Monitoring the Secret of Success

The way my brain works is that I’m constantly filing the things my friends do into a system for understanding how to succeed at anything.

So when my friend Jim O’Grady got a job as an on-air reporter for WNYC, the normal part of my brain was happy for him. “That’s great news! You’ll be happy there! I bet the work will be really interesting!”

But there was also a connect-the-dots part of my brain that wondered what he did to get that job.

The thing, that I saw at least, was that as a hobby he had started telling stories in public. This was a several years before the WNYC job came together. The Moth, which many people have listened to as a podcast, runs story telling contests around New York. They put out a theme and if you want to tell a story you show up and put your name in the hat.

If your name gets called, you tell your story and have exactly five minutes to finish it. Some people tell a story unrehearsed.

But the Moth Story telling circuit developed an inner circle of regulars who would write, rehearse and polish their stories ahead of time, doing test runs with each other, getting the beats and the punchlines exactly right.

Jim worked his way into this inner circle and then started winning occasional story telling competitions. That got him invited to the Grand Slam competition which brought together the winners of individual slams. Jim won that too.