Nerd Numba 2 is back.
Have you ever suffered through an open mic night at a comedy club?
If you haven’t, consider yourself lucky.
When I used to work in L.A., I made it custom of mine to drop by the Comedy Store over there in Hollywood, right off Sunset Boulevard.
This is the club where anybody who’s anybody in comedy has rocked the stage from Robin Williams and Steve Martin, to Richard Pryor and Chris Rock.
If you arrived before 9:00 on Sunday night you got in free. Well, there’s a two drink minimum but hey, listening to comedy buzzed is always fun for me so I never minded buying drinks.
So, I’d usually go to Miyagi’s at 8:00 for sushi, zoom North, park in the Hyatt’s garage and run down the steep ass Hollywood Hills ramp so I’d barely make it in the door at 8:57 without having to pay a cover and without having to suffer through any of the open mic’ers.
The reason you didn’t have to pay to get in from 7:00 to 9:00 was because it was Open Mic Night.
This is where they’d let anyone who had the cajones, hop up on stage for 5 or 10 minutes and give it their best shot.
Comics call this working out your routine.
These men and women were raw. Real raw. So raw in fact that almost everyone of them referred to the notepad of ideas they schlepped up on stage with them.
Every comic you admire has been this wet behind the ears but you’ve been fast forwarded to when they were polished.
As you can imagine most of these fledgling comics were stifled, nervous and were insecure.
They didn’t own the room. It owned them.
What makes the difference between the person who quits and the person who goes on to become a superstar in comedy?
Is it self esteem?
Is it coaching?
Is it being in the right place at the right time?
Yes. Yes. And yes.
But without this next factor I don’t think any of those would’ve have been enough to push them through the tough times.
10,000 hours.
Yep. 10 large. In Malcom Gladwell’s newest book “Outliers: The Story of Success” I learned that this number is one of the common denominators in any super successful person he studied for the book.
He found out that Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems had logged more than 10,000 hours of computer programming while still in college.
At peak he was programming 8 hours a day while going to school.
Same story with Bill Gates.
This meant that when huge opportunities arose in the field of computing, these guys were primed for action.
No learning curve. Just balls to the wall.
Does this 10,000 just apply to the tech field? Nope.
The Indra Club, where The Beatles first played on arriving in Hamburg, as it appeared in 2007.
Before the Beatles ever rocked Ed Sullivan’s stage they had logged over 10,000 hours playing to rowdy crowds in little dive bars like the Indra in Europe.
In Hamburg there were times when they played for 8 hours straight, 7 days a week.
Did you know that More
My Note Taking Nerd 
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