Find Your Voice
What It Means to Discover Who You Are, and Why Being Different Isn't a Worthy Goal for Its Own Sake
It’s generally accepted in the comedy community that it takes about seven years for a working stand-up comedian to “find their voice”. What this means is that for the first seven years, when a stand-up is slogging through the open mic scene, they sound like someone who came before them; their act is mimicry, albeit with an amateur flavor. Flattering as it is to their predecessors, no one can replicate the acts of Dave Chappelle, Jerry Seinfeld, or Louis CK (whose coworkers are probably pretty happy about that). Each has their own unique concoction of skills and personality traits contributing to their success.
Yet when each of these now-famous artists started out, they undoubtedly sounded like their heroes, from the generation of stand-ups who came before them. A common sentiment shared by each of these budding artists is “I can’t believe they’ll pay me for this!” The love for the craft is so deep and meaningful that following in the footsteps of “the greats” isn’t considered a bad thing. It’s considered a right of passage, a necessary step on the way to finding their voice.
But alas, it will take time. The good news for these comedians is that they simply don’t care how long it takes. They know that telling a joke like Richard Pryor or George Carlin isn’t something to scoff at; it’s a compliment. They also know that finding what makes them unique is necessary in order to achieve sustained success, but to get there, they just need to endure, to put the work in, night after night, and their voice will emerge. In most cases, there isn’t an end goal other than to do this thing they love for a living, and when they first get paid, there’s really no turning back.
. . .
Last week, I discussed the importance of finding your medium, which I define as the vehicle for shedding the barriers between you and your emotional filter. If finding your medium is about processing your thoughts and emotions, finding your voice is about the purification of those thoughts and emotions, the enabling factor for their exposure to the world, each original and unique, unphased by external influence.
But learning this lesson isn’t simple. At least, it wasn’t for me.
I tried my hand at stand-up comedy for two years before I called it quits. When I would prepare for an upcoming set, I could almost always hear the voice telling the joke I was writing, and it wasn’t mine. I was never able to graduate beyond this phase.
I expected to be able to distinguish myself from the crowd in a short period of time. I was smart, I told myself. Seven years won’t be the story of my experience. But I didn’t even make it there, as hard as I tried.
As time went on, I became uncomfortable working as a less-talented reproducer of another’s work. I was trying, consciously, to learn from my favorite comedians, but to also sound different from them. I thought a lot about my tone of voice, the stances I took, and the words I’d use. The product was a mixture of voices; I would slip in and out of personalities like a skinchanger from Game of Thrones, quipping like Mitch Hedberg and storytelling like Mike Birbiglia, being brash like Louis and clever like Jerry, all in the same set. Even if I performed well in each skin, crowds could see through it, and they were confused. Crowds are people after all, and people want consistency, they want authenticity. I couldn’t offer that.
Unfortunately for my stand-up career, I couldn’t sustain the effort to sculpt my act from the shapeless personality I was presenting. Even after I quit, I was confused about how it was possible that I spent years in this process of discovery and never learning to be myself on stage.
My issue wasn’t with comedy. It wasn’t really about being funny, it wasn't about jokes or opportunity. I wasn’t just seeking confidence in a stage presence, I was seeking confidence in myself.
It’s trying work, distinguishing ourselves from others. This is especially true at the beginning of a new skill or venture. It can be debilitating, if not fatal to your future in doing the thing you love so much.
So often, we quit before we arrive. We tell ourselves that it makes no sense to continue doing someone else’s work. I’m not good enough. Who am I to think I can do what Chappelle does? Even if we love it, the joy can evaporate like water vapor slowly escaping from a lightly sealed container. It’s only a matter of time before it’s all gone, before it’s not enough to fulfill you.
The only way to defeat it is to persevere just long enough to reach the feeling that the work we’re doing, the craft we’re engaging in, the voice we’re espousing is entirely our own.
Nothing feels better than doing something that’s completely, wholly mine. My voice, my work, my thoughts, my why.
