Being constructively critical is good, as long as your purpose is to improve your methods for future endeavors. Lying in bed and replaying failures and telling yourself you’re stupid is a tremendous disservice to your efforts and what you can offer the world.
I spent a lot of time bowling as a kid, mostly because I grew up in bowling alleys. They were kind of my playgrounds.
When I was in school, if you wanted a computer, you had to build one. But today, computers are everywhere. We’re all obsessed with technology and having the latest gadgets. Nerd culture is ubiquitous.
Humans cannot produce viable offspring with our closest animal cousin: the chimpanzee. We cannot impregnate a chimp. So you know what that means? No condoms.
Stand up straight. If you stand up straight, you will instantly feel better about yourself, and you will project a better image to the world, one that says you don’t feel like you have to be hunched over and closed off.
I’m not fun to bowl with. I take it way too seriously. I have high expectations for myself.
Steal moments of happiness if you have to, and then collect them until they are the dominant images in your psyche.
I think the mistake a lot of people make with new media is they just focus on one thing. But any one thing – just doing podcasts or just having a website or just doing television – isn’t enough anymore.
I don’t know if I’m a Twitter addict. That seems kind of harsh. I would say it’s more that I’m seriously involved. That it’s a long-term relationship – like a girlfriend, which my actual girlfriend loves to hear.
Nerds get caught up in minutiae, because there is a tremendous and fulfilling sense of control in understanding every single detail of a thing more than any other living creature.
Trying to make strangers laugh is crazy and more than a little narcissistic.
Worry is a misuse of your imagination.
For me personally, I have a fear of, ‘If I stop, I’m going to die.’ If I stop doing the things that are enriching to me or creatively exciting to me or if I stop creating, then I feel stagnant. If something isn’t growing, it’s dying.
My mom is a big sports fans. Basketball, football, baseball, whatever. She calls into sports radio shows and gets into shouting matches, that’s how intense she is about it.
The podcast movement was really a creative survival mechanism for standup comics.
We are in niche consumption mode, but ‘niche’ doesn’t mean ‘small’ anymore. Niche can mean focused, and particularly with the Web, which is a global audience you can have something niche and still get 10 to 15 million views.
Long ago you may have given up control of your brain and set it on autopilot either because it just felt like too much work. And it is work! But for me, this work was well worth it for the prospect of not waking up sad every day.
If you’re going into stand-up, you’re hyper-analyzing the world and asking as many questions about a thing as you possibly can so you can figure out the ultimate nature of that thing.
Playing Xbox for 23 hours straight is cool and all, but I’m going to teach you how to spend time on things in your life that will get you the following two things: paid and laid.
The thing about hipsters is that they take very seriously trying to make themselves look like they don’t take themselves seriously.