“As in all of the arts, fortune favors the persistent much more than the merely talented.” -John Hodgman (12)
“I have never been badly served by stopping before typing a word or taking a step on stage and asking myself: Why am I doing this? What do I have to say – need to say – on this specific day, to this group of people? It takes rigor, and a certain brave honesty, because sometimes the answer is small and dumb.” -John Hodgman (13)
“In a comedy-saturation era, where every joke you can think of has already been made five times, twelve minutes ago, knowing yourself is not merely essential to being funny, it is more important than being funny.” -John Hodgman (13)
“The seven traits of highly successful comedy people: 1. Self-Doubt 2. Excellent Procrastination Skills 3. Fear of the Unknown 4. Laziness 5. Fear of Failure 6. Poor Planning 7. A Need to Express Something to the World” (15)
“A character who innocently and earnestly pushes stupid, even dangerous ideas is infinitely funnier than a character who speaks in wisecracks.” -Jack Handey (23)
“It’s funnier – and perhaps more sympathetic – if a character doesn’t know that he’s being mean. If he’s oblivious and actually thinks he’s nice.” -Jack Handey (24)
“The two primary functions of comedy are: to push the bounds of comfort and to challenge authority. Without these two principles – and an important and universal third principle, which is to smear the edges of tragedy with a shared sense of the absurd – one does not have comedy.” (38)
“If The Onion is doing its job right, each article should offend at least a thousand people.” (40)
“When I’m running a show, I’m really looking for jokes from new writers. It’s great if they have story pitches. I mean, we need them, but a great way to contribute is to really listen to want the room and show runner want and pitch within that framework.” -Danny Zuker (76)
“The worst thing any writer can do is get married to their ideas. Write a book if you want final say, but in TV it’s collaborative. And don’t take a rejection of your jokes or stories as a rejection of you. You really need to take it with a smile and keep pitching.” (76)
“Cut anything that you wouldn’t read aloud in front of the people you hope will hire you. Then go through and do it again. ANd again, and again. I know that less than 1 percent of comedy writers actually do this, but I also know that 97 percent of that 1 percent are currently working on a show somewhere.” (79)
“There are five essential building blocks of great comedy performance… Relatability, timing, shamelessness, yelling and vulnerability.” (124)
“The job of the comedy performer is to be able to expose the raw inner animal of the human being at a moment’s notice – to look like a fool. If there’s even a hint of worry or concern about how one will look, the spell is broken and the comedy is dead.” (124)
“A good primal yell is equal to thirty-seven solid spit takes or nine pratfalls. It represents the deepest, least-eloquent form of communication, the bottom rung of emotion, hopelessness, the last straw. In other words: comedy itself.” (125)
“Liana Maeby said, “In some ways, the best career advice might be to figure out how to get to a place where you can be happy for other people’s success.” (136)
“Good characters are funny because of who they are and how they act, not necessarily because they tell jokes.” (190)
“The key is knowing the intention of the scene. If you know you have to et from A to B, and you have to hit certain emotions and story points to be clear, you can have fun along the way, but the intention of the scene must be the same.” -Judd Apatow (215)
“When considering the business of comedy, these are the core questions: What are you selling? Who will buy it? What do they want from it? How does it compare to everything else in the marketplace?” (301)
“Any good show usually starts from character.” -Kate Adler (317)
“A comedian’s success is almost always the result of a long, arduous struggle… No matter who you were or to which generation you belonged – you had to pay your dues. If you were launched into stardom without first putting in your time, you were sure to pay your dues later, when your career faded away.” (xiii)
“Jack Roy bombed more often than not. It wasn’t that he had bad material, but his persona was combative and unlikable. It didn’t matter how funny the material was – the audience despised him.” (91)
“But in the writers room, Mel Brooks had no fear. “I was aggressive. I was a terrier, a pit bull terrier. I was unstoppable. I would keep going until my joke or my sketch was in the show. I didn’t care if anybody else’s was in or out. All of us writers were like a litter of pups, and we all fought for our little tit and struggled and screamed. Sid was God, and if we could get his ear and he would smile on us – that was important.”” (110)
“Hackett opened his mouth. “He got very X-rated,” says Freddie Roman. “I once asked him why. He said, ‘Because there’s no more challenge. I know I’m going to get laughs when I do my regular act, but I want to get the audience to hate me – and then see how long it takes to win them back.’” (144)
“Lenny Bruce walked in and caught Joan Rivers’ act. He sent a note backstage: “You’re right and they’re wrong.” From then on whenever she doubted herself she looked at Bruce’s note. “That kept me going for a year and a half.”” (183)
