“Habits form when the brain takes a shortcut and stops actively deliberating over what to do next. The brain quickly learns to codify behaviors that provide a solution to whatever situation it encounters.” (16)
“Many entrepreneurs fall into the trap of building products that are only marginally better than existing solutions, hoping their innovation will be good enough to woo customers away from existing products. But when it comes to shaking consumers’ old habits, these naive entrepreneurs often find that better products don’t always win – especially if a large number of users have already adopted a competing product.” (23)
“John Gourville stipulates that “many innovations fail because consumers irrationally overvalue the old while companies irrationally overvalue the new.” (23)
“If you have ever grumbled at your mother when she tells you to put on a coat or felt your blood pressure rise when your boss micromanages you, you have experienced what psychologists term reactance, the hair-trigger response to threats to your autonomy.” ((121)
“To change behavior, products must ensure the users feel in control. People must want to use the service, not feel they have to.” (125)
“Businesses that leverage user effort confer higher value to their products simply because their users have put work into them. The users have invested in the products through their labor.” (138)
“The incessant need for a smoke in what was once a majority of the adult U.S. population has been replaced by a nearly equal compulsion to constantly check our electronic devices.” (175)
“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)
“CDs spawned a generation of record executives whose skill was in putting together compilations of existing music rather than discovering new artists.” (25)
Denniz PoP told a reporter, “It’s easy to say producing this music is equal to pushing a button in the studio. But that’s like saying writing a novel is a simple push of a button on your typewriter.” Denniz liked to say that no matter how technically adept you were at programming, sometimes you just had to “let art win.”” (32)
“Sweden had these farmers out there who were good at writing songs, but had no one to sing them. Songwriting was just a thing you did on your own when you were watching the cows, a kind of meditation. You didn’t focus as much on your ability as a performer as you did on the structure and craft of the songs. Which is really not the case in the US, where your charm and your voice and your powers as a performer come immediately into play.”” (38)
“A nation of songwriters endowed with melodic gifts, and who were meticulous about craft, but who were reluctant to perform their own songs, was a potential gold mine for a nation of wannabe pop stars who don’t write their own materials.” (38)
“Denniz once said, “It’s much more difficult to make it simple, especially achieving a simplicity without having it sound incredibly trivial.”” (39)
“Denniz put it, “A great pop song should be interesting, in some way. That means that certain people will hate it immediately and certain people will love it, but only as long as it isn’t boring and meaningless. Then it’s not a pop song any longer; then it’s something else. It’s just music.”” (39)
“Lyrics don’t need to mean anything much; the disco era had shown that. Lyrics that command too much attention are likely to kill the dancing.” (40)
“I think it was to our advantage that English was not our mother language,” Ekberg says, “because we are able to treat English very respectless, and just look for the word that sounded good with the melody.” Freed from making sense, the lyricists’ horizons are boundless.” (40)
“Cheiron studio needed an American act… not accidental stars with baggage, but lifers who would do whatever it takes to get to the top and stay there.” (46)
“At the beginning, the artists are regarded as mere hired hands by the writers and the producers, who are the real artists in the operation. But with success, the artists come to feel that they are, in fact, real artists – everything about the way they are sold to the world confirms it. They demand, at a minimum, more respect from their songwriters and producers, and they usually insist on more creative control over the songs. Some want to write their own material, often with disastrous results.” (68)
“They kept the labels’ names but little of their cool. The music business slowly changed from an art-house business run by men with ears into a corporate enterprise of quarterly earnings and timely results.” (116)
“Jimmy always says it’s all about the connection between the artist and the fans,” he says. “This whole business, it’s just about that connection.” (166)
“At the very least, that a pudgy guy with a goofy horse-riding dance (PSY’s Gangnam Style) could succeed where the most brilliantly engineered idol groups have not suggest that cultural technology can only get you so far. In the end, as Denniz PoP used to say, sometimes you have to let art win.” (167)
“Her main qualification as a singer was that she wanted to be one so badly. Rogers sensed that ambition ran deep – “I saw it in her eyes,” he says. But what was “it,” exactly? No mere girlish desire for fame; it was more likely a much more urgent need to escape from the anxieties of a violent home life into the illusion of security and boundless love that a life onstage seemed to offer. That desire, more than any inborn talent, is what fans will connect to, and that is what record men look for in a new artist. It’s the one thing they can’t manufacture.” (177)
“After appearing on several established rappers’ records, most notably Big Daddy Kane’s, Jay tried to get his own record deal, but the labels he approached, including Def Jam, turned him down. So he and his boys started their own label. They didn’t have a distribution deal; they sold their music out of the back of people’s cars in Brooklyn.” (181)
“All your instincts that make you successful, at some point in anyone’s life, those instincts will be wrong.” (235)
“Lenny Pickett says, “He has very good music skills, especially in the areas he needed to have them for producing music. Equally important, he had very good social skills, because if you don’t have those, doesn’t matter how good your tracks are, you’re going to end up being somebody’s helper.” (245)
“A fMRI study of people listening to music found that familiarity with a song reflexively causes emotional engagement; it doesn’t matter what you think of the song.” (303)
Kotecha says, “I always think in my head, if Max Martin was an American, he would have fizzled out a long time ago. He would have believed his own hype. But because he’s Swedish, he’s able to contain himself. He just focuses on being the best writer and producer and mentor he can be.” (306)
I recently read “The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships” by Neil Strauss. Below are the quotes I found most interesting. If you like the quotes, please buy the book here.