. . .
Now for the challenging part: you need to be a little different to become a household name in your craft, but you shouldn’t deliberately try to distinguish yourself from others. It might sound counterintuitive, but if you simply try to differentiate yourself, you’ll fall short of the goal. Self-discovery doesn’t happen by trying hard to not be someone else. That approach will fall flat in the same way that perpetually attempting to “round yourself out” will; you’ll find that you aren’t playing offense at all, that you aren’t learning about your personal strengths and therefore not honing them. You’re instead playing defense, and you’ll end up being different for the sake of difference.
This might make you notable. You might stand out, catching attractors who mistake your brazen individuality for self-assuredness. You might even get lucky and become famous. But that path ends before achieving true self-realization. Your weaknesses might tighten up a bit by playing defense, by distinguishing for its own sake; however, your innate strengths will be taken for granted, resulting in attrition and thereby never allowing you to get what you really need to become remarkable: a foundation of deep, personal confidence in who you are and what you do.
Gary Vaynerchuk, entrepreneur and millennial motivator mensch, said it well: “You have to double-down on your strengths and punt your weaknesses. You need to figure out who you are and go all in.”
This is the goal.
No one else should enter the equation. If you sound like someone else in your act, that’s fine; keep working on the small bits that sound most like you, not most unlike everyone else. If your code looks like it’s straight from the tutorials, that’s ok; explore the possibilities by asking yourself “What would happen if I did this?”, and try it. The same goes for musicians and athletes and anyone who’s attempted, consciously or unconsciously, to emulate the unemulatable.
The difference is subtle, but it’s been a profound discovery in my life.
Every time I sit down to write, Ernest Hemingway is whispering in my ear. “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.”
I can’t write truthfully without writing in my own voice. I can’t connect to what’s not mine. If I write in someone else’s voice, I know my work will be a shoddy attempt at recreating what already exists. It will be adding noise to a too-noisy world.
I’m beginning to notice warning signs while editing my work, like words being used solely for their elegance or for the sake of conveying my intelligence. It’s pure sesquipedalia. When I’m aware enough to catch it, I know I’m trying to be someone I’m not, that I’m trying too hard to be adored by the authors I adore, most of whom are good enough to afford themselves a little pretension.
I no longer believe there is ever any better word to use, no righter word...only a truer one.
And the truest word is always the one only I mean to say.
. . .
The truth is, it’s inexplicably difficult to learn from yourself, or to learn how to say what only you can.
You might not know what a truer word means to you. We’re often blind to what we sound like, what our voice is, and what our strengths are. There are countless stories told about people living an entire life and regretfully never becoming who they might have been, doing what they could have, or achieving what they had hoped.
My current worldview states that too many of us have innate talents that lay dormant, untrained and untested, until our days run out. We can change this, but many of us don’t, often because we’re too scared, but sometimes simply because it’s too difficult to figure out where to start, what to try and which parts of us to really expose.
Like most people I know, I am my own biggest critic. The value I offer is objectively valid, but so often it’s clouded by criticism and judgment, almost exclusively of my own creation!
So how do we figure out where to start, how to learn from ourselves with all these barriers?
Adam Grant, organizational psychologist from the University of Pennsylvania and author of several of my favorite books (such as Give and Take and Originals), tried to solve this for himself by asking his coworkers who they thought he was, and as it turns out, the other people around you might hold some keys to your personality hidden from you.
To learn from yourself means first understanding how others see you. To get a good grasp of this isn’t an easy process. But even when you understand your strengths from an outsider’s point-of-view, the hard work has really yet to begin. Once you have a foundational understanding of what your strengths are, it’s time to switch to a self-motivated model.
This is when the real work begins. And like all difficult things, we’re going to struggle, we’re going to make excuses, and we might shy away from doing what we know is best for us.
. . .
Many months ago I was asked in one of my therapy sessions what I would do if I had enough financial runway to enable the life of my choosing. The question wasn’t about where I’d go or what I’d buy; it was about what I would do.
