I.
The kid was nervous.
He stood on a small stage on Second Avenue, in the heart of the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Feet away from him sat Lorne Michaels, the gatekeeper to the world’s most prestigious comedy clique and creator of the most Emmy-nominated television show in history. With dark eyes and short, salt-and-pepper hair, the man sat in a wooden chair and waited, silent and scrutinizing, expressionless as he usually was at times like this.
It was 1996, and this was The Comic Strip, the oldest stand-up comedy showcase club in New York City. The long-haired kid wore jeans and a pullover T-shirt, and held in his shaking hands a Troll doll, a plastic, pantsless toy with beady eyes and neon hair.
It was a rare audition for NBC’s weekly sketch comedy series, Saturday Night Live. With The Comic Strip’s iconic brick wall to his back—where Eddie Murphy and a hundred other superstar comics had cast their shadows over the years—and with a cluster of veteran comedy producers to his front, the kid stood, feet rooted to the spot where he was about to spend the scariest three minutes of his life.
Then the kid—Jimmy Fallon—took a breath, and began his routine.
ABOUT NINE MONTHS EARLIER, Randi Siegel, a feisty, up-and-coming talent manager, was starting a new job. She’d gotten her feet wet in the comedy industry working with stars like David Spade and Adam Sandler, and had, by age 26, worked herself into the SNL in crowd.
One day, a colleague named Peter Iselin, who’d recently moved to L.A. from Upstate New York, handed Siegel an audition tape.
“There’s this kid,” he told her—one of his former interns from his last job. “He’s really great with impressions, and he wants to be on Saturday Night Live.”
Get in line, Siegel thought. So does everyone else.
But she watched the tape anyway.
The five-minute home video showed a teenage Jimmy performing at a small comedy club. The bit was a pretend audition held by a Troll doll that was seeking a spokesman. Various characters, voiced by Jimmy, “auditioned” for the “job,” including a convincing faux–Jerry Seinfeld.
“He was adorable,” Siegel recalls. “Very, very green. He was this nervous kid. But talent shines through, and he clearly had that.”
She asked for Jimmy’s phone number.
A FEW DAYS LATER, Siegel stayed late at the office and dialed long-distance.
“Hi,” she said. “I’m looking for Jimmy Fallon.”
“This is Jimmy Fallon,” announced a hyper-sounding 20-year-old on the other end.
“Oh. This is Randi Siegel—”
“Randi Siegel! I know who you are!”
This was not the response she expected. It turned out that while his peers at St. Rose College memorized NFL rosters and the names of their favorite rock band drummers, Jimmy had tirelessly followed his heroes in comedy. He fixated on the careers of comics like Sandler and Spade and tracked the movements of their management teams, agencies, films, and TV shows as if he was earning school credit for it.
Jimmy’s goal since childhood, he explained to Siegel, had been to join the cast of Saturday Night Live.
He was endearing. After a two-hour call, Siegel offered to represent him. She had one question, however.
“Why don’t you stay and graduate?” Jimmy was a semester shy of a degree. Siegel suggested that they get started in the summer, so he’d have a bachelor’s degree to fall back on, just in case.
“No, no,” Jimmy insisted. “I need to get on Saturday Night Live, and you’re going to make it happen, because you know Adam Sandler! I don’t want to do anything else.”
Siegel knew this was a long shot—and a long-term endeavor—especially for an out-of-town kid with zero acting credits. But for some reason, she couldn’t turn him down; she had never met someone as focused and passionate about a single dream as this grinning bumpkin from the tiny town of Saugerties, New York. And though his skills were rough, given some time in the industry, she thought he might just make it.
“OK, let’s do this,” she said.
So, in January 1996 Jimmy quit college and moved to Los Angeles. For six months, Siegel booked him gigs on small, local stand-up comedy stages. Then, without warning, SNL put a call out for auditions; three cast members would be leaving the show. Having worked with one of the departing actors, David Spade, Siegel pulled a few strings and arranged a Hail Mary for the young Jimmy Fallon: an audition at The Comic Strip.
