A conversation with Seth Meyers — and what improv’s greatest lesson reveals about the people with real X factor
One of the first things that strikes you about Seth Meyers, the incredibly accomplished comedian, actor, and TV host, is that he is a great listener. Thirty minutes before I interviewed him onstage at Barclays Center in New York last week, we met backstage in the Green Room, and in that brief conversation, I immediately felt it. He asked questions. He followed up. We riffed about the Knicks, the Red Sox, the World Cup, and our children. And he really heard everything I said.
It was an especially exciting moment for me. For a long time, I have obsessively pored over the tapes of performers that I admire, and Meyers is someone I have followed since his time as the Weekend Update anchor at SNL, where he remains the show’s longest-serving head writer, and through his twelve years as the host of Late Night.
In fact Seth started his career doing 200 improv shows a year in Amsterdam (yes, Europe was where he started his career. When he was hired by the Chicago parent company he didn’t have a passport!). Those are hard reps. Getting up on stage in front of a new audience night after night, never really knowing quite what the subject will be, solving problems in real time – it’s demanding work.
It was also incredible training in one of improv’s core tenets: you must make your partner look good. That’s the job: it’s not your performance that matters, it’s your partner’s. And you cannot make your partner look good if you haven’t engaged with what they’ve offered you. The moment you’re in your own head, composing your next line, you’ve already failed them. As Seth put it, “you can’t build something with a person if you’re just thinking about what you’re gonna say when they’re done talking, you want to play it off what they’re saying, that’s actually adding value. Otherwise, you’re just waiting.”
The beautiful thing about listening is that it informs curiosity. And curiosity fuels listening. They’re an infinite loop. The challenge of improv – and life – is to not break the loop and listen with selective attention as we compose our rebuttal or prepare to redirect the conversation.
I find it as a consistent pattern among people with genuine X factor, particularly in high-octane, people-focused careers like hospitality, politics, and entertainment. Whether it’s the Dalai Lama, or Will Guidara (the author of Unreasonable Hospitality and the man who took Eleven Madison Park to number one restaurant in the world), or the many-times bestselling author and incredible speaker, the late Sir Ken Robinson, these people have a remarkable ability to make you feel like they actually want to know what you are going to say. They are fully in.
On stage, Seth brought that same quality – the focus, the selflessness, the generosity. It’s why that entire night’s audience of leaders from across the high-performance sports ecosystem leant in, laughed and took copious notes.
At the end of our conversation, as we were wrapping up for the audience, Seth turned and said I was one of the best interviewers he’d ever had a conversation with. I can’t begin to tell you what that meant to me at that moment. For sure, I am a long way from how good I want to be, but the level of mastery Seth demonstrates night after night is something that conversation made me want to chase harder.
That is, I think, exactly what great listening does. It doesn’t just make the other person feel heard. It makes everyone in the room want to be better at it.