Who hasn’t pondered this question? In so many different ways we’re presented with it, typically starting with the lead up to college.
Choose a major.
As though eighteen-year-olds generally even have the sense to know for sure what they want THE REST OF THEIR LIVES to look like.
I majored in Philosophy, and almost had enough credits to obtain a minor in creative writing, too.
But I entered college as a Math major, and I now work in tech, managing highly technical projects for the likes of NASA’s Earth Science Data and Information System (ESDIS) Project.
I’m lucky, and I’m grateful. But the lesson I took from this wasn’t that privilege counts for something (though it does). Instead, I’m focusing on the value gleaned from letting my curiosity drive me.
If I went through college as I initially planned, I might be here, in the same place, with the same job, and with no idea that writing held one of the keys to my soul. I might never have been comfortable enough diving into the murky depths at all, if logic was the only tool at my disposal.
I left college with a number of tools I hadn’t entered it with. I focused not simply on where my natural inclinations were, but rather where my interests led me. I found a voice in college that even afterwards, I shied away from, because the work to develop it is so hard. I knew then what I’m just now re-learning, a full decade later, and that’s that ignoring your interests means never giving yourself the chance to develop strengths in an area that will fulfill you, and therefore encourage consistent progress.
The famous poet E.E. Cummings identified that the goal he wanted to achieve through his art (in his case poetry) was to be “nobody-but-yourself”.
In his words: “To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.”
I found this quote from Maria Popova’s blog Brain Pickings, in her article “The Courage to Be Yourself: E.E. Cummings on Art, Life, and Being Unafraid to Feel”.
The gist: it’s hard. The work is hard, and it will never quite stop. Cummings explained the difficulty of writing poetry by saying that “If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you’ve written one line of one poem, you’ll be very lucky indeed.”
This might sound intimidating. No, I take that back. It is intimidating. But the proof is in the pudding. The hardest working people always get somewhere. That’s not only because they’re working longer hours than the competition. It’s because the only way to uncover your personal greatness is by repeatedly creating garbage until the tiniest bits of gold are revealed. The secrets of greatness lie in finding your own voice. The remarkable are just those who’ve found theirs, explored it, honed it, and doubled down on it, leaving no question as to who they are or what they stand for.
There are no examples, no guides or tutors who can escort you all the way to mastery. You can get to good, even notable, with the help of others, but mastery requires the discovery of your voice, and you are the only one who can find it.
. . .
Robert Greene writes in his aptly named book, Mastery, that the path to it involves a five to ten year period in which we hone our thinking and our skills. This is our apprenticeship, as he calls it.
During our apprenticeship, our work resembles that of others’. We sound like our favorite comedian, code like our professor or write what we read, but we’re also building a foundation of knowledge within our craft.
Once we leap, stretching ourselves in a direction we own, working on our craft in silence, our voice is created.
Steven Pressfield calls this moment “turning pro”. Now, you’re doing the work, churning out crap you aren’t proud of like there’s a quota you must hit, and once you meet it, you’re free to discover who you really are. The quality of your work has reached a tipping point.
Skill doesn’t hide for too long. At a certain point in your daily devotion to work, passion overtakes the process, and skill has no choice but to follow along.
There is a reason that many authors use the term muses or gods when answering how it is they were able to write what they wrote. The answer: they don’t know, not really.
It kind of just happens. It might be the muses. It might also be the accumulation of showing up to your craft, everyday.
That’s not just how you build skill...it’s also how you build you.
. . .
A popular Chinese proverb suggests that “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”
Now is the time to get started.
Once you do, your apprenticeship has begun. Push through and turn pro, cranking out work without looking back. Along the way, your voice will crystallize, hardening with each day you show up to expose your ideas to the world.
Every single day, I hone my craft. Little by little, I hone my voice.
Through the slog, I’m finding myself, discovering who I already am, becoming who I already am.
And I wish the same for you.
Thanks for Reading!
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