you're in a mindful state, you're fully kind of aware of the situation. And when you're in a flow state, you're so deeply absorbed that you're not attuned to the fact that you're enjoying it. And I think by definition, right, if you start to become aware, you start to evaluate and analyze and you lose the moment. Yeah. Maybe that's not a bad thing. No, I think that's a beautiful thing. And they both have tremendous value.

13:14Okay, so was there a big snafu on the office? So many snafus. It was, I don't think this is necessarily a snafu in the grand sense, but it was just sort of a snafu of my experience, which was we all sort of had this fun feedback loop with the writing staff. Somewhere in those last couple of seasons, I started to hit a couple of speed bumps where I was like, I don't understand the behavior that you're writing for Andy. And I don't understand the choices Andy's making. And I really struggled to kind of like push through that, but it was a good lesson in sort of like it isn't always exactly what you want.

13:57Like even something great can you just have to push through. I do remember an arc where Andy got weird. Yeah. Yeah. I'm like, yeah, okay. You felt that too. Good. Okay, so let's talk about some snafus that you've been fascinated by and that did not embarrass you or affect your life or career in any way. What's your favorite snafu from the book? There's one that stands out because it is so crazy. And that is in the 1950s, the Cold War was getting very intense. And the United States really wanted to flex nuclear muscle. There was very much an arms race with nuclear development. And so someone hatched the idea, let's shoot the moon with a nuclear missile.

14:44And the logic was everyone can see the moon. So if we hit it with a nuclear missile, it'll just be this like, yeah, check this out, Soviet Union. And look what we did to the moon. We can do that to you too. And a lot of time and money and resources went into this. Carl Sagan worked on this and he loves planets, right? But he was right out of grad school. This is a true story. He was very young and he worked on this. The only reason this whole thing was uncovered is because one of Carl Sagan's biographers found a fellowship application that he had filled out at the time. And he had put this project on the fellowship application and they were like, okay, I'm going to table my Carl Sagan research and go into this for a minute.

15:35And they eventually realized that this is a terrible idea because any miscalculation or malfunction of the rocket could very easily miss the moon, be slingshotted around the gravitational field of the moon, and just come right back to Earth. And they decided not to do it. Thank God. That's like Wile E. Coyote. I can't believe that happened. Yes. It's crazy. I'm curious about the bigger lessons that you've learned from three seasons of the podcast from writing the book about how to prevent a snafu or how to clean one up. For me, the most obvious lesson is like so often these things happen because groups polarize and then fall victim to groupthink and they get overconfident and they don't have enough dissent and they don't question themselves and they end up on a path that they shouldn't be on.

16:27Absolutely. Surely there's more to them than that. What else have you found to be common patterns? That's the biggest one. What you just said, the enclosed bubble of groupthink. And also, I think, especially when you get back into the 50s and 60s, there are clearly no women involved in some of these decisions. And that, of course, contributes to a very siloed set of values and opinions. And I think… Are you suggesting that women are smarter than men, Ed? No, I'm stating that as a fact.

17:08But yeah, that also the sort of power of fear, both as a motivator to action and a motivator to often terrible judgment. Sometimes amazing judgment.

17:23Okay, we have some more audience questions that we haven't covered yet. Heck yeah. Okay, we'll do some of these lightning-style rapid fire. If Andy Bernard had a spinoff show, what would it be called and what would he be doing now? It'd be called Andy Time. And he would be the dean of admissions at Cornell. Or no, he would not be the dean of admissions. He would be like a staffer in the admissions office. Aspiring to one day. Aspiring dean, yeah. Who do you identify with more, Andy Bernard or Stuart Price? Andy, for sure. Yeah. I mean, they're both departures from me, but there's a lot of me in both.

18:06But I think Andy is a guy with very few tools to deal with the feelings that I have. Like, I relate to some of the thoughts and feelings and internal battles that Andy has, but I like to think I have a little bit better set of tools and I have a higher emotional intelligence than Andy, but I relate to some of his expressions of insecurity for sure. Wow. What's your favorite office episode? This will probably surprise no one, but Dinner Party is, it was some of the hardest laughs I've ever had in, was shooting that episode. Favorite scene? My favorite moment is when Steve is showing us how his flat screen TV is adjustable and it moves two inches.

19:00And he's so proud of that. And we must have done 500 takes of that because none of us could get through it. It just was so dumb and so funny. Love it. Okay. Did you actually do acapella in college? Yes. I was in the Oberlin overtones for two semesters and I learned something very valuable, which I think is a sort of fundamental truth of the universe, which is that acapella music is unbelievably fun to do and very painful to endure or watch or consume. Okay, this one I thought was highly amusing. The question is, do you have it written into your acting contracts that you have to sing at least once per performance?

