Overcome Your Fear of Failure: Booze, Bombing, and Reverse Psychology | Ari Shaffir | Big Think

Overcome Your Fear of Failure: Booze, Bombing, and Reverse Psychology

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Fear of failure is a real thing, and so are the ways of overcoming it. Comedian Ari Shaffir names ways of understanding fear, accepting it, and inviting it into your experience—all as a way to succeed.

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ARI SHAFFIR:

Ari Shaffir is a stand-up comedian, podcaster and actor who describes his comedy as a puppet show, but way filthier and without the puppets. He grew up orthodox Jewish, spent 2 years in a yeshiva in Israel, and came back to America to lose his religion and become a comic. LA Weekly has called Shaffir “a gifted unyielding comic…a real force to be reckoned with.” Shaffir’s new two-part Netflix special, Double Negative, released on Netflix in July 2017. Presented in two episodes, Children and Adulthood, the special is a sprawling look at where the comedian is at in life right now.

Shaffir co-created and hosted 3 seasons of Comedy Central’s weekly storytelling series This is Not Happening, which will return for its fourth season later this year. He was a regular panel guest on the series @midnight, and has appeared on Comedy Underground with Dave Atell, both on Comedy Central; he has also been featured on Showtime’s The Green Room with Paul Provenza, HBO’s Down and Dirty with Jim Norton, and TBS’s Conan.

Shaffir also hosts the wildly popular podcast The Skeptic Tank, a weekly interview show where he chats with everyone from parents to comedians to prostitutes “to help better understand humanity and also to make fart jokes.” The podcast is consistently among the top-rated podcasts on iTunes and averages over 100,000 downloads per week.

In the past 5 years, Shaffir has released two hour-long standup specials on Comedy Central entitled Paid Regular and Passive Aggressive. Prior to these popular specials, Shaffir’s standup album “Revenge for the Holocaust” went to number 1 on both iTunes charts and Amazon.com the week of its premiere. He continues to perform standup to sold-out crowds nationwide and has been featured at Montreal’s prestigious Just for Laughs Festival, San Francisco SketchFest, SXSW, the Edinburgh Comedy Festival, and the Moontower Comedy and Oddity Festival. For more information go to www.AriShaffir.com or follow follow Shaffir on Twitter @AriShaffir.

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TRANSCRIPT:

ARI SHAFFIR: It’s almost—the worst thing you can do in almost any experience is have too much expectations. You can have thoughts of how it might be going to go, but then if it doesn’t what are you going to do?

Like Tiger Woods used to have this thing where he’d close his eyes, I think some sports therapist told him to close your eyes and imagine a perfect shot like your perfect backswing hitting it perfectly landing on the green four feet from the cup. And he would do that, imagine and then go and do it. That’s his expectation. But sometimes he’d shank one into the high grass and he can’t just go, “Well I thought I’d be on the green.” He’d be like “It’s a new moment, I’m in the high grass, and I’ve got to figure out a way to fucking get out of that over the sand with water behind it and hit this new shot.” You can have expectations but don’t stick to them.

Stage fright is a real thing. It’s debilitating to some people. Liz Phair, I think, she never toured because she had stage fright, which was too bad. She was great. She’s a musician. Maybe it’s a bad example. But I used to be really frightened.

My first time onstage I had to do like two shots, guzzle a beer and then sip another beer just to get my hands down to like that from that. It’s a real thing. I know some people have taken beta-blockers, they’ve taken pills to like get rid of that fear. I think with experience you just get over it.

I had a time at the DC Improv where I was coming out from backstage and I threw up in my mouth and I had to fucking swallow it back down. It was like, “This next guy, he’s originally from—“, as they’re saying that it was like “Please welcome…”

I had to go out there like that. And I wasn’t expecting it but that was real. I don’t know what happened I just got nervous. And then there was a time where I went home to do some like job-job, so I was maybe a year, two years into comedy, went home to do this job, came back and was—I haven’t thought about this in a while, I was overcome by fright. I couldn’t get back onstage. I couldn’t to do it.

I would drive from my apartment in West L.A. 30 minutes toward The Comedy Store; find parking; g...

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