Best Ending Line Ever…
One of my favorite films of all time was that classic comedy by Billy Wilder, “Some Like It Hot.”
In this film, two musicians (played by Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon) flee gangsters in Chicago by pretending to be women and joining an all-girls band heading South.
Marilyn Monroe plays “Sugar Kane Kowalczyk” – now there’s a good, mid-western moniker – who winds up being the love interest (of course) for Tony Curtis.
Jack Lemmon, however, isn’t quite so fortunate… he gets hooked up with leering millionaire Joe E. Brown.
I won’t go into all the details of the film, which is one of the true greats, but the kicker is at the end when Lemmon says he’s just not right for Brown, because … well, he’s not a woman, he’s a man. Brown responds:
“Nobody’s perfect.”
Perfect ending. And the concept of perfection is the topic for Myth #7 in my series, “The Myth of Perfect.”
Wanting to get something perfect before putting it out there for review or into use will… quite honestly… kill your business.
I’ll make it simple. Let’s say you’re working on a new routine to put in the act. Like a true pro, you practice, practice, practice until you
have it down. But you practice some more, look at it from other angles, write some solid patter for the routine, add some bits… there, it’s ready.
You take it on the road. Maybe a little nervous, but you know you’re prepared.
And it goes over well. Super!
But was it “perfect”?
No. Not by a long shot.
As someone who has performed some of the same routines for years… in fact decades… I’ve learned that what I thought was GREAT was merely okay given the passage of time.
In performing, new ideas emerge while onstage. Maybe it’s a new handling for how you pass a sponge ball from one hand to the other.
Or maybe it’s the tone of voice you use with a line you’ve said a thousand times – but this time it worked so much better.
Or maybe it’s a totally cool additional trick or bit you could add to the routine – something that takes it from SOLID to STUPENDOUS!
But if you had waited until that something was PERFECT before rolling it out and taking it on the road, you would never have had the chance to see the crowd’s reaction… feel out how it worked in the real world… ad lib in real time some new ideas to make it stronger.
What works for tricks/routines applies to your marketing as well.
That website you’re working on – if you wait until you have it 100% perfect it will never get launched or viewed. It will just sit on your PC awaiting it’s final blessing – which may never come.
To beat the Myth of Perfect you just need to get hard core about this fact: the most important feature of any product or idea boils down to one word – DONE.
You gotta finish it.
Then you gotta put it out there to see what folks think.
Then make it better over time.
Eventually, you may indeed get close to perfect.
But the only way there is to keep moving forward.
–Jack Turk
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