Give and Take: a revolutionary Approach to Success pdfdrive com

partners more credit for successes.
This is George Meyer’s modus operandi: he’s incredibly tough on himself
when things go badly, but quick to congratulate others when things go well.
“Bad comedy hurts George physically,” Tim Long says. Meyer wants each joke
to make people laugh—and many to make them think. Although he holds other
people to the same high standards that he sets for himself, he’s more forgiving of
their mistakes. Early in his career, Meyer was fired from a show called Not
Necessarily the News after six weeks. Twenty years later, he ran into the boss
who fired him. She apologized—firing him was clearly a mistake—and braced
herself for Meyer to be angry. As he shared the story with me, Meyer laughed:
“It was just lovely to see her again. I said ‘Come on, look where we are; all is
forgiven.’ There are a few people in Hollywood who thrive on driving their
enemies’ faces into the dirt. That’s such a hollow motivation. And you don’t
want to have all these people out there trying to undermine you.”
In the Simpsons rewrite room, being more forgiving of others than of himself
helped Meyer get the best ideas out of others. “I tried to create a climate in the
room where everybody feels that they can contribute, that it’s okay to fall on
your face many, many times,” he says. This is known as
psychological safety
—
the belief that you can take a risk without being penalized or punished. Research
by Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson shows that in the type
of psychologically safe environment that Meyer helped create, people learn and
innovate more.
*
And it’s givers who often create such an environment: in one
study, engineers who shared ideas without expecting anything in return were
more likely to play a
major role in innovation
, as they made it safe to exchange
information. Don Payne recalls that when he and fellow writer John Frink joined
The Simpsons, they were intimidated by the talented veterans on the show, but
Meyer made it safe to present their ideas. “George was incredibly supportive,
and took us under his wing. He made it very easy to join in and participate,
encouraged us to pitch and didn’t denigrate us. He listened, and asked for our
opinions.”
When revising scripts, many comedy writers cut material ruthlessly, leaving
the people who wrote that material psychologically wounded. Meyer, on the
other hand, says he “tried to specialize in the emotional support of other people.”
When writers were freaking out about their scripts being rewritten, he was often
the one to console them and calm them down. “I was always dealing with people
in extremis; I would often talk people down from panic,” Meyer observes. “I got
good at soothing them, and showing them a different way to look at the

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situation.” At the end of the day, even if he was trashing their work, they knew
he cared about them as people. Carolyn Omine comments that “George does not
mince words; he’ll come right out and tell you if he thinks the joke you pitched
is dumb, but you never feel he’s saying you’re dumb.” Tim Long told me that
when you give Meyer a script to read, “It’s as if you just handed him a baby, and
it’s his responsibility to tell you if your baby’s sick. He really cares about great
writing—and about you.”

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