19:51No, it's not in any of my contracts, and I just force it in there. And it's not welcome most of the time. I get a lot of pushback, and I don't give a fuck. I'm going to sing, and you can use it or not. Was there a moment in your career when you thought, yep, I've made it? Or has that never really happened? I don't know. There are definitely moments of celebration, you know, like in a production like The Office or The Hangover movies, like there are these kind of built-in moments of celebration. You have premieres. You have these kind of big events that feel kind of like milestones. And I think there are some heady moments during some of those times where you feel like this is incredible.

20:39But it's very fleeting. And in show business, no one's stock is really permanent in any way. So I think, I don't know, there's kind of this beautiful constant pursuit. Okay. How do you deal with people expecting you to be funny all the time? I am funny all the time. I just be funny all the time. No. Different moments have different expectations, and I try to surround myself with people who know me and appreciate me. In terms of, like, my friends and family, they know that I can be a really serious, boring dude, and that's okay. How do you think about what success means at this point in your career?

21:23This is super cheesy, but I think of it now as I have kids and I think of it as like, how is this something that I can be proud of as a parent? And my kids can be proud of and look at it as they get older, see me putting my heart into things that have value. And by the way, value is measured in a thousand different ways. But it's something – I don't know. It's like you know it in your gut if it's worthwhile. And all the markers of success, the money or the adulation, and certainly in show business, fame is a big sort of metric. They start to lose meaning at a certain point because they don't make you a better dad.

22:09They don't make you a better brother or family member or friend. And those are the things that matter. Why is that cheesy?

22:24Because it's about feelings. And I was raised in the South, and we don't talk about feelings. Okay, so Ed, we've got a lot of people here who I think are afraid to fail. We've been talking this whole conversation about the value of failure. What would your advice be about how to confront the next snafu that we all face? You know, going back to what I was talking about earlier about finding kind of your people, part of that is how are you reacting to your peers' failures? What culture are you helping to build around you? It's not necessarily like, how do I handle my own failures? It's like, what sort of soup am I swimming in and contributing to?

23:05Like, is this a yummy vegetable soup and I'm like a delicious carrot? Or is this, am I just like a gross cockroach that got thrown into this soup? And because the right people, failure just won't feel so catastrophic. Is there a surprising takeaway that you've picked up when it comes to then bouncing back from your snafus? It's habits. I have a weird one. A lot of self-help and pop psychology talks about the power of affirmations, right? Like saying nice things to yourself in the mirror and so forth. And I made – this is crazy. I've never told anybody this. I made a video of myself on my phone giving myself a pep talk.

23:48And I have a couple of them for different situations, like specific moments of difficulty. I'll go to those. Some of them are for like if I feel like I failed in some social context. Some of them are in a more professional context. And I swear it helps a lot. Seeing myself like myself is pretty damn good. Wow. It's a pretty nice thing. I've never heard of this application before, but psychologists would call that self-distancing, right? To hear from a version of you that isn't caught up in the current failure. Yes, that's exactly what it is. I've never seen someone record a video of themselves giving the pep talk.

24:27To myself, yeah. That's amazing. So what's your favorite one? What does it say? It says, it basically starts out like, all right, Ed, cue the cheesy background music. Here we go. And I put some like inspirational music behind it. As a person in show business with a high profile, I'm constantly putting myself out there. And I'm constantly exposing myself to judgment. And sometimes that's hard. Sometimes I'll ruminate after a moment, after an interview or an appearance of some sort and be like, I can't believe I said that. I can't. We all do that. That's so normal. and I'm there for me. Like in my phone, I'm right there.

25:15And I can literally check it in those times. I also will sometimes watch it going into a thing before the thing where it's like, hey, you belong. You're where you're supposed to be. And it's like basically tricking yourself. And it's, but sometimes that's what you need. Or you're not tricking yourself and you're getting the version of yourself that's currently being tricked by wallowing in your despair out of that. Yes, I like that take. That's exactly right. Well, I would record one of these myself, but I can't act. So I don't know how to record it. Just be affectionate to yourself. Too many feelings, but I appreciate the encouragement.

25:51So just by a little applause, how many of you are going to record your own pep talks tonight? Oh, wow. All right. We're starting something here. This is a revolution. Well, you came to the right place to debut it. There are a lot of people who need a pep talk right now. and also a laugh. And Ed, we're so grateful that you were willing to come and provide both of those things to us today. Thank you. Thanks so much for having me.

26:18Rethinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant. The show is produced by Ted with Cosmic Standard. Our producer is Jessica Glazer. Our editor is Alejandra Salazar. Our engineer is Asia Pilar Simpson. Our technical director is Jacob Winnick. And our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Our team includes Eliza Smith, Roxanne Hailash, Ban Ban Chang, Julia Dickerson, Tansika Sung Manivong, and Whitney Pennington Rogers. Original music by Hans Dale Su and Alison Leighton Brown.

26:48I worked on this little movie that my friend directed about a zombie who was trying to like enter the dating pool. There's like me sitting in a cafe waiting for my blind date to show up. It's very sad. It's like moving. But it's so silly to like treat a zombie as this like poignant guy struggling through not life, death. Never felt so much zombie empathy before. Yeah, exactly. Which was the point.