SO HERE HE WAS. Fresh-faced, sweating in his light shirt, holding his Troll doll. In front of Lorne Michaels and a phalanx of Hollywood shakers.
When Jimmy ended his three-minute bit, the audience clapped politely. True to his reputation, Michaels didn’t laugh. Not once. Jimmy went home and awaited word.
Finally, the results came: SNL had invited Tracy Morgan, Ana Gasteyer, and Chris Kattan, each of whom had hustled in the comedy scene for years, to join the cast. Jimmy—the newbie whose well-connected manager had finagled an invite—was crushed.
“Was he completely raw? A hundred percent,” Siegel says.
But, the SNL people said, “Let’s keep an eye on him.”
II.
If you don’t live under a rock, you probably know that Jimmy Fallon eventually became one of comedy’s fastest-rising icons and the host of the prestigious Tonight Show by age 38. This chapter is about how he ultimately shortened his path to Hollywood success.
Many entertainers toil for decades to get their break. They pay their Actors Guild dues, hone their craft, and starve like artists until they reach a tipping point. Funnyman Louis C.K., for example, spent 15 years performing stand-up comedy for ungrateful local crowds before finally catching his break and becoming a recognizable name with his own cable TV series.
On the other hand, some people skip the dues and jump straight to the top, like the Canadian singer Justin Bieber, who played a few songs on YouTube and became an international megastar in a year. Bieber’s first record went platinum; his first single went diamond; his second and third records each hit number one by the time he was eighteen.
Both C.K. and Bieber are extremely gifted performers. Both climbed to the top of their industry, and in fact, both ultimately used the Internet to get big. But somehow Bieber “made it” in one-fifteenth of the time.
How did he climb so much faster than the guy Rolling Stone calls the funniest man in America—and what does this have to do with Jimmy Fallon?
The answer begins with a story from Homer’s Odyssey.
When the Greek adventurer Odysseus embarked for war with Troy, he entrusted his son, Telemachus, to the care of a wise old friend named Mentor. Mentor raised and coached Telemachus in his father’s absence.
But it was really the goddess Athena disguised as Mentor who counseled the young man through various important situations. Through Athena’s training and wisdom, Telemachus soon became a great hero.
“Mentor” helped Telemachus shorten his ladder of success.
The simple answer to the Bieber question is that the young singer shot to the top of pop with the help of two music industry mentors. And not just any run-of-the-mill coach, but R&B giant Usher Raymond and rising-star manager Scooter Braun. They reached from the top of the ladder where they were and pulled Bieber up, where his talent could be recognized by a wide audience. They helped him polish his performing skills, and in four years Bieber had sold 15 million records and been named by Forbes as the third most powerful celebrity in the world. Without Raymond’s and Braun’s mentorship, Biebs would probably still be playing acoustic guitar back home in Canada. He’d be hustling on his own just like Louis C.K., begging for attention amid a throng of hopeful entertainers.
Mentorship is the secret of many of the highest-profile achievers throughout history. Socrates mentored young Plato, who in turn mentored Aristotle. Aristotle mentored a boy named Alexander, who went on to conquer the known world as Alexander the Great.
From The Karate Kid to Star Wars to The Matrix, adventure stories often adhere to a template in which a protagonist forsakes humble beginnings and embarks on a great quest. Before the quest heats up, however, he or she receives training from a master: Obi Wan Kenobi. Mr. Miyagi. Mickey Goldmill. Haymitch. Morpheus. Quickly, the hero is ready to face overwhelming challenges. Much more quickly than if he’d gone to light-saber school.
The mentor story is so common because it seems to work—especially when the mentor is not just a teacher, but someone who’s traveled the road herself. “A master can help you accelerate things,” explains Jack Canfield, author of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series and career coach behind the bestseller The Success Principles. He says that, like C.K., we can spend thousands of hours practicing until we master a skill, or we can convince a world-class practitioner to guide our practice and cut the time to mastery significantly.