“Will Jordan says, “Joan Rivers was bad, just terrible, but she got writers and every single day she worked. She is an example of intense hard work.” (184)
“Shelley Berman was stopping his act to complain about the refrigerator. Putting up with him was difficult, and that temperament cost him his career.” (211)
“Phyllis Diller said, “f it happens too fast it goes to your head. He had a bodyguard, but nobody ever bothered him.” His agent said “He was temperamental and went out of his way, unknowingly, to make himself a bad guy. He destroyed himself.”” (213)
“I told neat little inoffensive chickenshit stories. I thought that because it was safe, it would also be commercial. I was wrong. Couldn’t have been wronger. What i was doing was phony. I was turning into plastic.” (230)
“Dick Gregory said, “We keep voting for the lesser of two evils, but the evil keeps getting worse and worse.”” (240)
““Kinison was the first guy I ever saw go onstage and not ask the audience in any way, shape or form to like him,” said comedian Bill HIcks. “I found that highly reassuring.”” (326)
“Comedians copied his successful business model, but no one pulled in the same kind of audience. The business model of comedy was changing, but the most important variable was the same as ever: good luck.”” (352)
“In the new, atomized world of Internet show business, a cult following is a sustainable achievement.” (355)
“Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.” (3)
“Deep work is necessary to wring every last drop of value out of your current intellectual capacity. We now know from decades of research in both psychology and neuroscience that the state of mental strain that accompanies deep work is also necessary to improve your abilities.” (3)
“Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.” (6)
“Spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work.” (7)
“If you create something useful, its reachable audience is essentially limitless – which greatly magnifies your reward. On the other hand, if what you’re producing is mediocre, then you’re in trouble, as it’s too easy for your audience to find a better alternative online.” (13)
“The Deep Work Hypothesis: The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.” (14)
“The lack of distraction in my life tones down that background hum of nervous mental energy that seems to increasingly pervade people’s daily lives.” (17)
“Once the talent market is made universally accessible, those at the peak of the market thrive while the rest suffer.” (25)
“Talent is not a commodity you can buy in bulk and combine to reach the needed levels: There’s a premium to being the best. Therefore, if you’re in a marketplace where the consumer has access to all performers, and everyone’s q value is clear, the consumer will choose the very best. Even if the talent advantage of the best is small compared to the next rung down on the skill ladder, the superstars still win the bulk of the market.” (26)
“An increasing number of individuals in our economy are now competing with the rock stars of their sectors.” (26)
“Current economic thinking argues that the unprecedented growth and impact of technology are creating a massive restructuring of our economy. In this new economy, three groups will have a particular advantage: those who can work well and creatively with intelligent machines, those who are the best at what they do, and those with access to capital.” (28)
“The complex reality of the technologies that real companies leverage to get ahead emphasizes the absurdity of the now common idea that exposure to simplistic, consumer-facing products – especially in schools – somehow prepares people to succeed in a high-tech economy. Giving students iPads or allowing them to film homework assignments on YouTube prepares them for a high-tech economy about as much as playing with Hot Wheels would prepare them to thrive as auto mechanics.” (31)
“Another general observation for joining the ranks of winners in our economy: If you don’t produce, you won’t thrive – no matter how skilled or talented you are.” (32)
“High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)” (40)
“By working on a single hard task for a long time without switching, Grant minimizes the negative impact of attention residue from his other obligations, allowing him to maximize performance on this one task.” (43)
“There are, we must continually remember, certain corners of our economy where depth is not valued. In addition to executives, we can also include, for example, certain types of salesmen and lobbyists, for whom constant connection is their most valued currency.” (47)
“If e-mail were to move to the periphery of your workday, you’d be required to deploy a more thoughtful approach to figuring out what you should be working on and for how long.” (59)
“We no longer see Internet tools as products released by for-profit companies, funded by investors hoping to make a return, and run by twentysomethings who are often making things up as they go along. We’re instead quick to idolize these digital doodads as a signifier of progress and a harbinger of a new world.” (68)
“the skillful management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience.” (77)
