For the last three years, I’ve written a satire blog called Stuff Christians Like. I also wrote a book that it is categorized as “humor.” Sometimes I tell jokes when I speak. As a result, people occasionally ask me “What’s the secret to being funny?”

And although there are probably a million ways to answer that question, mine is pretty simple and actually applies to more than just being funny. Here it is:

“The secret to being funny is the willingness to be unfunny a whole lot.”

You simply have to have the courage to say 100 unfunny things before you stumble on 1 funny one. You have to throw away a lot of material that isn’t great to find the tiny bit that is. You have to go 0 for 49,413 on Twitter.

That’s what I do, every day.

One of the things I like to do on Twitter is make people laugh. So I write tweets that I think are funny. And sometimes, not a single person replies or retweets what I said, which is the Twitter equivalent of laughing at a joke. I have 49,413 followers, which means that almost 50,000 people did not find something I said funny or interesting or worth commenting on. That’s a wicked big whiff right there. I went 0 for 49,413.

It’s not that I didn’t try my hardest to write something funny, I did. There have been many times when I’ve thought to myself, “People are going to love this tweet! This is so funny.” And then I tweet it and I get no response. Digital crickets. I bombed.

But that’s OK, because the secret to being funny is the willingness to be unfunny a whole lot first.

That’s it. That’s the whole secret and as small as it might sound, I think it actually has big implications to any type of dream you’re pursuing.

You see, when we have a hope in our hearts or a dream in our minds, we often find someone who we feel has achieved it and we watch what they are doing. We want to be a photographer perhaps so we look at Jeremy Cowart who takes amazing photography. And we see his amazing photography and think inside, “It comes so easy to that guy. My photography is not amazing like his. I’ll never be able to be as good as he his. I should quit.”

And we put down our dream because we’re unwilling to invest in the “un portion” of our adventure. The season where we will:

Write unfunny jokes

Take unamazing photos

Hold unspectacular promotions for our new store

Get unawesome traffic to our blogs.

But your ability to push through the “season of un” is often the only way to get where you’re really going.

So don’t view being “un” as failure on your part. Being unamazing sometimes is an investment you make in amazing. I promise.

(If you ever feel down, check out my twitter feed. I promise you’ll find a lot of unfunny things as I keep working my way toward funny. And that can be pretty encouraging, in an unexpected way.)