Research from Brunel University shows that chess students who trained with coaches increased on average 168 points in their national ratings versus those who didn’t. Though long hours of deliberate practice are unavoidable in the cognitively complex arena of chess, the presence of a coach for mentorship gives players a clear advantage. Chess prodigy Joshua Waitzkin (the subject of the film Searching for Bobby Fischer) for example, accelerated his career when national chess master Bruce Pandolfini discovered him playing chess in Washington Square Park in New York as a boy. Pandolfini coached young Waitzkin one on one, and the boy won a slew of chess championships, setting a world record at an implausibly young age.
Business research backs this up, too. Analysis shows that entrepreneurs who have mentors end up raising seven times as much capital for their businesses, and experience 3.5 times faster growth than those without mentors. And in fact, of the companies surveyed, few managed to scale a profitable business model without a mentor’s aid.
Even Steve Jobs, the famously visionary and dictatorial founder of Apple, relied on mentors, such as former football coach and Intuit CEO Bill Campbell, to keep himself sharp.
SO, DATA INDICATES THAT those who train with successful people who’ve “been there” tend to achieve success faster. The winning formula, it seems, is to seek out the world’s best and convince them to coach us.
Except there’s one small wrinkle. That’s not quite true.
We just held up Justin Bieber as an example of great, rapid-mentorship success. But since his rapid rise, he’s gotten into an increasing amount of trouble. Fights. DUIs. Resisting arrest. Drugs. At least one story about egging someone’s house. It appears that Bieber started unraveling nearly as quickly as he rocketed to Billboard number one.
OK, first of all, Bieber’s young. He’s acting like the rock star he is. But his mentor, Usher, also got to Billboard number one at age 18, and he managed to dominate pop music for a decade without DUIs or egg-vandalism incidents. Could it be that Bieber missed something in the mentorship process?
History, it turns out, is full of people who’ve been lucky enough to have amazing mentors and have stumbled anyway.
Indeed, equal amounts of research support both assertions: that mentorship works and that it doesn’t. Mentoring programs break down in the workplace so often that scholarly research contradicts itself about the value of mentoring at all, and prompts Harvard Business Review articles with titles such as “Why Mentoring Doesn’t Work.”
The mentorship slip is illustrated well by family businesses: 70 percent of them fail when passed to the second generation. A business-owner parent is in a perfect spot to mentor his or her child to run a company. And yet, sometime between mentorship and the business handoff, something critical doesn’t stick.
One of the most tantalizing ideas about training with a master is that the master can help her protégé skip several steps up the ladder. Sometimes this ends up producing Aristotle. But sometimes it produces Icarus, to whom his father and master craftsman Daedalus of Greek mythology gave wings; Icarus then flew too high too fast and died.
Jimmy Fallon’s mentor, one of the best-connected managers Jimmy could have for his SNL dream, served him up on a platter to SNL auditions in a fraction of the expected time it should take a new comedian to get there. But Jimmy didn’t cut it—yet.
There was still one more ingredient, the one that makes the difference between rapid-rising protégés who soar and those who melt their wings and crash.
III.
In the mid-1990s, local outrage bubbled over some distressing news at Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH), a children’s clinic in London: The beloved 150-year-old medical facility, to which J. M. Barrie had bequeathed the rights to his play Peter Pan in 1929, was killing children.
Not on purpose, of course. But a perplexingly high mortality rate plagued the facility’s cardiac ward. Doctors studied the hospital’s surgery processes and determined that a large number of fatalities occurred due to problems during the handovers between the operating room and the intensive care unit.
