what Bill Hader learnt from Seth Meyers...
Transcript of this video:
I was watching a conversation between Seth Meyers and Bill Hader, reminiscing about their days as writers on the American comedy show Saturday Night Live.
And Hader described how when they had a guest host, he would pepper them with his brilliant ideas for sketches.
And then he noticed what Seth Meyers would do when a guest host arrived.
He would talk to them and show interest in them and have a much more relaxed conversation.
And it slowly dawned on Hayden that that might be a better approach.
And then he said what he found when he started doing what Seth did is first it was more relaxing and then much better ideas would emerge naturally from the conversation.
And a few years ago, I started saying to myself, relationships before ideas.
As a recovering advertising guy, this felt particularly important.
It’s very easy to think you’re being helpful to people when you are peppering them with ideas.
But usually it’s better to focus first on the relationship.
And I think, for example, on social media, we’re all tempted to write these posts in which we…
…condense our thinking into bite-sized chunks with lots of bullet points so that we can effectively give people lots of ideas in a very short space of time and get their attention.
But what we may actually be doing is contributing to a much more fragmented sense of relationship and we might want to lean in different directions with that.
Photo by Afif Ramdhasuma on Unsplash