“Our brains instead construct our worldview based on what we pay attention to. If you focus on a cancer diagnosis, you and your life become unhappy and dark, but if you focus instead on an evening martini, you and your life become more pleasant – even though the circumstances in both scenarios are the same. As Gallagher summarizes: “Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love – is the sum of what you focus on.”” (77)
“Elderly subjects were not happier because their life circumstances were better than those of the young subjects; they were instead happier because they had rewired their brains to ignore the negative and savor the positive.” (78)
“Human beings, it seems, are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging.” (84)
“To build your working life around the experience of flow produced by deep work is a proven path to deep satisfaction.” (86)
“The task of a craftsman, Dreyfus and Kelly conclude, “is not to generate meaning, but rather to cultivate in himself the skill of discerning the meanings that are already there.” (88)
“The meaning uncovered by such efforts is due to the skill and appreciation inherent in craftsmanship – not the outcomes of their work.” (91)
“The key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration.” (100)
“Mason Currey says, “the single best piece of advice I can offer to anyone trying to do creative work is to ignore inspiration.” (119)
“David Brooks summarizes this reality more bluntly: Great creative minds think like artists but work like accountants.” (119)
“Any effective ritual must address: Where you’ll work and for how long… How you’ll work once you start to work.. How you’ll support your work.” (119-120)
“By leveraging a radical change to your normal environment, coupled perhaps with a significant investment of effort or money, all dedicated toward supporting a deep work task, you increase the perceived importance of the task. This boost in importance reduces your mind’s instinct to procrastinate and delivers an injection of motivation and energy.” (123)
“Focus on the Wildly Important: identify a small number of ambitious outcomes to pursue with your deep work hours. The general exhortation to “spend more time working deeply” doesn’t spark a lot of enthusiasm. To instead have a specific goal that would return tangible and substantial professional benefits will generate a steadier stream of enthusiasm.” (137)
“When I shifted to tracking deep work hours, suddenly these measures became relevant to my day-to-day: Every hour extra of deep work was immediately reflected in my tally.” (138)
“Downtime aids insights.” (144)
“Providing your conscious brain time to rest enables your unconscious mind to take a shift sorting through your most complex professional challenges.” (146)
“Attention restoration theory (ART) claims that spending time in nature can improve your ability to concentrate.” (147)
“Trying to squeeze a little more work out of your evenings might reduce your effectiveness the next day enough that you end up getting less done than if you had instead respected a shutdown.” (149)
“Ericsson notes that for a novice, somewhere around an hour a day of intense concentration seems to be a limit, while for experts this number can expand to as many as four hours – but rarely more.” (150)
“When you’re done, have a set phrase you say that indicates completion (to end my own ritual, I say, “Shutdown complete”). This final step sounds cheesy, but it provides a simple cue to your mind that it’s safe to release work-related thoughts for the rest of the day.” (151)
“Decades of work from multiple different subfields within psychology all point toward the conclusion that regularly resting your brain improves the quality of your deep work. When you work, work hard. When you’re done, be done.” (154)
“The ability to concentrate intensely is a skill that must be trained.” (157)
“Don’t take breaks from distraction. instead take breaks from focus.” (159)
“Schedule in advance when you’ll use the Internet, and then avoid it altogether outside these times.” (161)
“To succeed with deep work you must rewire your brain to be comfortable resisting distracting stimuli. This doesn’t mean that you have to eliminate distracting behaviors; it’s sufficient that you instead eliminate the ability of such behaviors to hijack your attention. The simple strategy proposed here of scheduling Internet blocks goes a long way toward helping you regain this attention autonomy.” (166)
“I suggest starting with a careful review of the relevant variables for solving the problem and then storing these values in your working memory… Once the relevant variables are identified, define the specific next-step question you need to answer using these variables.” (173)
“Michael Lewis notes, “It’s amazing how overly accessible people are. There’s a lot of communication in my life that’s not enriching, it’s impoverishing.” (193)
“This strategy picks specifically on social media because among the different network tools that can claim your time and attention, these services, if used without limit, can be particularly devastating to your quest to work deeper. They offer personalized information arriving on an unpredictable intermittent schedule – making them massively addicted and therefore capable of severely damaging your attempts to schedule and succeed with any act of concentration.” (205)
