The advantage of the hard restart

Is this thing on

The world of stand-up comedy is known for its grueling circuit of obscure shows in small venues, where thousands of anonymous hopefuls work through their material with the aim of building a following and one day getting their name on a theater marquee. A select few who sit in the right intersection of talent, timing, perseverance, and luck can find themselves with a full-time career in the field. They often become known for a specific brand of humor.

Much like musicians with their hit songs, these comedians develop trademark bits or catchphrases that become core to their image. A sufficiently well-known artist can build a persona around them that is popular enough to sustain a long and reasonably stable career. These core routines can keep the crowds buying tickets throughout long tours. It makes sense to leverage what you’re known for—after all once you have a few hits, wouldn’t you want to milk them as much as possible?

Yet a select few commit to a more counterintuitive path. They periodically throw out all their existing content—which helped them achieve success—and rebuild their core set entirely from scratch. This appears foolhardy: why jettison the very thing that made you famous, likely honed over hundreds of laborious hours, in favor of content whose reception is uncertain?

By making the personal commitment to new material, these comedians are getting the benefits of working without a net, liberating themselves from the constraints of an old and potentially stagnating approach and ensuring continued relevance. More than most art forms, comedy thrives on incisive perspectives on a cultural moment. It is frequently observational and topical, taking universal principles and applying them to the specific ways that people reflect and find humor in them.1

There’s a reason why, unlike music, few comedy albums remain popular fifty years after their release. The world moves on, slowly in the moment but in huge leaps when viewed retrospectively. Comedians are often products of their place and time, leaving them unable to make the jump.2 Those who are willing to toss everything and start fresh can find themselves on the cutting edge long after their peers have become nostalgia acts for dwindling audiences. Relying too heavily on past success risks losing the innovation that attracted fans in the first place.

In the beginning

Readers of Amazon’s annual report to shareholders will note a curious feature, which has been included unchanged in every iteration. Before breaking down the financial and strategic details of the business, founder Jeff Bezos presents his 1997 letter to shareholders.

This letter makes the claim that it is “Day 1 for the internet”. 20 years and several hundred billion dollars of market capitalization later, Bezos is bold enough to assert that the condition still holds. This despite the reality that his company sits comfortably atop the ecosystem of businesses spawned by what is now a much more mature internet.

“Day 1” could be a gimmicky turn of phrase that resonates with Silicon Valley’s technology elite.3 But the way Amazon has implemented this philosophy and remained consistently adherent to its principles—through the dotcom bloodbath of the early 2000s, the global recession in 2008 and a decade in which the company’s stock flatlined—suggests it is more than a marketing term.4

The first day of any endeavor will be rocky, full of surprises that must be dealt with. It should be uncomfortable. An organization will not have mastered the environment in which it operates. Basic conditions must be tested and not assumed. Possibilities are broad and less predictable. As a company Amazon has managed to take the philosophy of comedians starting all over again and spin it into a source of enduring value.

Instead of banking on its early successes in internet retailing, optimizing operations and harvesting the profits, Amazon has continued to invest heavily in areas that were non-existent under the 1997 version of the internet: cloud services, streaming television, always-on home appliances, drone delivery, etc., with other offerings surely in the works.5

Begin again

As your career progresses, consider how you could throw everything away and start anew—in the most productive sense. This can lower the risk that you will spend long years solving the wrong problem or one that is rapidly becoming irrelevant.

This does not mean your approach will be unmoored from what came before. Some disciplines require long foundational training or apprenticeship. The skills developed during a law career will be of minimal use during a lateral jump to neurosurgery, and the aspiring scientist or musician will still need to invest the time in building a skill base. Just as a comedian tossing years’ worth of material still has extensive stage experience to build on, when clearing away the old determine what parts of the foundation have continuing relevance.

As with Amazon, looking at the world with fresh eyes is a continuous process, not an action that can be performed once when some indeterminate end point of success has been reached. Wherever you are in your career, think of healthy ways to blow it all up. There are practical ways to implement this philosophy of growth:

1. Get out of the country, metaphorically.6 Remember the first time you visited a country very different from what you grew up in? The sights, the noises, perhaps an unfamiliar language—all contributed to an atmosphere that was noticeably different. The contrasts could be confusing or shocking or bewildering, but they were also illuminating. Some elements would be out of place or impossible in your original culture; others that you expected would be missing. Over time these became less noticeable, until the familiar became normal, and the normal unremarkable. But in the process of adapting you learned something. Try putting yourself in a foreign professional context, and when you find the unexpected, consider why that’s the case, and unpack the reasons further.
2. Rearrange the furniture. Just like pictures arranged on a wall quickly recede into the subconscious, a structure configured in the same way every day becomes unnoticeable. But walk into a room where the chairs are now facing the opposite direction and you will immediately notice the difference. If your work requires you or teammates to largely perform the same tasks, with the same division of labor, change it. Ask the analyst who’s usually deep in the spreadsheets to deliver the executive presentation. Host the vendor meeting that you normally delegate to your team. Ask your employee to give the keynote, while instead you support from the wings.7 Break up the operating framework that is taken for granted and see if a new perspective changes things.
3. Rethink your routine. Discipline is essential for regular, sustained growth, but there is a parallel stream of creativity that requires a jolt to unleash. Doing the same thing the same way every day can work very well when the external world is stable. But a diligent manufacturer of typewriters might not notice the ominous rise of personal computers. Intense focus on one activity can lead you to ignore critical events happening around you. A classic psychology experiment asked viewers to watch a performance and count one specific activity, with the intriguing result that another outrageous and obvious event was completely missed. If each day or quarter or year in your organization follows a predictable rhythm, repeated with little thought, consider what this is blinding you to.

Bezos has retained an almost-monomaniacal focus on treating his company as if it were still a startup, despite its globe-spanning reach and the fact that it now rules numerous markets as the dominant player.8 Some of the best comedians know that their past material will be enough to get laughs, and force themselves to start from scratch anyway.

What parts of your output are a crutch that need to be cleared away, to allow the next level of growth? What would your organization do differently, if today was its first day?

References

Amazon’s annual shareholder reports, each containing the original 1997 letter, are available on the company’s website.