(I’m writing something every* day for #100days. This is post 89/100.)
This Seinfeld interview with Alec Baldwin is so good it’s worthy of listening to twice.
Referencing the success of ‘Seinfeld’, Jerry says:
“Let me tell you why my TV series in the ’90s was so good, besides an inordinate amount of just pure good fortune. In most TV series, 50% of the time is spent working on the show, 50% of the time is spent dealing with personality, political, and hierarchical issues of making something.
We spent 99% of our time writing... The door was closed.
Somebody calls, we’re not taking the call.
We’re gonna make this thing funny.
That’s why the show was good.”
Making great work takes focus.
That’s how Zach describes those first weeks making Vimeo.
When I look back at Sessions, it was like that for 8, maybe 10 weeks in the early days at Rock Health.
And then it got away from us a bit — with the BD deals that never eventuated, and the partnerships that delivered nothing, and the semi-successful fundraising, and the meetings with people in nondescript roles at behemoth corporations — always with the hope that they might have the silver bullet.
And then in the 12 weeks leading to the acquisition, it narrowed down again and I don’t remember much else but running and getting the deal done.
Creating the external conditions for great work is both hard and rare.
How many times in your life can you say that you were so focussed on your work that for a sustained period you stopped taking any calls?
It takes some good fortune. But it also takes the will to ignore all externalities until you “make the thing work”.