This chuckle worthy post on The Economic Times highlighting the discrepancy between LinkedIn post and reality.
There’s the Silicon Valley-enabled lip service: Fail fast. Experiment. Take risks. Learn from your mistakes. But then, what gets posted is only the promotion.
Standup comedy doesn’t give you that option. If a joke fails, you know immediately. So does everyone else. Nobody schedules a meeting afterwards to discuss whether the audience was sufficiently aligned with the strategic intent of the punchline. They just stare at you. Or their phone. Or, if you’re particularly bad, their watch. There are few performance management systems more efficient.
Comedy teaches you that failure is information. When a joke bombs, you change a word, move a pause, rewrite the premise, or eventually accept that the brilliant idea you’ve been polishing for three weeks was not ahead of its time. It was just rubbish.
Business, supposedly, believes this, too. Yet, somehow every professional story gets edited before being posted or emailed. Nobody writes: ‘Delighted to announce that after 18 months of strategic transformation, we have returned to exactly where we started, but with a new logo.’
Nobody posts: ‘Humbled to share that the market did not recognise my genius.’ You almost never see, ‘Excited to share that the project I championed has been cancelled. Apparently, finance had concerns. In retrospect, finance had several excellent points.’
Nobody says: ‘Thrilled to announce that the promotion went to Sanjay.’ Except of course, Sanjay.