The fire comes later
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People keep asking how to find their passion like it’s buried somewhere waiting to be discovered. It’s not.
In 1965, Steve Martin was twenty years old and performing at the Bird Cage Theatre at Knott’s Berry Farm in Buena Park, California.
Four or five shows a day. Six days a week. The audience was mostly families killing time between rides. They weren’t there to see him. They were waiting for their chicken dinner.
He did magic tricks. He told jokes. He studied what landed and what didn’t. He wrote down crowd reactions after every set and came back the next morning with adjustments.
He did this for years.
Martin later described his career in three phases: “Ten years spent learning, four years spent refining, and four years spent in wild success.” By 1978, he was selling out arenas of 45,000 people. He was the biggest concert draw in the history of stand-up comedy.
But when he sat down to write his memoir decades later, he opened with something most people skip past. “I was not naturally talented,” he wrote. “I didn’t sing, dance, or act, though working around that minor detail made me inventive.”
No gift. No calling at fourteen that told him this was his thing. Just a guy performing magic tricks for people who weren’t paying attention, writing down what worked, and showing up again tomorrow.
There’s one line from that memoir I keep coming back to. He wrote: “I was seeking comic originality, and fame fell on me as a by-product.”
A by-product.