“To take full advantage of the value of deep work: Schedule every minute of your day.” (222)
“This type of scheduling, however, isn’t about constraint – it’s instead about thoughtfulness. It’s a simple habit that forces you to continually take a moment throughout your day and ask: “What makes sense for me to do with the time that remains?” It’s the habit of asking that returns results, not your unyielding fidelity to the answer.” (226)
“Without structure, it’s easy to allow your time to devolve into the shallow – email, social media, web surfing. This type of shallow behavior, though satisfying in the moment, is not conducive to creativity. With structure, on the other hand, you can ensure that you regularly schedule blocks to grapple with a new idea, or work deeply on something challenging, or brainstorm for a fixed period – the type of commitment more likely to instigate innovation.” (227)
“Decide in advance what you’re going to do with every minute of your workday. It’s natural, at first, to resist this idea, as it’s undoubtedly easier to continue to allow the twin forces of internal whim and external requests to drive your schedule. But you must overcome this distrust of structure if you want to approach your true potential as someone who creates things that matter.” (227)
“To evaluate where given work tasks fall on the shallow-to-deep scale ask: How long would it take (in months) to train a smart recent college graduate with no specialized training in my field to complete this task.” (229)
“Here’s an important question that’s rarely asked: What percentage of my time should be spent on shallow work?” (232)
“It’s incredibly wasteful to pay a highly trained professional to send email messages and attend meetings for thirty hours a week.” (234)
“The key is to avoid providing enough specificity about the excuse that the requester has the opportunity to defuse it.” (239)
“The ability to concentrate is a skill that gets valuable things done.” (258)
“There’s also an uneasiness that surrounds any effort to produce the best things you’re capable of producing, as this forces you to confront the possibility that your best is not (yet) that good.” (263)
I recently read “When I Stop Talking, You’ll Know I’m Dead: Useful Stories From A Persuasive Man” by Jerry Weintraub (with Rich Cohen). Below are the quotes I found most interesting. If you like the quotes, buy the book here.
“Though he was selling rubies and sapphires and I am selling Clooney, Pitt, and Damon, the trick is the same: packaging. You might have the greatest talent in the world, but it doesn’t matter if you can’t sell it.” (8)
“When you dig through all the craziness of my life, you’ll see that I’m just a guy from the Bronx who knows how to a attract a crowd.” (8)
“At some point, you forget the object, and the means becomes the end. You work for the joy of the work.” (16)
“Relationships are the only thing that really matters, in business and in life.” (17)
“I saw the neighborhood with new eyes. It was no longer just streets and stores: It was needs and opportuinties, money to be made. Once you see the world this way, things are never the same.” (19)
“As soon as you feel comfortable, that’s when it’s time to start over.” (27)
“Do not get attached to the world as it is, because the world is changing, something new is coming, every ten years a big hand comes down and sweeps the dishes off the table.” (38)
“Grunt jobs are often the most instructive – they allow you to flow through an organization unnoticed, a corpuscle or cell moving in and out of the heart and lungs.” (39)
“The job of an agent is, in part, anyway, to bullshit and schmooze: How better to find talent than by seeing who can talk his way into a career?” (42)
“An idea is only crazy, after all, until someone pulls it off.” (52)
“A lot depends on who you know, who you can get to. If you have people who will open the door for you, literally and figuratively, you can make a pitch. It’s in your hands from there.” (65)
“Ther person who makes it is the person who keeps on going after everyone else has quit. This is more important than intelligence, pedigree, even connections. Be dogged! Keep hitting that door until you bust it down! I have accomplished almost nothing on the first or second or even the third try – the breakthrough usually comes late, when everyone else has left the field.” (76)
“Let the other guy save face with his people, but keep score.” (98)
“What had started as a ploy to snap Frank out of his depression had turned into a major deal – handled wrong, it could turn into a major embarrassment. At such times, I become obsessed with details. That’s where God is, so that’s where I go, with my notebook and phone numbers and head full of ideas. The people, the angles, the chairs – I wanted to get everything exactly right.” (111)
“it’s best, when selling something new, to envision the goal – let the entire world hear John Denver – then work your way back. How do we get there? Now and then, it happens by itself. This is a matter of luck, zeitgeist. More often, you have to be creative, crabwalk your way.” (121)
