ReThinking: Ed Helms on growing through failure

Learning To Love Bombing: Why Failure Is the Backbone of a Comedic Career

Ed Helms sits down with Adam Grant to trace a career built on public flops, stubborn curiosity, and the people who make creative risk-taking tolerable. He describes how early standup nights that felt like physical pain—heckles from neurosurgeons, doomed 30-minute sets, and anxiety-fueled casino gigs—were actually formative exercises in resilience. Instead of retreating after humiliating performances, Helms learned to treat bombing as callus-building: each failure hardened his ability to perform again, experiment more boldly, and pursue moments of live connection that film and television often cannot deliver.

Building Creative Calluses With Your Cohort

One of Helms’s clearest takeaways is that progress rarely happens in isolation. He recommends finding a tight cohort of peers who share your ambition and will celebrate attempts even when they fail spectacularly. That community becomes an emotional safety net, turning catastrophic flops into shared anecdotes and practical feedback loops. For aspiring performers and leaders alike, surrounding yourself with people who validate your aims reduces friction and makes recovery from setbacks faster and less demoralizing.

The Pep-Talk Trick: Record Yourself to Self-Distance

Helms reveals a surprising personal habit: he records short pep talks on his phone with background music and watches them before nerve-wracking appearances. This technique acts as a form of self-distancing, letting him hear encouragement from a calmer, coached version of himself. It’s a pragmatic strategy for anyone confronting public failure, helping to quiet rumination and cue the confidence needed to try again.

From The Office To Snafu: Nostalgia, Flow, And Groupthink

The conversation moves from onstage disasters to television craft and the lessons he learned on The Office—chief among them, the power of small, daily moments to become the "good old days." Helms also discusses the patterns behind some of history’s greatest mistakes, like Cold War projects with catastrophic blind spots. He argues that many large-scale snafus arise from enclosed bubbles of groupthink, a lack of dissent, and fear-driven decisions—conditions often worsened by homogenous teams and overconfidence.

Strange Historical Mistakes That Feel Like Cautionary Tales

• The 1950s proposal to fire a nuclear missile at the moon, a plan abandoned only after careful scrutiny.
• How power, gender imbalance, and the absence of dissent accelerate catastrophic decision-making.
• Examples from show business where repeated retakes and private tinkering replace the immediacy of live performance.

Practical Ways To Reduce Snafus And Bounce Back Faster

Helms mixes personal practice with structural advice: build communities that normalize failure, use behavioral tricks like recorded pep talks to self-distance from shame, and create organizations that invite dissent to counteract dangerous groupthink. These recommendations apply both to creative professions and to teams handling high-stakes choices, where diverse perspectives and habit-driven resilience can prevent small errors from becoming historic disasters.

Whether he’s candidly recalling a brutal standup night, reflecting on the bittersweet rhythms of making a beloved TV show, or unearthing the quirks behind historical snafus, Helms offers a pragmatic and humane map for dealing with setbacks. The throughline is simple: exposure, community, and deliberate habits turn humiliation into fuel, and thoughtful structural safeguards keep small mistakes from becoming catastrophic choices. These lessons—about how to recover from public failure, how to prepare emotionally for high-pressure moments, and how to design teams that welcome dissent—create a blueprint for more intentional risk-taking and steadier recovery.