The Seinfeld Strategy—or why MS Dhoni is still the boss

A question I get asked frequently—just last week, in fact—is how to improve one’s writing. The answer is simple. To write better, read more and write more. As Hanif Kureshi, one of my favourite writers, says in his latest book Shattered: “Reading and writing go hand in hand.”

This answer leaves most people disappointed given that it sounds as simple as it does.

Were you forwarded this email? Did you stumble upon it online? Sign up here.

It also leaves the person asking the question with the feeling that I am holding something back, that I have a formula that I do not want to reveal. That I do not want to increase competition in a field that is not really monetarily very rewarding. Or that I am a generally insecure person who can’t see other people coming up. It’s nothing like that. ?

So, I have decided that from now on I will not answer this question in such a simple way. I will make my answer complicated and convoluted. In the process, one day when I rise to my level of incompetence as a writer, I will be ready to be hired as a consultant. And so, I will talk about what is now known as the Seinfeld Strategy.?

For those who do not know their stand-up comedy, Jerry Seinfeld has been one of the most popular stand-up comics in the last few decades. (Okay, for you Indian Zoomers, he is the Zakir Khan of American stand-up but not Samay Raina because he doesn’t swear on stage.) Seinfeld also starred and co-wrote the superhit sitcom Seinfeld, in which he played a fictitious version of himself.

The story goes that many years ago a young stand-up comic named ?Brad Isaac ran into Seinfeld at a club. Isaac asked Seinfeld if he had any tips for young comics. This is how the conversation seems to have gone. Seinfeld advised Isaac that to become a better comedian, the key was to craft better jokes, and the way to do that was to write every single day. He suggested that Isaac get a large wall calendar and hang it somewhere highly visible and mark a big red X for every day that he completed his writing task.

“After a few days, you'll see a chain start to form. Keep going, and the chain will grow longer with each passing day. You'll enjoy seeing that chain, especially once you've built up a few weeks. Your only job is to not break the chain.”

This came to be known as the Seinfeld Strategy, or the do-not-break-the-chain rule. The trouble is that when Seinfeld himself came to know of this, he denied it: “It’s the dumbest non-idea that was not mine, but somehow I’m getting credit for it.”

But that’s one version of it. There is another version.?

As Oliver Burkeman writes in Meditations for Mortals—Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts: “It turned out that the ‘Seinfeld Strategy’ was a throwaway remark he’d made to an aspiring comic at a comedy club one night, decades earlier, then promptly forgotten about completely.”

Now, whether Seinfeld said this or not is not the issue here. But the Seinfeld Strategy does sound fancier instead of saying if you want to do something well do more of it and do it regularly, if not daily. As Seinfeld told Burkeman: “If you’re a runner and you want to be a better runner, you say, well, I’ll run every day, and I will mark an X on the calendar every day I run! I can’t believe this was useful activity to anybody. Really? There are people who think “I’ll just sit around and do absolutely nothing, and somehow the work will get done”?”??

While this may come across as a surprise to Seinfeld, there are enough such people in this world because if there weren’t, the world wouldn’t have the number of self-help gurus and so-called productivity consultants that it does. And LinkedIn wouldn’t be a successful social media enterprise.??

But the essence of what Seinfeld is supposed to have told Isaac is that if you want to be a better stand-up comic you need to write jokes regularly and go out and perform those jokes to see if they land with the audience or don’t. And then, gradually, bit by bit, you will build an entire set.?

The best comics will tell you that all jokes don’t come completely formed in their head and that many jokes don’t really land well with the audience and need to be worked upon more. And the only way to find out what works and what doesn’t is to put yourself out there regularly. Go out and do the open-mic rounds.??

The same is true for writing. If you want to write better you need to write more. Writing more will help you write better. This might in a way sound paradoxical because it emphasises quantity over quality, but as Burkeman puts it: “Often, the way to have the best ideas, and to produce the best work, is to develop an ability to forget entirely about trying to control the quality of your output. And the easiest way to do that is to focus on quantity instead.”

This has always worked well for my writing. I do end up writing a lot of mediocre stuff (and in my early days as a freelance writer, also a lot of rubbish) but now and then, here and there, there is always something nice that comes out of this head.??