“You can evolve and grow but you should never resent your thing. If you look at how few artists actually make it, you will recognize that those trademarks, though in some ways limiting, are a gift of providence.” (121)
“Know what you’re buying. Was I buying Nashville? No, I was buying Robert Altman. I did not understand the script, but Altman did, and it was Altman who was going to make the movie.” (164)
“Work with the best people. If you have the best writers, the best actors, and the best director and fail, okay, fine, there is even something noble in it; but if you fail with garbage, then you are left with nothing to hang your spirits on.” (167)
“I don’t care what kind of cast you have, how beautifully the thing is shot – if you don’t have the right script, you’re going to fail.” (179)
“Being successful means filling your life with calls you want to return.” (204)
“You have to be willing to walk away from the most comfortably perch, precisely because it is the most comfortable.” (204)
“I believe in not getting hung up or paralyzed in a quest for perfection, but by the same token, you have to identify what is truly important and hold out until you can get those things right.” (209)
“People think that Hollywood and politics operate in different spheres – they don’t. The world is very small at the top, with a few thousand players running everything. For a producer, an actor, a banker, a politican – name your celebrity – crossing genres is less a matter of making connections with the leaders of other industries than of climbing high enough in your own to reach the place where all lines converge.” (229)
“From Kennedy I learned that the best politicians are not different from movie stars. They charm, communicate, command. THe good ones never make you feel isolated or small, as if they have something you don’t. Quit the opposite. They include you in their world, enlarge you, make you recognize the best qualities in yourself.” (230)
“This is why politicians seek out movie stars, and why movie stars want to become politicians. They seek the same target, which is the soul of the people.” (231)
“People judge on first sight, so make those surfaces shine.” (245)
“Steve Ross said, ‘What are you worrying about? You are a talented guy. That talent did not go away. The company went away? So what! Companies always go away. They’re a dime a dozen. It’s talent that counts!” (248)
“I don’t care if you get flattened a thousand times. As long as you get up that thousand and first time, you win. As Hemingway said, ‘You can never tell the quality of a bullfighter until that bullfighter has been gored.’” (248)
“Alone with Hans Conried for a moment, I said, ‘You’re a major talent with a big reputation. Why do you agree to substitute for another actor without a single question, not about billing, or even money?’ His response became a marker along my career path. ‘I work to work, Norman, and the rest follows,’ he said, adding, ‘When it isn’t about the money, it’s funny how much seems to come your way.’” (139)
“Typical of Fred Allen was his attitude toward television. ‘It is called a medium because it is neither rare nor well-done.’ As to ‘the minds that control it,’ he said, ‘you could put them in the navel of a flea and still have room enough beside them for the heart of a network vice president.’” (147)
“As I would learn in the seventies, a dozen protest letters from among millions of viewers were considered a “flood” to an advertising agency.” (163)
“I learned from Kib that just about anything can be improved, and that reaching for perfection, not necessarily achieving it, was worth the effort.” (171)
“I dictated the first draft of everything I wrote.” (207)
“I told Richard Brooks I had never owned a camera, had never taken a lot of pictures, even of my children, and knew nothing about lenses and such. He asked me, in that case, why in hell I had been toying with the idea. I was stumped, and Richard answered his question for me: ‘Because you know what you want to see, don’t you?’ Oh, yes, I had to acknowledge, I knew exactly what I wanted to see. ‘Then get yourself a great cinematographer and tell him what you want.’ (225)
“Comedy with something serious on its mind works as a kind of intravenous to the mind and spirit. After he winces and laughs, what the individual makes of the material depends on the individual, but he has been reached.” (235)
“The audiences themselves taught me that you can get some wonderful laughs on the surface of anything with funny performers and good jokes, but if you want them laughing from the belly, you stand a better chance of achieving it if you can get them caring first.” (262)
“A relatively small group of agitators, especially when convinced God is on their side, can move corporate America to quake with fear and make decisions in total disregard of the Constitution that protects against such decisions.” (266)
“An audience is entertained when it’s involved to the point of laughters or tersa – ideally, both.” (266)
“There is stress, and then there is ‘joyful’ stress.” (279)
“A rabbi shared his Talmudic-style version of what I was attempting to convey: ‘A man should have a garment with two pockets. In the first pocket should be a piece of paper on which is written, ‘I am but dust and ashes.’ In the second should be a piece of paper on which is written, ‘For me the world was created.’” (402)