The risks of opening up a tiny child’s chest cavity and repairing her heart are already terrifyingly high. But once she’s stitched up, the medical staff must transfer all her life support equipment—monitoring lines, ventilator, vasodilators—not once, but twice: first, between the OR and a wheeled bed for transport, then again to a bed in the ICU. The process typically takes about 15 minutes. There were plenty of opportunities to screw up during the shuffle, but especially worrisome was the knowledge transfer. When the nuances of each particular case that were learned in surgery were lost in the handovers, patients suffered.
For years, the medical staff, exhausted after marathon surgeries, simply tried to do better at handovers. Nobody wanted these kids to die. But not only did errors persist, 30 percent of handover-related problems were caused by both equipment and information errors—the staff doubly screwed up.
One day, after lengthy surgeries, two tired doctors, Martin Elliott and Alan Goldman, sat down in front of a television for a break. Unbeknownst to them, that short break would change everything for the hospital.
“I’d done a transplant, then an arterial switch in the morning, and we were both pretty knackered,” said Elliott. “The Formula 1 came on TV just as we were sitting down.”
The doctors watched the drivers zoom around a racetrack at 300 kilometers per hour. Then, one car pulled over to the side of the circuit for a pit stop, “and we just realized,” Dr. Elliott said, “that the pit stop where they changed tires and topped up the fuel was pretty well identical in concept to what we do in handover.”
In seven seconds, the pit crew tore off four tires, filled a tank of gas, screwed on four new tires, and leapt out of the way for the car to scream back onto the track. Working as if controlled by a hive mind, the Formula 1 crews made the GOSH staff look like monkeys fighting over ventilator tubes.
“So we phoned them up.”
Before long, the GOSH doctors found themselves hanging out with a Ferrari pit team in Italy. The mechanics demonstrated their process for the doctors up close and in detail.
Right away the GOSH team observed several differences between the Ferrari routine and their own. The pit crew meticulously planned out every possible scenario of what could go wrong during a handover and practiced each scenario until it became habit; GOSH staff, on the other hand, handled surprises on the fly.
Ferrari crewmembers operated with lots of physical space between each other; the hospital staff constantly got in each other’s way—by virtue of the small space, they claimed. But a dozen grown men with power tools managed to gather round about as small a space during every race without bottlenecking anybody.
Ferrari pit crews had a dedicated overseer who ran the show. This overseer, often called a “lollipop man,” would stand back to watch and direct the operation holistically. Only when he waved his flag would the car be allowed back onto the track. In a hospital room full of surgeons, anesthesiologists, and nurses, there was no conductor, no lollipop man. Each staff member simply helped out where he or she thought help was needed.
Finally, the GOSH doctors noted that the Ferrari technicians worked in silence. In contrast, hospital handovers were full of chatter; they not only talked through what was happening (“Ventilator is reattached!”) but just chatted during the procedure.
When the doctors returned to London, they hired a dance choreographer to practice movements and add space to the small working area around a hospital bed. They turned the handover scramble into a routine, where each staffer had a prescribed set of actions. Contingencies for various scenarios were mapped out, then practiced. The head anesthesiologist became the lollipop man, standing back to observe and direct.
And everyone shut up.
Before long, the hospital had reduced its worst handover errors by 66 percent.
AFTER TRAINING WITH MASTER handover artists, the GOSH team created a life-saving shift at the hospital. The Formula 1 mentorship clearly worked out for them, and probably better than if the doctors had asked handover experts from another hospital for help.
But what about the training made it work, especially when so many other mentorship relationships don’t?
The answer comes from the research of a young psychologist named Christina M. Underhill, who in the early 2000s noticed something troubling. Like most of us, she’d grown up with Star Wars and other heroes-with-mentors storylines. But when she dug into the academic side of mentorship, she observed that most studies were either scientifically unsound, or produced contradictory results. Common wisdom said that protégés benefited from being mentored by more experienced colleagues—just as we learn from the Greeks—but many of the reports she saw disagreed on not only if mentorship worked, but how well, and under what circumstances.
