Making a plan is smart, it’s ‘MBA graduate from Harvard Business School’ smart. Having a plan is the difference between doing something and nothing happening.
Harvard sent a survey out in 1979 and found that the 3 per cent of graduates from their MBA who had their goals written down ended up earning ten times as much as the other 97 per cent put together within just ten years of graduating.
And that’s fucking Harvard Business School – do you know how hard it is to get into that programme? Have you ever met someone who went there? You’ll know if you have, they never stop going on about it (have I mentioned I went to Cambridge?).
Having a plan was the factor that predicted success. The good news is that the barriers to having a plan are low. All you need is a pen, some paper and a little thinking time. The amazing thing to me is that 97 per cent of Harvard Business School graduates thought, ‘I don’t need a plan, I’ll wing it.’ I guess ‘What They Don’t Teach at Harvard Business School’ is: make a plan, dummy.
A 2017 study done in the UK by the Department of Education found that the most important behavioural factor for success after university was having a plan. I see a pattern here.
You know when you look at someone and think, ‘That guy, he seems to have it all worked out.’ He hasn’t got it all worked out. He’s got one thing worked out. He knows where he’s going . . . it might be the only thing he knows, but that’s enough.
You don’t need it to be a good plan or the right plan, just a plan. I didn’t leave my cookie-cutter job to become a TV host, tour the globe and become the British poster boy for cosmetic dentistry. I left to be a comic, I left with a direction and it led me on. The plan isn’t what you’re gonna do, it’s who you’re gonna be. Wherever you are in life, have a plan. Don’t worry, nothing will go according to plan, but take the time to make one.
APPLICATION WELCOME
I’m all for pursuing desires. However, there’s a difference between a dream and a delusion. For me, that’s about what you can practically do with your dream. If it has no next step, then you’re dreaming. If you have a dream that involves some Svengali who happens upon you whilst you sit at home in your pants, you’ve already lost.
I wish someone had told me after university that you get judged on what you do, not what you say you’ll do. Christ, people talk a good game. Having ideas is not the same thing as being creative. Creation is execution, not inspiration. Talking about a film script, podcast or app is not the same as writing a film script, doing a podcast or making an app. There’s a lot of talk (and often, especially in show business, that talk is fuelled by cocaine).
Many people have ideas, but very few take the steps to make the thing they imagine. You only have to compete with those few. You put the hours in and you get satisfaction, but you don’t get results? There’s a name for that: that’s a hobby.
The modern-day example: ‘I’ve got an idea for an app, it’s the Tinder for . . . whatever.’
The difference is application. The Tinder people made a plan and went and built the complicated thing. What the Tinder people didn’t do was just talk about it and high-five each other.
Did Leonardo da Vinci invent the helicopter? Nope. He drew a great picture though. His picture looks a little like a helicopter, but it isn’t one.
I have a cure for cancer. It comes in a little green pill and it’s a hexagonal shape. You take it with water and the stuff in the pill finds your cancer and kills it for you. That’s my idea. I had an idea. That’s what people who talk about apps sound like to me. They know as much about creating apps as I do about biomedical science (fuck all).
Of course, you might not be there yet. But you get it, right? The metric is not the amount of effort you put in, the metric is the results you get out. You can polish a brass coin for a hundred years, it’ll never be gold.
Peter Cook was at a party and asked someone what they were up to. The guy said, ‘I’m writing a book.’
‘Oh really,’ Cook said. ‘Neither am I.’
GOALS ARE THE GOAL
Your current habits are perfectly designed to deliver your current results. Are you happy with that?
If you’re not happy with the current state of play, here’s what I’d do: take your life’s purpose and break that down into manageable, smaller goals. Goals, rather than a goal. Goals are your plan broken down. They should be hard enough to be a challenge but still realistic. Have a timeline to give yourself a sense of forward momentum.
Prioritise important things. Frankly, if that’s news to you, you shouldn’t be reading this. There is a book about a very hungry caterpillar that I think you’d like.
Sometimes, though, stuff can sound important when it isn’t. You have to keep asking yourself, ‘What do you want?’ And if the answer is to play more Xbox, then you are incorrect. There are such things as wrong answers in life.
You might want to lose a stone in weight. That’s a goal. A system would be to exercise first thing in the morning. A checklist would put exercise in your diary.
Heroin addicts in recovery programmes find that doing all the little rituals — robbing their mums, getting the works out, heating up the spoon, looking for the last viable vein in their big toe — all the practical things they need to do to take heroin, gives them mini highs. There is pleasure in deferred pleasure. I’m saying get high all the time.
Break down your purpose into daily goals and then find the high in the everyday of the goal. Get lots of little highs.
LITTLE HIGHS
The way you judge yourself is up to you. In my world, it could be the validation of other comics, critics, television execs, the audience . . . Your internal metric is more important than external measures of success.
The answer to someone who tells you that you’ve failed as a comic is, ‘Well, I’m not done yet.’ Unless you’ve finished your set, in which case, get off the stage.
When I first started doing comedy you could do the Comedy Store in central London, drive to Balham in South London to do the Banana Cabaret, where you would do two shows, and then drive back to the Comedy Store. I was getting paid, the clubs were packed, I was in the zone the whole time. People were laughing, I got to hang out with other comics. It was great. For me, that was success.
IT’S ALL IMPORTANT
Even when you love your work, there are things around your work that you’ll have to do. Usually tedious and boring admin. Sometimes the periphery feels like a distraction from the work you’d rather be doing. It isn’t. It’s all part of what you want to do and where you want to go.
I say, love that too. Life is not just a highlights reel, it’s the whole shebang (The Hole She Bang would be a great title for a porn star’s autobiography).
As a comic you better fucking love planes, trains and automobiles, because that is your life. And I love comedy. I love everything about it. I love sitting in airports. I love driving down the M1 at 1.30 a.m. with my stereo blasting to keep me awake. I love getting up at 5 a.m. and catching a bus across a fjord to make a flight. I love it all.
Look, when you’re a jobbing comic, you’re driving up and down the motorway all the time. You basically live in comedy clubs and service stations. Put another way, you’re essentially a salesman, a door-to-door salesman of dick jokes.
The vision, the life’s journey, the purpose, that’s all valid. But what are you doing at 9 a.m. on Monday morning? Take care of that and the big stuff takes care of itself. A life’s journey is a lot of days strung together.
Two boys go to ride ponies. But the owner of the ranch insists they shovel manure out of a stall before they get to ride. One of the boys hates it. He complains all morning. The other is whistling and smiling as he works.
‘What are you so happy about?’ asks the first boy.
‘Well,’ says the second boy, ‘with all this shit, there must be a pony.’
Life is full of shit – but there’s a reward for getting through it. Sometimes it’s just the lesson.
‘Never complain, never explain.’
Jimmy
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