Re:Thinking with Adam GrantEd Helms on The Office, comedic snafus, and learning from failures | ReThinking with Adam Grant
At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Ed Helms on embracing failure, community, and avoiding groupthink snafus
- Ed Helms argues that standup comedy trains performers to “love bombing,” treating failures as callus-building practice rather than as identity-defining events.
- He recounts a disastrous early set at a Long Island club—derailed by a heckler he accidentally insulted—to illustrate how unpreparedness and lack of credibility amplify failure’s sting.
- He explains that breaking into entertainment becomes more sustainable when you find a cohort that validates your aspirations and buffers you from social resistance and judgment.
- Reflecting on The Office, Helms highlights the importance of recognizing and cherishing the mundane moments that later become “the good old days.”
- Drawing from his SNAFU work, he emphasizes that groupthink, homogeneous decision-making, and fear-driven overconfidence are recurring causes of large-scale blunders, exemplified by a Cold War plan to nuke the moon.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasFailure tolerance is a trainable skill, not a personality trait.
Helms describes bombing in standup as repeated exposure therapy: you build “calluses” by surviving painful sets and learning that the discomfort is temporary and useful.
Preparation determines whether low expectations help or hurt.
When Helms felt underprepared, failure was crushing; when he’d done the homework and had “killer jokes,” being unknown became an advantage because he could exceed expectations without reputation pressure.
A supportive cohort reduces the psychological cost of risk-taking.
He advises aspiring creatives to find people who genuinely believe their goal is worthwhile, because that social proof counters subtle skepticism (“Oh…that’s what you want to do?”) that erodes persistence.
On-camera repetition can be creative exploration, not monotony.
In contrast to the boredom of many retakes, Helms says he looks for endless novelty by tweaking angles, timing, and “top spin,” using repetition to chase an (unattainable) comedic ideal.
Nostalgia is built from small moments, so notice them earlier.
His signature Office line—wanting to know you’re in the good old days while in them—becomes a practical lesson: cherish the mundane routines and interactions, not just the “big” milestones.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesShow business is a, is just a festival of failure. It, truly, and then I started in standup comedy, which is just punishment.
— Ed Helms
In order to get anywhere with standup comedy, you really have to learn to love bombing, and love failing, and sort of see it as, like, uh, just building your calluses, you know? Building your toughness as a performer.
— Ed Helms
And at that point, like, I lost. I just lost. The crowd won.
— Ed Helms
I was so, I was so proud to be given the line the, the, in the very last episode of, of the series, "I wish there was some way to know you're in the good old days while you're actually in them."
— Ed Helms
The, all the markers of success, uh, the money or the, the adulation or f- and certainly in show business, fame is a big, uh, sort of metric. They start to lose meaning at a certain point because they don't make you a better dad. They don't make you a better brother or family member or friend, and those are the things that, that matter.
— Ed Helms
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