Underhill compiled 25 years of mentorship research—more than 100 studies—and looked at the data. She tossed out flawed case studies and anecdotal articles marketing particular coaching programs, and focused on research in which the career outcomes of mentees at work were measured and compared with the outcomes of those who were not mentored.
The statistics showed that businesspeople who were mentored in the workplace tended to achieve slightly more at work, on average, than those who didn’t. Counterintuitively, however, “Informal mentoring,” Underhill found, “produced a larger and more significant effect on career outcomes than formal mentoring.”
The mentorship study data conflicted, it turned out, because of the difference between structured mentoring programs, which were less effective, and mentorship that happened organically. In fact, one-on-one mentoring in which an organization formally matched people proved to be nearly as worthless as a person having not been mentored at all. However, when students and mentors came together on their own and formed personal relationships, the mentored did significantly better, as measured by future income, tenure, number of promotions, job satisfaction, work stress, and self-esteem.
This is why Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook and the author of Lean In, dedicates a chapter in her book to this concept, arguing that asking someone to formally mentor you is like asking a celebrity for an autograph; it’s stiff, inorganic, and often doesn’t work out. “Searching for a mentor has become the professional equivalent of waiting for Prince Charming,” she writes. “Young women are told that if they can just find the right mentor, they will be pushed up the ladder and whisked away to the corner office to live happily ever after. Once again, we are teaching women to be too dependent on others.” This waiting for luck to strike is the antithesis of lateral thinking. And the research shows she’s right.
All those expensive mentorship programs that corporations put on to smash strangers together in the hopes of increased success are basically just rolling dice. But in light of Underhill’s research, the GOSH doctors did something very right: They managed to build an organic bond with the Formula 1 pit crews. By the time the handover problems had been fixed, the relationship between the doctors and racers had developed beyond what Elliott and Goldman originally envisioned. They had gone to Formula 1 seeking technical help, and ended up becoming friends.
The GOSH doctors and nurses needed to model moves of master handoverers, and nobody beat Formula 1 pit crews at complicated equipment swaps. Ferrari’s process for tire replacement didn’t map exactly to unhooking and rehooking ventilators, but its masterful approach to teamwork in tight spaces did. And the Ferrari team was delighted to coach the doctors.
That solved the short-term problem. But long-term success of the hospital was accelerated by the deep relationship. Over the next several years, the Formula 1 made GOSH its official charity, raising more than £3 million for the children and hosting events where sick kids and their parents could hang out with the racing stars and for a moment forget their pain. The racers became invested in the success of Great Ormond Street as a whole.
There’s a big difference, in other words, between having a mentor guide our practice and having a mentor guide our journey.
OUR TYPICAL PARADIGM FOR mentorship is that of a young, enterprising worker sitting across from an elderly executive at an oak desk, engaging in Q&A about how to succeed at specific challenges.
On the other hand, a smartcut-savvy mentee approaches things a bit differently. She develops personal relationships with her mentors, asks their advice on other aspects of life, not just the formal challenge at hand. And she cares about her mentors’ lives too.
Business owner Charlie Kim, founder of Next Jump and one of my own mentors, calls this vulnerability. It’s the key, he says, to developing a deep and organic relationship that leads to journey-focused mentorship and not just a focus on practice. Both the teacher and the student must be able to open up about their fears, and that builds trust, which in turn accelerates learning. That trust opens us up to actually heeding the difficult advice we might otherwise ignore. “It drives you to do more,” Kim says. The best mentors help students to realize that the things that really matter are not the big and obvious. The more vulnerability is shown in the relationship, the more critical details become available for a student to pick up on, and assimilate.
And, crucially, a mentor with whom we have that kind of relationship will be more likely to tell us “no” when we need it—and we’ll be more likely to listen.
IV.
