[Ian noises]
Hello Lani.
It’s Wednesday
...and my turn to...
...say words at you
...though the Internet
...with my wordhole.
And as much as I have an ever growing list of topics and ideas that I want to throw out to you
and as much as I feel like we’ve bonded in a super short amount of time
I still thought it'd be a benefit to lead with a...
...quick biography of me.
BUT,
...in order to keep this video from descending into
...online dating self-summary territory...
"Hi, my name is Ian and..."
"...I love to laugh.”
"I love hanging out with my friends."
WHO DOESN’T LOVE TO LAUGH?!
YOU HAVEN’T TOLD ME ANYTHING ABOUT YOURSELF!!!
...I thought we could structure it...
...in our language.
So here...
...are three fictional characters I feel most represent me.
If you wanna do the exercise with me,
it’s important to make sure you’re drawing a distinction between
three characters you WANT to be
...and three characters you...
...ARE.
I may want to be James Bond
except for...
what I can only imagine must be a stunning case of...
mega-Hepa-Herpa-ghonna-syphilis
And also there's his, uh...
Maybe not James Bond.
Picard!
"NOOOOOOO!!"
Certainly, I'd love to have the grace and...
...leadership ability of Jean Luc.
And to be losing my hair with as much...
...sexy dignity.
[weird Picard chuckle]
[Beverly minor laugh]
But,
...the point of the exercise is...
...not to self-flagellate.
It just is what it is.
I love that phrase.
I got into an argument with someone over that phrase last week.
Yes.
Of course.
SELF-EVIDENTLY
...things are what they are.
But the point of that phrase is not necessarily
...that it is what I say it is
...or what you say it is
...or what my neighbor says it is.
It just is what it is.
So,
...to that end,
...let's start with #1 on my list of fictional characters that I believe most represent me:
[long scream]
Cameron from 'Ferris Bueller's Day Off'.
This one is apparently dead enough on the nose that a few of my friends agreed so quickly
...I was insulted.
Cameron is the neurotic bag of anxieties from 'Ferris Bueller'.
Replete with Daddy issues and...
...terrified of...
...everything.
Ferris takes him on his own personal odyssey through downtown Chicago,
eventually inducing Cameron to disturb his own life
...beyond the point of no return.
Breakdown.
Breakthrough.
You've, of course, heard the 'Fight Club' reading of Ferris Bueller right?
Cameron is essentially the only one in the movie with an arc.
Ferris doesn’t change from the start to the end of the story.
Ferris also seems capable of some pretty magical things.
"You know as long as I've known him everything works for him."
"There's nothing he can't handle."
"I can't handle ANYTHING."
So the idea is that Ferris is Cameron’s Tyler Durden,
...the manifestation of Cameron’s id.
Cameron made him up to try and free himself from his father’s hand.
My #2 is a cheat,
but it's my game so I don't care,
...and that is...
...Holmes AND Watson.
I think most of us have our own...
...dualities.
Holmes and Watson are a good model for one of my mine.
On one side you have the feeler.
Writer.
Storyteller.
Introspective and compassionate friend.
He rarely gets to be the smartest person in the room
...but...
...he doesn’t need to be.
On the other hand,
...you have the intellect.
The intensely single-minded thinker.
The misanthrope.
The one who would always choose to be alone
and somehow, for all his intelligence,
lacks self-awareness in moments where he should need it the most.
Somewhere in the middle,
teetering...back and forth I guess
...is me.
And
#3,
from 'Parks and Recreation',
...Andy Dwyer.
Why Andy?
Well....
"--ever."
“Hey, if we're going that way"
"can we stop at our place real quick"
"'cause I forgot to put on deodorant."
"And a jacket."
"And one of my socks."
Plus I’ve gotta poop”
"...but I can stop anywhere for that."
That has almost happened to me verbatim.
“I just got this..."
"...super sweet ass, rad, crotch rocket."
"Got a really good deal on my lease."
"Paying like 12 percent interest."
"It’s like one of the highest you can get.”
I once bought a sailboat to live on,
promptly got a loan for 22,000 dollars to fix it
...and then discovered I’m terrified of the ocean.
“I have no idea what I’m doing"
"...but I know I’m doing it really, really well."
(case in point)
“I’m allergic to sushi."
