"In show business, if you make a mistake, you can do it over again"
About this Quote
Show business sells the fantasy of control: mess up, reset, nail it on take two. Bobby Sherman’s line lands because it’s breezy and true in a narrow, technical sense - you can re-record a vocal, reshoot a scene, splice together a “live” performance that never actually happened in one clean run. The mistake becomes raw material, not catastrophe. That’s the comfort and the trap.
Coming from a teen-idol-era musician who lived inside highly managed pop machinery, the subtext is almost a wink at the industry’s invisible scaffolding. Audiences are invited to experience spontaneity; the business is built on repetition, editing, and a quiet army of professionals smoothing the seams. Sherman is pointing at the retake as a kind of privilege: most people don’t get one. In regular life, the flubbed sentence, the bad meeting, the impulsive choice, all stick. In entertainment, the “real” version is whatever survives the cut.
The quote also functions as self-protection. It reframes public failure as something temporary, even negotiable. Yet there’s an implied cost: if you can always redo it, you can also be endlessly perfected, endlessly corrected, endlessly replaceable. The line captures the paradox of pop fame in one shrug - a world where image is manufactured to look effortless, and where the pressure is relentless precisely because perfection is technically possible.
Coming from a teen-idol-era musician who lived inside highly managed pop machinery, the subtext is almost a wink at the industry’s invisible scaffolding. Audiences are invited to experience spontaneity; the business is built on repetition, editing, and a quiet army of professionals smoothing the seams. Sherman is pointing at the retake as a kind of privilege: most people don’t get one. In regular life, the flubbed sentence, the bad meeting, the impulsive choice, all stick. In entertainment, the “real” version is whatever survives the cut.
The quote also functions as self-protection. It reframes public failure as something temporary, even negotiable. Yet there’s an implied cost: if you can always redo it, you can also be endlessly perfected, endlessly corrected, endlessly replaceable. The line captures the paradox of pop fame in one shrug - a world where image is manufactured to look effortless, and where the pressure is relentless precisely because perfection is technically possible.
Quote Details
| Topic | Learning from Mistakes |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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