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SOLO | Make Money by Reinventing Yourself After Success - Lessons from Dane Cook
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Travis
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what's going on, everybody? Welcome back to another episode of the show. On this episode, it's just me, you and the mic and we're continuing with our series of talking about the lessons and takeaways I've had from multiple guests here on the show. Today's chat is all about my time with a guy by the name of Dane Co Cook. If you do not know who Dane Cook is, then where have you been the last like 20 years? The dude was arguably the most famous standup comedian for at least a period of time and was doing. He did like three or four feature films during this same run and then famously had a terrible thing happen to him. I think there's actually a documentary coming out this year that will be about him overcoming the multiple obstacles that were in his path, including his own brother stealing like $14 million from him at the height of his career. So he's been through a lot. And I had a really great conversation with Dane. Very nice, very kind, very down to earth, willing to chat about whatever we wanted to chat about. He's been a friend ever since, whenever, you know, he's given me some tickets to his comedy shows. Got to go meet some cool comics backstage at one of his events. Just a really nice, caring, giving guy, generous guy. Another. Another person who just like genuinely wants to see people succeed, which I find to be rarefied air, especially for those who have been to the top of the mountain and seen what the view looks like from there. So here's a few of my lessons from my conversation with Dane Cook. Number one comedy. And really, any creative pursuit requires you to let go of the last pitch and throw a new one. So Dane said something that I think about a lot in the business space. You never get over the moment when people don't like you. Doesn't matter how big the arena is, doesn't matter how much success that you're, that you're seeing in the business. The best, the best comics don't try to just recapture what worked. They lean into their creative evolution and throw a new pitch. It can get really easy to just sort of play the hits type of a thing, to just get comfortable, just be like, well, this was working. So we're just, we're just going to kind of chill. We're just going to remain neutral here. I don't want to ruffle the feathers. I don't want to upset the base that I have now. And so he was just basically saying like, it's the same concept of look, you're only as good as your last at bat. You have to continue to re. To iterate. You have to continue to work, to change, to write new jokes, write new material, try it out in front of an audience, move on to something else if it doesn't work. That's what keeps them alive. That's what keeps you thriving. That's what keeps you hungry and ambitious. When you see an artist go sideways, what you're usually watching is someone who can't let go of what used to work. So don't get married to those ideas. This is why it's so hard for big corporations to, to succeed sometimes. Because they, they get so bogged down with corporate minutia that they forget what made them successful in the first place, which was taking big swings and being in touch with their ideal customer and, and having a pulse on what they actually want to see from them. They get so bogged down in, in, you know, in meeting minutes and in shareholder prices and like all this other stuff that they just, they, they lose the plot somewhere. And that's what we're seeing now even, especially in like fast food space. Same thing happening in fast food now that happened to like video stores, you know, 10, 15 years ago. Just people who refuse to adapt with the times and, and continue to take big swings. Number two, your environment is not you and you can leave it. When I asked him about rock bottom, which he experienced in a, in a, in a crazy way because like, I've talked to a lot of people who've had this sort of like rock bottom moment, but most of the time it was, they had something that was like sort of successful and then they hit rock bottom or they hit rock bottom before they had any success. But for somebody like Dane to see this type of a cycle where he was quite literally on top of the world, you know what I mean? Like selling like the. I Think he was the second comic ever to sell out Madison Square Garden. He was doing arena tours. He was starring in feature films with Jessica Alba in, and Jessica Simpson and all these types of, you know, accolades that, that everybody in that industry would be, would be jealous of. Really. He, he made it. And then to go from that to a rock bottom, like the, the rock bottom to like. The reason I wanted to ask the question is to me it was like the rock bottom has to feel worse when you know what it looks like from all the way up at the top of the mountain. And so he didn't give a motivational speech or anything like that when I asked him about this. He just gave a practical, gave practical advice. He said, you are not your environment. You are not tethered to it. If you need to get up, walk out the door and go somewhere you've never been before, one mile in a new direction, then two miles, then 50. Movement creates momentum. And he did this literally in New York City. Like, he literally just went walking around through the city when he felt this, like this anxiety crippling him in his, in his home. He literally just got up and started moving and walking around, going to different parts of the city that he'd never seen before. It's so simple. It sounds stupid, but it just, it works like that. Your emotional state is highly tied to your physical state. They are not, they are not individual pieces of yourself that you can remove from the other one. They, they work in, in lockstep. So you can change emotional state by changing physical state and vice versa. And so if you're in this like crazy emotional state and you feel the crushing weight of anxiety or stress or depression or of these things just simply getting out and moving and just walking in a new direction, experiencing something new for the first time, having something novel happen, lighting up those centers of your brain again can be something that is really, really beneficial during that time. So your environment is not you. You can leave that environment. You can shape your environment to help you become the person that you really want to become.
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number three. Going through loss is what builds character. This is one of the, this is one of those hard things about life, man, is that, you know, you can look back at all the things that you went through that were struggles, that were difficult. And then, you know, people can be like, okay, well do you reg doing xyz? Because it obviously made you have a really difficult time. And it's like, of course, like theoretically, like if I go back and change, you know, my action in that scenario to prevent myself from going this thing, then yeah, I'd probably do it. But then when you really start thinking about it, you start going like, but then again, I probably wouldn't do it because like the, the struggle that I
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went through, the, the cocoon that I
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had to break out of gave me the strength I needed to do what I do now. It turned me into the person that I am today. And I don't know that I would have been forced to become this person had I not gone through that period of struggle. So going through the loss is what actually builds the character. Dane lost both of his parents to cancer in the same year, then had, like I said, over $10 million. I think it was close to $15 million stolen by his half brother, who's his business manager, and just went through a complete professional and personal demolition. He was sober. He's always been sober, no substances. So he's feeling everything in real time. He's always been sober, which is something that is surprising to people. And I was surprised to learn he's never drank or done drugs in his life, even when he was going through this sort of rock bottom moment. So he was feeling every single feeling that you could feel. And he personally called it metamorphosis. It was like, like I said, like, like the caterpillar in the cocoon. And so he said his character didn't come from the success that he had. Success gives you the accoutrements, but your character, those moments of struggle when everything breaks down from. From who you are, when. When someone else is in need, from how you handle it, when everything gets stripped away, you can't fake that type of stuff. Going through the loss is what builds character and turns you into the person that you will eventually become. The hard part, the part that almost feels impossible, honestly, is trying to find gratitude in the middle of that struggle. A lot of times it's easy to look back and be like, man, I'm grateful for that period of time in my life because it turned me into
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who I am today.
