Finding the break behind the break

"Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better."
-John Updike

When you read the typical success story, the action starts with a "break," often a fluke involving the right time and place. But look a bit deeper and you find the break before the break.

As Exhibit A today, I'd like to offer Ricky Gervais, the creator of "The Office" and "Extras." Gervais's break came when the BBC agreed to air the initial version of "The Office." That happened only because one of Gervais's employees, Stephen Merchant, left to take a new job at the BBC. It was Merchant, recalling Gervais imitating bad bosses, who got some of his new colleagues to shoot one of those impersonations, and that became the sample they showed the BBC executives.

It's interesting to note that if Gervais himself had been a better boss, perhaps Merchant would have stayed on, and both of them would still be clowning around in the back room of a radio station in Great Britain, amusing themselves and four others, instead of entertaining millions.

You can hear Gervais talking about his career in a pair of interviews online -- an audio one with Terry Gross at NPR.org, and a video before the Oxonian Society in New York (which you can watch if you go to FORA.tv and put "Gervais" into its search engine). In the latter, Gervais gave two reasons why he and Merchant succeeded in selling the show: First, they didn't just provide the usual -- a script -- but a prepilot pilot, a 20-minute sample. Gervais: "If we'd sent a script, it would still be in someone's drawer. There are no jokes. It's about 20 percent silent. No famous people. No plot. [He pulls a face as if having a revelation.] Maybe it isn't funny. Who would ever watch that? But once [the BBC execs] saw it, they knew what we meant."

The second reason: "We were low risk. We went out on 10 o'clock on a Monday in the lowest season. And it cost nothing. They had nothing to lose."

In those two comments, we see how you set up a break, how you construct a fluke. When I talk with employees, particularly young ones, they insist that management isn't interested in new ideas. It seems to these rookies as though management is in love with the old ideas and keeps bringing them back, pretending that they're new. Indeed, the recycled ideas are slipcovers on the old sofa, where the cushions already conform to the same old butts. The ideas look new but feel familiar, which means, and this is what really matters, they don't take much time. They are prethought. It isn't that management is out of ideas; it's they are out of time. In the case of Gervais and Merchant, they didn't just walk in with an idea; they walked with an idea easy to understand and easy to implement -- in sum, with an idea that was easy to say yes to.

That's how Gervais built his break. But that's not what I meant when I spoke of the break behind the break. When success stories are written, the plot usually begins with the breakthrough. But the other break is the break with tradition.

We see in Gervais the common trait of creative people, what I've come to think of as being "lovably unreasonable." Reflecting on his work, he told the Oxonians: "I wouldn't change one line if they said, 'This will get you an extra million viewers.' I'd go the other way, if anything. The only reason I care about ratings is so someone says, 'You can do another one if you want.' "

And when asked about his new show, "Extras," he said: "It seemed like the opposite of 'The Office,' which is good. We tried to make it different, different from 'The Office,' and it is."

In those two comments the artist's mind is at work: It isn't "How can we do more of what has been successful?" but "How can we be different?" That kind of thinking frustrates corporate management; it causes them to think of creative people as flakes and to scowl at attitudes they see as being unreasonable. Then again, the best you can hope for by being reasonable is be reasonably successful, and once you understand that principle, you know where to look for the break behind the break.

Dale Dauten is a syndicated columnist. He can be reached at dale@dauten.com.