The troubling thing about all these mentorship stories so far is they seem to depend heavily on luck. Chess prodigy Josh Waitzkin didn’t seek out a master to train him; one found him in the park. Justin Bieber was randomly discovered by his manager-to-be via YouTube. Telemachus was fortuitously visited by a goddess. The busy Ferrari team were willing to meet with the GOSH doctors in the first place.
Aristotle was privileged to study at Plato’s Academy, but some kid on the other side of the world was probably just as promising as young Aristotle and never got the mentorship.
How can building deep relationships with master mentors be a smartcut if it hinges on our being lucky enough to know the master?
Hip-hop icon Jay-Z gives us a clue in one of his lyrics, “We were kids without fathers . . . so we found our fathers on wax and on the streets and in history. We got to pick and choose the ancestors who would inspire the world we were going to make for ourselves.”
In ancient Greece, few people had access to the best mentors. Jay-Z didn’t either, but he had books from which he could get an inkling about what those kinds of mentors were like. With every increase in communication, with every autobiography published, and every YouTube video of a superstar created, we increase our access to the great models in every category. This allows us to at least study the moves that make masters great—which is a start.
Some people are naturally good at making this work. Sam Walton, founder of Walmart, studied and stole moves from master retailers fabulously well. He openly admitted it. “Most everything I’ve done, I’ve copied from someone else,” he said.
The problem is that two people can study the same business model, watch the same video, or even take the same advice from a mentor, and one person might pick up critical details that the other misses. The late literary giant Saul Bellow would call someone with the ability to spot important details among noise a “first-class noticer.” This is a key difference between those who learn more quickly than others.
Jack Canfield, who we met earlier, explains that though mastery of those details can come from “modeling [the master], whether conscious or unconscious: their thinking, their visualizing, their body posture, their breathing patterns,” the benefit of an in-person relationship is that the mentor can help the student focus on the most important elements. “A master is able to give you feedback on a much more nuanced level, [and] has very little patience with distraction.”
The reason GOSH and Telemachus and the other successful mentees in this chapter succeeded in the long run is that mentors who were invested in their success, who showed vulnerability and cared enough to tell them what they didn’t want to hear when they needed to hear it, forced them to examine success-crucial details more closely than they might have on their own.
Which brings us back to that troubling question. How do people accelerate success when they don’t have personal access to great mentors, when they can do nothing but watch their videos and read their biographies? Especially when first-class noticing doesn’t come naturally?
It turns out that the answer is exactly how young Jimmy Fallon got his break.
V.
When the SNL people called Jimmy Fallon in 1998 to audition for a newly opened slot in the cast, they said, “No Troll doll.”
Two years had passed since Jimmy’s first attempt to get on Saturday Night Live. In the meantime, he’d practiced nonstop. Siegel had arranged a relentless schedule of stand-up performances in front of audiences who she knew in many cases would decimate him. It toughened him up. She made him rehearse his voice impressions with his back turned; if she couldn’t recognize Jimmy’s characters with her eyes closed, she cut them from the act. Like Mr. Miyagi from The Karate Kid, Siegel taught her young charge confidence and attention to detail. By that time, Jimmy was no longer simply Siegel’s client; he had become a dear friend.
Short-term job opportunities came and went as Jimmy built credibility in the L.A. comedy scene; Siegel cared more about his long-term journey than his short-term paycheck; she screened every offer through the lens of, “Will this help Jimmy get SNL one day?” He said “no” to television sitcoms, “no” to acting jobs that might take him too far away from SNL. When Jimmy booked stand-up gigs in New York, Siegel phoned SNL people to check out his progress.
During those two years, agents turned their backs on Jimmy, and hungry managers whispered in his ear, saying if he ditched Siegel, he’d be better off. But Siegel believed in Jimmy’s fanatical dream as much as he did, and Jimmy preferred to work hard with someone like her, as opposed to an old-school manager to whom Jimmy would be just one of many small bets.