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But when you're going through it, man, it's. It's not easy to be like, I'm grateful for this, you know, cancer. It's like I'm. It's like.
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It's hard to.
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It's hard to be like that. So do what you can to. While you're in the middle of it, as best as you can feel. I heard this, heard this from. I was about to say Pete Davidson, Pete Holmes. There's another one of my favorite comics. He said he picked this up from. I think this is a Taoist or Buddhist thing. But anyway, the two words that changed his life were. Or three words that changed his life were, yes, thank you. So when anything bad happened to him, he just started saying, yes, thank you. Yes, thank you. Yes, thank you. Even when it was something that you would look at and go, like, this is objectively terrible. Why are you saying thank you for this? He tried to train himself in the middle of it to say thank you. The powerful reframe of that is that it starts to train your brain to look for the. The opportunities and the good things in the bad things while you're in the middle of the bad things. And that can sometimes help you almost psychologically trick yourself into overcoming that thing sooner and finding the good things sooner. Because you're saying thank you for something that you're not even sure how it's going to benefit you. You're just assuming that this is going to benefit you at some point. And then it almost, like I said, tricks you into finding those things sooner rather than later and pulling you out of that situation faster. So going to the loss is what actually builds the character. Number four. Comedy is a ring. It's like. Like a boxing ring. You signed up, and you're possibly going to get hit. Probably going to get hit. His framing of Cancel Culture and comedy censorship. Comedy censorship is the clearest that I've heard on the show. So when you walk into a comedy club, you're entering a ring where someone might throw a punch and you might get hit. That's the deal. That's the structure. We know this is going to happen. That's what you signed up for. So, you know, taking a clip out of context, stripping it out of the room and the performer and the night, and then using that clip to destroy someone's livelihood is a completely different thing. That's not accountability. It's ambushing someone outside of the ring after the fight is over. And so that's. He was just kind of like the broader commentary on Cancel Culture. And that's his problem in the comedy space specifically, is like, look, when he's like, I don't have a problem with any of that stuff while I'm on stage because I like. We understand the terms of the agreement. Like, you came to a comedy show. I'm a comedian. Median. I'm going to try this. It may work. It may not work. You may like it, you may not like it. You may be upset, you may be happy, you may laugh, you may not. I understand, like, that those are all the agreed upon rules of engagement. And what he was saying is, like, what. What's happening now? And what he's saying is that people are being canceled from a set that they did 14 years ago that somebody clipped and put on the Internet six months ago. And Then that thing is then preventing that person from having opportunity, you know, in the future. And he was saying that stuff is where I draw the line, like that's where it's difficult. And that brings up the broader conversation that I've had multiple times on the show, which is about context, is that we are literally living in a world that exists without context. Short form media exists without context, and people are forming opinions based on things that are not given in their full context, which is really dangerous thing to do. So just be careful how fast and how strongly you form opinions based on something that you saw for 20 seconds, 30 seconds, because it's almost never the full story. Number five, don't take creative notes from people who are threatened by you. And this sort of goes into the conversation that I, that I touched on at the very beginning of this, which is like, Dane is somebody who I found in that space that just genuinely is rooting for people. He's not jealous of their success. And I'm sure that there's some sort of envy in there deep down. And we're all human and we feel that. But he's trained himself, I think, over the years to just really be happy for people and to help wherever he can. So he was talking about Matt Rife, who's obviously a very famous comedian right now. And he mentored Matt when he teenager started featuring him years before TikTok blew him up. And his one firm rule was that he'll never tell a young comic what to do when they're on stage. Because the advice that people give about creative choices usually says more about the advisor's fear than it does about the person's actual act. So if someone who has influence over you is telling you to pull back, they probably see something that intimidates them, not necessarily saying something that is going to be helpful for you. So don't change that line. And this is more, I would think, applicable in the creative space in general. General. But even if it's coming from somebody, that's good, just examine the advice, interrogate a little bit, ask a couple of questions and make sure that this is something that is. That feels right to you and isn't something that's just a projection of their own internal fears being put on you. So don't take creative notes from people who are. Who are threatened by you. Don't take creative notes from people who are not willing to go to places that you're trying to go. And it's sort of like that whole thing of like, don't take advice from people you wouldn't want to trade places with. If somebody is taking those risks and they're constantly pushing the line and then they have something to say and you ask them for that specific piece of advice, like that might be a little bit different, but overall, especially in the creative space, people can get almost chained by the fears of other people because those people are projecting their fears on them when it wasn't a fear that they were experiencing. So just be careful whose advice you take inside of a space like that. So again, great episode with Dane. Had a lot of fun with him. A lot of laughs, a lot of good moments, a lot of learning in this episode. So go check out my full conversation with Dane Cook over on the Travis Makes Friends podcast, but that's it for this one. Thanks so much for tuning in. We'll catch you guys on the next episode. Peace.