The Tryptych & Overcoming Trolls in TwitterSpaces
The obstacle is the path.
Ryan Holiday
About a decade ago, I quit finance and began doing stand-up comedy.
Here’s a clip from my first stand up comedy performance.
📺 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXwj4Y43FJc
That performance went well. I improvised, they laughed. I did material aka written jokes, they laughed. After the set, I was on cloud nine. I couldn’t wait to do stand up again. I felt like I’d discovered a new career.
The second time I went on stage, I used the same material and BOMBED. If you’ve never bombed at a comedy open mic in front of your girlfriend and sister, I wouldn’t recommend it.
The first enemy of a personality-driven brand is fear. It’s the fear of encountering someone like an investor who tears your entire business apart in five minutes and sends you packing, humiliated.
But bombing on my second attempt at stand up comedy didn’t dissuade me from stand-up; it made me even more fascinated with it. When watching comedians on TV, it appeared that they were reading from a script…and they were….sometimes. It was at that moment when I realized that stand up comedy was more than just speech arts.
Waiting to go on stage at Toronto’s Got Talent hosted by Quinn C. Martin
About six months of bombing later - this is the winter of 2020 - I applied to be on a local network TV show called, “Toronto’s Got Talent” and got accepted.
Before the show, I did my research on the host, Quinn C. Martin. I was trying to get a sense of the jokes that he would laugh at, because they often cut to his reaction when people were telling jokes during the show. I figured that if I could make HIM laugh, then the people at home would laugh WITH him.
Long story short, I did the show at the fancy Second City Theatre in Downtown Toronto, and the jokes made him laugh got cut from the show!
Quinn C. Martin on Toronto’s Got Talent on RogersTV, circa 2010
After the show, I asked him if he’d meet with me to look over my comedy business plan. When we met up, I showed him the plan and he hardly glanced at it. I felt insulted, but because I could tell that he knew what he was talking about I decided to subordinate my ego and learn.
After that meeting in a McDonald’s in Scarborough, he became my mentor.
After about five years, I figured out how to write a joke. Soon after, Quinn taught me how jokes could be strung with narrative into a single cohesive set.
📺 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pz8_Rs7qd8A
The Purpose of this Article
The purpose of this article is to teach you a step-by-step method to deal with hecklers also known as trolls so you can grow your personality-driven brand by overcoming hecklers aka trolls.
Comedy Becomes Boring
When I figured out how to write a joke, I got bored.
Back in I spent months and months and months coming up with individual jokes that I could rely on, and Quinn taught me the way to use narrative to string individual jokes into a coherent seven-minute set.
Here was my last joke:
📺 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rl8SHB9NO2E
After this joke that ended my set, I went for a walk outside. It was a beautiful summer night I can remember. I’d never felt so disappointed.
People laughed. They applauded. They cheered…so what? People laughed. Was that all there was to comedy? Writing jokes, telling jokes, honing jokes, doing hours…I could see the whole scenario play out and I couldn’t see myself writing jokes just to write jokes.
The Bill Burr Guide To Stand Up Comedy
Eventually I took a few years away from the stage. I didn’t know if I was ever going to come back.
They say that everyone starts comedy at a different point in their life. After a few years away from the stage, learning, working, failing, learning a lot, I came back. But this time, I came back with a complete different approach to comedy.
The confidence I gained in real life lead me to start going on stage with zero material and just relying on crowd work and improv. I was bored of writing jokes. I needed to add some danger back into the mix. And THAT’s where the real learning started.
What I learned from going up on stage with zero material and just relying on crowd work and improv lead me to encounter hecklers. Not everyone you talk to in the audience is going to be friendly, and when you leave open space for people to interrupt, someone eventually will.
Trolls are the number one obstacle for web3 startups to overcome.
Figuring out how to deal with Hecklers on stage prepared me for dealing with hecklers in TwitterSpaces. As it turns out, dealing with hecklers requires you to deal with the first enemy of a man of knowledge: fear.
📺 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2OQbCGfN6Q
It didn’t always work, but when the crowd interaction did well, it did REALLY WELL. I soon discovered that the best laughs I could generate were produced when I was talking with HECKLERS.
When I figured out how to deal with hecklers, I quit stand up and went back into sales with a renewed vigour because I realized that people can’t disagree with you when they’re laughing.
The Four Enemies of a Man of Knowledge (Castaneda)
📺 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kh1uoWKords
The Four Enemies of a Man of Knowledge are:
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Fear
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Power
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Clarity
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Old Age
A man fights these fears in order. Most men never overcome the first enemy of a man of knowledge.
- Carlos Castaneda
Why am I telling you this?
Because the first enemy of a personality-driven brand - just like your startup - is fear. It’s the fear of encountering someone like an investor who tears your entire business apart in five minutes and sends you packing, humiliated.
Many web3 startups live and die on the success of their community.
Most web3 startups never end up building a community because their leaders never figure out how to overcome the first enemy of a man of knowledge: fear. They never end up building a community because when you build a company in public, you’re going to face the startup’s version of a heckler; the troll.
The troll can be someone in your TwitterSpace who brings up a point you never thought about before, it could be an investor who dismisses your idea as worthless, it could be an internal employee who’s lost faith and hope and has too much experience to see things another way and take courage in the face of uncertainty.
Trolls are the number one obstacle for web3 startups to overcome. Every time you open up a TwitterSpace, it’s like being at a stand up comedy open mic, only this time everyone in the room has access to a microphone. So, when you reach about seven people in your room, invariably one of those people will end up criticizing - sometimes vehemently, often explicitly - the people in the room, the idea, and will attempt to divert the conversation.
Why Do Trolls Troll?
Hurt people hurt people. But keep in mind that a troll could actually be a very useful member of society. For that we’ll have to understand gamification at a high level. When you understand gamification, you’ll understand how to categorize trolls and judo them into the team or out of the dojo.
I’ll finish this later…