Martin said it on camera to Charlie Rose, in an interview recorded at the 92nd Street Y in New York and broadcast 12 December 2007, while promoting his memoir Born Standing Up. It is a spoken answer to a question about how to make it in show business — not a line from any of his books.
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In context
Evoking the world of Steve Martin — American comedian, actor, writer and musician. Theme: "Be so good they can't ignore you". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
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Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "Be so good they can't ignore you". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Provenance
The interview it comes from
Source
An Hour with Steve Martin, on Charlie Rose
Broadcast
12 December 2007 (recorded at the 92nd Street Y, New York)
Form
Spoken remark in a television interview — not a written text
Later popularized by
Cal Newport, So Good They Can’t Ignore You (Grand Central, 2012)
Nobody ever takes note of it because it’s not the answer they want to hear. What they want to hear is ‘here’s how you get an agent’ or ‘here’s how to write a script’. But I always say ‘Be so good they can’t ignore you’. If somebody is thinking ‘How can I be really good’ people are going to come to you. It’s much easier doing it that way than going to cocktail parties.
Television interview
Transcribed from the broadcast by a third party; the surrounding words vary slightly between transcriptions, but the sentence itself is consistent across every version located.
12 December 2007 — the Charlie Rose archive lists the episode: highlights of a live interview with Martin at the 92nd Street Y, in which he discusses how he became a comedian (Charlie Rose, episode page ↗).
1 February 2008 — Cal Newport writes up Martin’s advice under the heading “The Steve Martin Method,” quoting “Be so good they can’t ignore you” and referring back to the December Charlie Rose interview (calnewport.com ↗).
13 June 2008 — a blogger quotes the line and points readers to the interview, dating it 12 December 2007 and noting Martin says it at the very end (Explorer Street ↗).
2012 — Cal Newport publishes So Good They Can’t Ignore You with Grand Central, and the phrase escapes into general circulation as a book title (calnewport.com books ↗).
This is a spoken remark from a television interview first broadcast in 2007 — far too recent for the public domain in the United States, where the cutoff currently sits at works published before 1931. The words are Martin’s and the recording belongs to the interview’s producers; quote the sentence with attribution rather than reproducing the segment.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
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Fact-check
What people get wrong
The attribution here is right — unusually, for a line this heavily memed. What goes wrong is the source: almost nobody who shares it can say where or when Martin said it, and a good number credit the wrong person entirely.
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Credited to the wrong personCal Newport book title, not origin
Newport’s 2012 bestseller is titled So Good They Can’t Ignore You (Grand Central), which leads people to treat him as the author of the phrase. Newport himself had credited Martin four years earlier, in a February 2008 post that quotes the line and traces it to the Charlie Rose interview (calnewport.com ↗).
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Treated as a written maximQuote aggregators and poster prints no source given
It circulates as a bare sentence with Martin’s name attached and no citation at all — Wikiquote’s Steve Martin page, for instance, does not carry the line in any of its sourced sections (Wikiquote ↗). It was said out loud on television, not written in a book.
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Assumed to be from his memoirReaders of Born Standing Up adjacent, not identical
Martin was promoting Born Standing Up, published in 2007 (Wikipedia ↗), and the interview is largely about that book — but the sentence belongs to the interview, and no edition of the memoir has been found here containing it.
✓Genuine Steve Martin, genuinely his own words — spoken to Charlie Rose in an interview broadcast 12 December 2007 (Charlie Rose archive ↗).
Context
Why it landed
Rose asked the question every young performer asks, and Martin gave an answer that deliberately refuses to be useful in the way people want. As he put it, nobody takes note of the advice, because what they actually want to hear is how to get an agent or how to write a script (transcript ↗). The advice is the opposite of a shortcut: it is an instruction to spend years on the craft instead of on the networking.
Coming from Martin it carries weight, because the memoir he was promoting is precisely the story of those unglamorous years — the stretch most show-business books skip. In the same interview he described the frustration that drove him to write it: reading other entertainers’ biographies in which the guy is suddenly performing at the Copa and you are left wondering how that happened.
It’s much easier doing it that way than going to cocktail parties.
Read the full story
The line stayed a niche piece of career advice for several years, passed around blogs, before Cal Newport made a version of it the title of a 2012 book arguing that skills, not passion, produce work worth loving. From there it became a slogan — stripped of the interview, the question, and the cocktail parties.
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
Born 1945 · American comedian, actor, writer and musician
Steve Martin was born in Waco, Texas, on 14 August 1945, and spent the 1970s turning stand-up into arena-scale performance with albums such as Let’s Get Small and A Wild and Crazy Guy before moving into film, playwriting and bluegrass. He gave this advice while promoting Born Standing Up (2007), the memoir in which he documents the long, unglamorous apprenticeship most show-business books skip. It is a characteristic answer: unsentimental, faintly impatient with the question, and about craft rather than career.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Cite this page
Steve Martin, interviewed by Charlie Rose, “An Hour with Steve Martin,” recorded at the 92nd Street Y, New York; broadcast 12 December 2007. Quoted in Cal Newport, “The Steve Martin Method,” calnewport.com, 1 February 2008.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Be so good they can't ignore you’?” Last verified 22 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/be-so-good-they-cant-ignore-you/