And so, at age 23, Jimmy Fallon found himself once again on stage in front of Lorne Michaels. Still young and fresh-faced, but more polished and a little less terrified of the gray-haired king of comedy sitting in front of him, Jimmy was after a small win this time: not a spot in the cast, but just to make Michaels laugh.
This time, unlike many other auditioners who showcased mainly celebrity impersonations, Jimmy impersonated a bevy of other comedians: Chris Rock, Gilbert Gottfried, Bill Cosby, Colin Quinn. His impressions were dead-on. When he spoke in these great comedians’ voices, he became them.
Then, his lifelong obsession with Adam Sandler suddenly paid off. Jimmy later recalled, “After about 3 bits, I did the Adam Sandler bit, and Lorne Michaels laughed.”
“And then I blacked out.”
JIMMY WAS TALENTED AND funny, but so are a lot of people who try out for SNL. However, Jimmy’s routine, the one where he stole the voices of master comedians, stood out to Michaels and the rest of the crew. If this guy can become these funny people so vividly, he can be funny on our show.
They hired him. Jimmy’s dream had come true.
Jimmy Fallon got SNL not just because he had a great relationship with a great manager, but because of another deep relationship: the one he’d spent his entire life developing with comedians he hadn’t met. From a young age, he’d studied their videos obsessively, learned everything about their lives and what they were like. When Siegel called him that first time, Jimmy already knew who she was; he’d memorized her name and myriad more facts about his long-distance “mentor,” Adam Sandler. Jimmy’s intimate connection with these comedians drove him to master the tiny details that would separate his performance from aspiring comics who moved on once their celebrity impressions were “good enough.”
As we’ve learned, mentorship doesn’t always yield success. But when we look at superlative success stories throughout history, the presence of an in-person mentor (in Jimmy’s case his manager) or a world-class, long-distance mentor (in Jimmy’s case, great comedians whom he copied) with whom the mentee has a deep, vulnerable relationship is almost always manifest. The smartcut is the same:
The world’s youngest Nobel Prize winner, 25-year-old Lawrence Bragg, won the coveted award for physics in 1915 in conjunction with his father, master physicist William Bragg, who had mentored his son in the lab. (The younger Bragg, who was later knighted, went on to run the lab where James Watson and Francis Crick discovered DNA.)
The billion-dollar micro-blogging service Tumblr earned its founder, 26-year-old David Karp, $200 million in 2013, after six years of hard work. But it was in the second year that everything changed; that was when Karp brought in his personal mentor and friend, tech executive John Maloney, to guide him and the Tumblr rocket ship to maturity. This story is a repeat of that of countless other fast-growing companies.
And comedian Louis C.K., who as we saw earlier did things the hard way for 15 years, finally transformed his career with this same smartcut. In his depression as a failing comic, C.K. turned to his childhood comic icon, George Carlin. He resolved to tick like Carlin ticked. So he started to mimic Carlin’s process, memorize the details of his life. He soaked in Carlin’s style of telling raw, honest stories about himself—jokes that exposed Carlin’s human vulnerabilities—and began telling similarly vulnerable jokes about himself.
When C.K.’s long-distance connection with Carlin became more than mimicry, it transformed him. And that’s when his career finally took off.
You can feel the depth of that relationship when C.K. speaks about Carlin. “He was a beacon for me,” C.K. said, choking with emotion, to a crowd at the New York Public Library in 2010, after Carlin’s passing. “I’m doing exactly what he taught me to do.”
AFTER MICHAELS TOLD JIMMY he’d made SNL, Jimmy and Siegel went out for a celebratory dinner. They picked a fancy spot, called a friend, and ordered manhattans at the bar, in honor of Jimmy’s soon-to-be home. The restaurant staff brought out a cake and candle in Jimmy’s honor.
He blew out the candle.
And then he got suddenly quiet.
“What’s wrong?” Siegel asked.
“Since I can remember,” Jimmy said, “whenever I blew out candles, I wished for Saturday Night Live.”
For the first time in his life, he didn’t know what to wish for.