"Every time I eat more than eighty sushis I barf.”
All I’m saying is I have a...
...messy, hopefully lovable moron inside of me.
Just being honest.
But there is an aspect to Andy that is aspirational for me as well.
I’m turning forty in September so,
...inevitably I guess,
...I’ve been taking stock of my story to this point.
My twenties felt like they were about breaking down my own illusions.
I was a pretty big fish in a small pond in college.
But running face to...
let's say ass
...with ACTUAL day to day life
...after school
...tore apart my preconceived notions of what I thought life was going to be like when I was younger.
And what I was going to be in it.
I remember many people speaking at school assemblies telling us when we were younger,
"You can be ANYTHING you want."
"Figure out what you’re passionate about..."
"...and you’ll never work a day in your life."
That is some...
...BULLSHIT.
No one ever came to my elementary school and told us, the assembled students,
...that sometimes
...life is HARD.
You’re going to have to pay rent
...and buy gas and groceries.
And doing that is sometimes going to mean putting forty hours a week
...into a mind-numbing job you can’t stand.
But the hardest thing you’ll face
sometimes
...isn’t that,
...but just trying to remember the reasons you keep doing all of this to begin with
...so that you can motivate yourself to get out of bed in the morning.
And just when you think you’ve got it,
someone or something you love in life
...will die
...or go away
...and it’ll all seem pointless for a time anyway.
No one ever told us that the frauds who said you can be anything you want
...weren’t bothering to mention how big a factor
...LUCK
...is
...to ANYTHING attempted in life.
And the liars who said that doing what you’re passionate about
...meant never working a day in your life
...were shortchanging all the successful, passionate people
...who worked their ASSES off to get where they are.
Michael Jordan spent thousands and thousands of hours taking practice shots.
Stephen King wrote 2000 words a day everyday when he was younger,
Work is work.
It is a form of chosen suffering.
Loving what you do doesn’t change that.
It just makes you more willing to show up.
And that was how I spent my twenties.
Coming to understand that successful people haven’t magically figured out a way to avoid work.
They’ve ritualized it.
They’ve made their work a part of who they are.
I guess fittingly, the day I turned thirty
I discovered I had a mild form of skin cancer
...and I gave myself a gift on that day of having it removed.
But, after the teardown decade of my twenties,
and now that I thought I had some sense of...
...the rules,
... I spent my thirties rebuilding.
If I couldn’t bank on the luck required to be Steven Spielberg,
and all work involves a measure of suffering
...what is the work in life I’m most willing to suffer for?
The work that matters enough to me to overcome my own fear of failing by giving myself...
...unlimited permission
...to fail over
...and over
...and over again.
"I'm just tired of being afraid."
For me,
...that's been talking about and understanding the stories that stick to us.
And why they matter.
I can’t say yet what my forties I’ll be entering into in September will be like
...but so far I’m finding some inspiration in Andy
...and his relationship with April.
See April is this...
...dark star on 'Parks and Recreation'.
She expresses herself through morbid cynicism and melancholy.
“You ever found a dead body in the trash?"
"Or body parts?"
"Like a torso or a head?
"Please say 'head'.”
But Andy,
...maybe the sweetest character on the show,
...see’s something different in her.
Something different than everyone else sees in her.
“I swear..."
"...on this dead crow..."
"...that I will never cook for you.”
“I love you.”
"I found a dead rabbit on the side of the road and I cut its feet off and made it into a lucky charm.”
“BABY, you are so CREEPY."
"Thank you!”
"I love it!"
And that’s...
...powerful to me.
The flexibility of perspective.
Over the course of my short life, I’ve discovered that any anger or resentment
...I’ve harbored towards other people or situations that didn’t work out,
... were burdens that punished...
...ME.
Fears that crippled ME.
I may have been RIGHT about it all
...how I shouldn’t have said that,
...or done this,
...or how could they do that to me?
But who cares?
I want to live the next forty years as the man I choose to be.
NOT the man shaped by his own disappointments and fear of failure.
Life is just hard.
Life is just...
[sniffles]
"It's okay."
“It’s not okay.”
“No."
[Watson sniffles]
"But it is what it is."
See you in two weeks, Lani.
[Danke schoen]
[darling, danke schoen]