You also need to read more because that’s where the ideas will come from and where you will be able to borrow from. Nothing ever got written from scratch. As Salim Khan, the famous film writer, put it in the documentary Angry Young Men: “Originality is the art of concealing the source.” The more you read, the more you will be able to conceal the source while writing.

Also, reading comes with cumulative advantages built into it. As you keep reading over the years, you will forget almost all of what you read. But the little that you remember will keep adding up and embellish your writing by helping you recall relevant details and examples. It will also help you connect things and build a broader narrative. While history rarely repeats itself, it does keep rhyming now and then.?

One part of the Seinfeld Strategy I am not really sure of is the daily bit. I wrote my first four books following this strategy. I tried writing a couple of thousand words almost every day, even on Sundays, and I wouldn’t give up until I had achieved the target. I was obsessed with completing two thousand words or more of writing every day.??

On some days this meant sitting and writing for 10-12 hours. This was not because I knew of the Seinfeld Strategy at that point but that’s how it was. That’s how I used to work. And it left me physically tired and unfit and emotionally tired as well.??

Then I wrote my fifth book by writing it for a few hours, four to five days a week. I didn’t get obsessed with the daily word count and I stopped writing the moment I felt that I was running out of things to say on a given day or when I felt mentally tired. That left me with a lot of time to do other things. I enjoyed the process much more. The process should not become a punishment (that’s a great line for LinkedIn). Also, what many people don’t really realise is that this dailyish strategy—as Burkeman terms it—adds up to quite a bit over a period of time.??

If your job involves regular thinking—that is, you are what management guru Peter Drucker called a knowledge worker—then you are best following the intense focussing strategy for a few hours on most days (look at how casually I have dropped the word focus here), instead of thinking about things all-through the day.??

Getting back to the process of writing… when I say the only two things that need to be done to write better are to read more and to write more, the answer doesn’t go down well with many people. As humans, we are used to solutions that sound like solutions, and this clearly doesn’t.??

But if I were to answer the question of how to write better under the garb of the Seinfeld Strategy it would clearly go down better with people. One, the term has got the word strategy in it. Two, it has got a famous person’s name attached to it.??

As Burkeman puts it: “The unstated appeal of… the Seinfeld Strategy lies in the bewitching idea that there might be a rule, or a set of rules, that would force accomplishment to occur, rendering it inevitable and automatic.” At the same time, doing something dailyish is tough, as staying consistent forces you to abandon the idea of perfection and accept the discomfort of making progress that’s far from flawless. You have to be at it.??

Of course, following this strategy will not make you a bestselling writer. It will perhaps make you a better writer than you are. Whether that leads to monetary success leading you to become a societal benchmark is another question altogether.

Success in life is about inherent talent, and that talent getting the luck of opportunity, and being ready to grab that opportunity by having practised their skill over and over again as and when it comes up. That’s how it is, in simple terms.

As Kureshi writes: “[Writing] is a talent you must practise daily, like a dancer or sportsperson, but at base it is a gift, and as such it is inexplicable… Real talent is rare and surprising; it is a gift, which must be elevated with discipline.”

Finally, dear reader, you must be wondering why I have mentioned MS Dhoni in the headline but haven’t really talked about him as yet. As I have said in the past, this is the era of clickbait, and one has to do in Rome as the Romans do.??

Well, over the years, there has been a lot of talk about Dhoni’s wicket-keeping skills and his fast hands. Anyone who has seen cricket regularly in the past two decades has seen those fast hands. The interesting thing is that other cricketers who have played with him have said that he rarely practises wicket-keeping in the nets. So has Stephen Fleming, the coach of Chennai Super Kings, the IPL franchise Dhoni plays for.

This goes against the very idea of the Seinfeld Strategy. But then, there are always exceptions to the rule. Dhoni’s wicketkeeping is an exception to the rule. That’s why he is the Boss. You and I, dear reader, are no Dhonis, and for us lesser mortals to improve our skill, we need to practise more and practise it regularly. It’s as simple and as difficult as that.?

Were you forwarded this email? Did you stumble upon it online? Sign up here.

Written by Vivek Kaul

Edited by Feroze Jamal

Produced by Vertika Kanaujia

Send in your feedback to [email protected]