As I am sure you know by now, last night was David Letterman’s final show. After 33 years in front of the camera, the 68-year-old from Indiana is hanging up his tie and letting Stephen Colbert take over the reigns as host of the Late Show.
There have been a number of tributes to Letterman this week (you can find some here or here). I would not call this post a tribute, but I would like to share one thing we can all learn from the long time talk show host.
When I first started a blog a couple of years ago, my plan was to post 7 days a week. I was going to take the blogosphere by storm with my thought-provoking and hilarious writing. Before I launched my site, I prepared 7 days of content. I figured that would be enough to start and the ideas would come easily after that.
I was wrong.
After using up my first 7 days, I was stuck. My content well ran dry immediately. I quickly reduced my plans from posting every day to 6 days a week.
Then it became 5 days a week. Then 4.
I didn’t realize how difficult it would be to come up with content every single day.
Over the course of his career, David Letterman logged more than 6,000 hours on late night television. I am not sure where in the timeline of those 6,000 hours he too realized how difficult it is to come up with content on a nightly basis, but I am sure it happened.
Or at least it happened to his team of writers.
Somewhere along the line, Dave and his writers came up with the Top Ten list. The list became the show’s way of offering an hilarious take on anything from the Top Ten Signs Your Kid Had A Bad First Day At School to the Top Ten Rejected James Bond Gadgets.
They created a fun way to talk about current events. But they also created something just as important to the success of the show.
They created a segment.
With the Top Ten list, they had now a structure to follow that made crafting jokes for the show much easier. They developed an easier way to create content.
It is one thing to be dealt the task of having to come up with a show full of jokes on current events. That task is ambiguous and daunting. It is a much easier thing to come up with 10 jokes on the New England Patriots Deflategate. That task is concrete and manageable.
By creating a segment, the Late Show writers had a cheat code in the game of content creation. The segment became extremely popular and allowed for their job to be done very fast.
In a 1990 article in People Magazine Late Show head writer Steve O’Donnell (the innovator of the Top Ten list) said, “The whole thing gets done in the course of an hour and a half. Fast. We pick the subject. We write them, we run them past Dave, he picks what he likes, he sometimes adds more, we edit some out. It’s pretty simple, when you think about it.”
Looking back on the beginning of my blog, it comes as no surprise that I ran out of content so quickly. I thought by making my blog open to any topic I would expand my capacity for potential articles.
But actually, I was doing just the opposite.
I was staring down an ambiguous and daunting task.
I needed something more concrete and manageable. I needed a segment.
So I took Dave’s lead and created one.
Yes, that is right, I have the gumption to compare Wonder Why Wednesday to David Letterman’s Top Ten list. Not in the sense of popularity of hilarity, the Top Ten list destroys my segment in that comparison.
But they are similar in one way. Both are cheat codes. Both allow for an easier way to tackle the difficult task of creating content on a frequent basis.
If you are a blogger, a podcaster or anyone else who needs to come up with fresh material, I’d recommend you follow Dave’s lead and come up with a segment.
Photo credit: Wikipedia
