Yesterday I went to the Alameda County Fair for our annual outing.  My friends and I go mostly for the shows and rides, but it’s also intriguing to see the products being sold and the animals and prize winners.  This year we chose yesterday to go because of the performer – comedian Paul Rodriguez.

Our motley crew are all fans of his acting & stand-up routines, so we were excited to see him live.  Don’t get me wrong, we were not disappointed, but I noticed something about his hour long act last night that got me thinking about the lifespan of a person’s career, regardless of their profession.

If you’re as big a fan of stand-up comedy as I am, you’ll notice that many performers have carefully written & structured routines.  Optimized sequence of jokes & topics for the best laughs, call backs to earlier bits, and clear thought progression.  Most of what I’ve seen Paul Rodriguez do in the past isn’t any different.  But last night he rambled a bit and couldn’t follow a train of thought, often going back to things he’d mentioned already 15 minutes later after being done with a random tangent.  He had many off the cuff interactions with the crowd, which often distracted him from his topic.  While all hilarious, this is definitely the sign of someone who’s confident and comfortable with their profession; they feel that having to “wing it” is no problem because they will still get the job done.  Ultimately the crowd was laughing like crazy, so most people probably didn’t notice the disjointedness of it as much as I did.  Overall it’s safe for anyone to say that his job was accomplished.

But the hard work just wasn’t there.  To me that shows a slacking work ethic – to not give as great a performance at your job every time no matter what the circumstances.  This transcends performance art and really extends to all careers.  While it’s great to be advanced in your career and confident with your skills at what you do, putting your actions into cruise control can be dangerous.  If you’re not working hard and being the best you can be at your job every day, it’s going to start to show.  While one little mistake can be swept under the rug, a lot of little mistakes start making the rug bumpy and get noticed in a big, bad way.  A lesson should be learned that confidence doesn’t replace hard work.  Of course it’s great to be confident at your job because it will help your performance, but also recognize that it took a lot of hard work to get there and it will take a lot of hard work to stay there.  You cannot rely on that confidence to just “get through it” – the effort and hard work ethic still has to be there driving you to perform at your peak.

I understand the psycology of winging it, especially under the circumstances.  It is just a county fair and the show was free with the $10 price of admission, so he can’t be making much off of this gig.  He’s also go bigger projects he’s working on at the moment – upcoming movies, a USO trip to Bagdad, and a trip to South Africa to name a couple he mentioned.  So at a certain point, delegation of resources, time, and energy is necessary to get everything done.  But that’s really no excuse to let anything slack enough to be as noticably disorganized as last night’s show.  There’s a fine balancing point to multi-tasking, which is not letting anything slack and getting everything done effectively and presenting the best product (in this case, his show) you can & always putting the best foot forward.

It’s hard to get to the top.  But career minded people need to also remember that it’s equally as hard to stay there.  Just look at Britney Spears

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