Carson ruled the late-night airwaves for thirty years. He was the most important Kingmaker in American culture. If you were invited to do a 5-minute set on The Tonight Show, and Johnny liked you, your career was set.

In 1981, Seinfeld was scheduled for his first appearance on the show. A few years later, he reflected on the experience when he sat for an interview with Larry Wilde, a comedian and author.

Larry asked, “How did you prepare for that?”

Seinfeld deadpanned, “Rigorously.” Then he continued, “Every comedian knows that his first appearance on the Tonight Show is his Olympics, his World Series, and his Superbowl all rolled into one. This is his chance to become an A player, the A team.”

Then, Seinfeld went on to explain that as soon as he constructed his 5-minute set of material, he practiced it relentlessly. In the weeks before his Tonight Show appearance, he would go from club to club, performing it. He would do it up to five or six times a night. Seinfeld said that he probably rehearsed that single 5-minute set two hundred times during that period to make sure it was perfect. It was an opportunity he was not going to blow.

And in fact, he made the most of that appearance because Seinfeld became one of the most famous comedians in America, even before the enormous success of the Seinfeld TV show.

All because he saw an opportunity he was not going to waste. He put in the reps, he did the work, and it paid off in spades.

Question: When you consider the success you want to achieve and the opportunities you want as a writer, how many reps are you willing to do in order to be the best?

Note: If you’d like to listen to Larry Wilde’s full interview with Jerry Seinfeld, you can do so by listening to the album “Jerry Seinfeld on Comedy.”

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The idea goes something like this: the main purpose of your life, vocationally speaking, is to find your dream. The dream is what you are meant to do. It’s granted by some otherworldly force or power. Your task, should you choose to accept it, is to keep seeking and searching, defeating obstacles and naysayers, until the dream becomes a reality.

There is some truth to that story. Anyone who has achieved anything worthwhile has defeated obstacles and ignored naysayers. But the main fault in this philosophy is that a dream is “out there” somewhere. And if you work hard enough and seek it out, you will eventually find it.

The truth is that dreams are not found. A dream does not exist out there somewhere. The whole idea of finding your dream is based on the idea that you are a passive observer to your own life.

In truth, a dream doesn’t exist anywhere outside of yourself. A dream is created from within.

A lot of writers spend years or decades passively waiting for their dream to come true. Maybe they’ll get discovered by an agent or a publisher. Maybe that book will magically get written. Maybe someone will hand them that opportunity they’ve been waiting for.

That’s not how it works. Yes, people do get discovered sometimes, and their dreams come true. But for the vast majority of writers, their dreams become reality because they worked for them. They did the work. They put in the years of effort and built their platform, their business, and their success one brick at a time.

It’s the cold, hard truth… but it’s also the most liberating thing you can possibly hear. Your dreams are not out there… they’re in here, in your mind and heart. But it’s up to you to do the work and take them from the realm of possibility to the realm of reality.

Question: Do you find this truth frustrating or liberating? Why?

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