“Intimacy is sharing your reality with someone else and knowing you’re safe, and them being able to share their reality with you and also be safe.” (50)
“But why should you have to make that sacrifice? A relationship should be about what you both want, not about what you both don’t want each other to have.” (54)
“Maybe that’s the female dilemma. She marries someone who’s giving her love and romance, but over time she gets taken for granted or turned into a maid or becomes a baby factory or gets cheated on. There’s not a single emotional need of hers that’s filled by her husband. Then he has the nerve to complain that sh’es not sexual or attractive when he’s drained the life out of her.” (83)
“Childhood trauma may sneak up from behind and fuck you in the ass when you grow up, but at least it leaves a tip on the nightstand.” (84)
“As a journalist, I’ve met a lot of so-called experts. Most are just people with a little experience and a lot of confidence who’ve given themselves a title with which they can fool the suggestible and dim-witted.” (85)
“Remember that humor is a wall. It’s a form of denial, just the same as repression, rationalization, globalization, and minimization.” (85)
“Are you relentlessly driving yourself to succeed and beating yourself up when you fail? Maybe that’s because when you were a teenager, your parents made you feel as if your worth as a human being was dependent on your grades, touchdowns, or accomplishments.” (88)
“Only when our love for someone exceeds our need for them do we have a shot at a genuine relationship together.” (97)
“All my anxiety and fear and guilt have peeled away, as if they were layers of clothing I didn’t know I was wearing. I thought they were part of my skin the whole time, but it runs out they were someone else’s hand-me-downs.” (105)
“I used to think that intelligence came from books and knowledge and rational thought. But that’s not intelligence: It’s just information and interpretation. Real intelligence is when your mind and your heart connect. That’s when you see the truth so clearly and unmistakably that you don’t have to think about it.” (105)
“Suddenly there seem to be very few adults in the world, just suffering children and overcompensating adolescents.” (109)
“Continuously complying with someone else’s priorities at the expense of my own is called pathological accommodation.” (134)
“If you add up all the people who’ve cheated in their relationships, that’s tens of millions of customers in the U.S. alone. Now add to that the even huger number of people who watch porn, and this is the smartest business plan in the world. If they turn being male and horny into some kind of brain cancer that’s covered by health insurance, they’ll be billionaires.” (139)
“Bill W., the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, was so notorious for cheating on his wife with attractive women who attended sobriety meetings that his colleagues later started calling this type of lechery the thirteenth step.” (143)
“No matter what your point of view may be, you can always find someone with a Ph.D to support it.” (144)
“It was the Catholic CHurch that began a relentless campaign to make monogamy and lifelong marriages inviolable institutions in the ninth century.” (163)
“We have so many contradictory, repressive, self-limiting beliefs about sexuality – and almost every one of them stems from a pathological need to dictate to someone else what they are and aren’t allowed to do with their body and heart.” (166)
“Loneliness is holding in a joke because you have no one to share it with.” (175)
“Perhaps just as there are cults around religion, so too are there cults around intimacy. But instead of monotheists, pantheists, and atheists, there are monogamists, polyamorists, and celibates. Each belief system comes with its own rituals, whether they be twelve steps, pujas, exclusivity, adultery, or arguing about money every night.” (182)
“Guys bring their dating problems on themselves. They program their daughter with an aversion to men and sex for fear that she’ll meet someone just like her father, then they meet someone else’s daughter and expect her to just jump into bed without anxiety or reservation.” (192)
“When your wife is tired of making the effort to understand you, when she’s fed up with hearing the same stories coming out of your mouth, when she holds so much resentment that it poisons every conversation, when she’s nicer to telemarketers than she is to you, when the only time she’s passionate with anyone anymore is when she’s criticizing you – that’s when you want a mistress.” (217)
“Once fear of loss is taken away, you get past jealousy.” (221)
“Some people live in an endless on-and-off relationship with control. Either they’re trying to exert it over their lives – by getting obsessive about a diet, a belief system, a phobia, a hobby, a need for order, a twelve-step program – or they’re completely out of control, making a mess of their lives.” (230)
“Any good Jungian therapist will tell you, you’re not supposed to repress the shadow in the first place. That’s when bad things happen. The goal is to integrate it.” (230)
“I used to think that a good relationship meant always getting along. But the secret, I realize, is that when one person shuts down or throws a fit, the other needs to stay in the adult ego state. If both people descended to the wounded child or adapted adolescent, that’s when all the forces of relationship drama and destruction are unleashed.” (246)
“Relationships are about giving, not getting.” (264)
“Life is a learned skill, but instead of teaching it, our culture force-fills developing minds with long division and capital cities-until, at the end of the mandatory period of bondage that’s hyperbolically called school, we’re sent into the world knowing little about it. And so, left on our own to figure out the most important parts of life, we make mistakes for years until, by the time we’ve learned enough from our stumbling to be effective human beings, it’s time for us to die.” (266)
“I have no idea what the boundary is between taking care of my emotions, wants, and needs and taking care of the emotions, wants, and needs of others.” (281)
“The problem many people have is that the exact quality that originally attracted them to their partner becomes a threat once a serious relationship beings.” (324)
“Most people seem to believe that if a relationship doesn’t last until death, it’s a failure. But the only relationship that’s truly a failure is one that lasts longer than it should. The success of a relationship should be measured by its depth, not by its length.” (334)
“Willard F. Harley writes that a man needs five basic things from his wife: sexual fulfillment, recreational companionship, physical attractiveness, domestic support, and admiration… A woman’s five basic needs are affection, conversation, honesty and openness, financial support, and family commitment.” (334)
“Try is the critical word here, because managing feelings is like tamping lions. No matter how successful you think you are, they’re still ultimately in control.” (342)
“life is a test and you pass if you can be true to yourself.” (347)
“Sex is easy to find – whether through game, money, chance, social proof, or charm. So are affairs, orgies, adventures, and three-month relationships-if you know where to look and are willing to go there. But love is rare.” (350)
“Evidently, if you have long receptors in the brain’s reward center for the hormone vasopressin, then you’re more likely to be monogamous. If not, then you’re a born player.” (363)
“The person who is too smart to love is truly an idiot.” (365)
“Our lives are like children’s building-block games in which objects are stacked one by one on top of each other. You can build the tower to a certain height without a problem, but as it continues to grow, eventually the instability of the foundation will cause everything to come tumbling down.” (366)
“love is when two (or more) hearts build a safe emotional, mental, and spiritual home that will stand strong no matter how much anyone changes on the inside or the outside. It demands only one things and expects only one thing: that each person be his or her own true self.” (381)
“I realize that I made a mistake by equating variety with freedom. I’m off all social and dating apps and websites. That’s freedom. Less than twenty people have my email address. That’s freedom. My phone barely makes a sound. that’s freedom.” (381)
“It turns out that leaving all my options open has kept me too busy juggling them to really live.” (381)
“The most caring thing to do when they’re upset is simply to ask if they want you to listen, to give advice, to give them space, or to give them loving touch.” (395)
“You can’t change a person unless they’re in diapers.” (400)
Harville Hendrix wrote that the unconscious purpose of a long-term relationship is to finish childhood.” (405)
“True intimacy is when partners stop living in the past – in their trauma history – and start having a relationship with each other in the present moment.” (406)
“In the end, love is not about finding the right person. It’s about becoming the right person>” (408)
“I’ve started thinking of the things my parents didn’t do perfectly as variables that make me an individual rather than as trauma that makes me a patient.” (416)
“It’s tragic. The wounds that humans get are so strong that they’re like robots operating on childhood programming.” (417)
