- I used to own the domain, fredarmisenfans.com.
(laughs)
I was gonna make a whole website about Fred Armisen.
(upbeat jazz music)
My path was really weird.
I loved performing when I was little.
I wanted to be a singer at first,
but I was told that I didn't have a very good voice
at a very young age, so I lost all my confidence in singing.
Then I found acting and being on stage,
and I thought that was great.
But my parents were like,
"How are you gonna make money doing that?"
And I was like, "Good point, Dad."
(laughs)
I ended up getting a degree in economics,
supply equals demand, that's all I learned.
What does that even mean?
I don't know.
Then I got a graduate degree in design,
which was more creative,
and a little bit more towards what I wanted to do,
but I still missed acting.
Around age 30, I was like,
"You know what, I owe it to myself
to really try acting again."
So I started auditioning and getting rejected
and auditioning and rejected.
Then I tried stand-up comedy,
and I loved writing my own lines,
I loved being myself a lot more than being a character.
And that's when I went broke.
Because when you're a stand-up comedian
you don't really get paid to do stand-up comedy,
you have to pay people to let you get on their stage.
Then I ended up at Google
and I was at Google for awhile
and I was doing stand-up at night
and I was writing and I was still trying to do comedy.
I was doing comedy at meetings.
Everybody wanted to be in a meeting with me
because I didn't take any of it seriously,
'cause I was like, "No, this is just for money,
I really wanna do entertainment."
Finally I combined the two things,
I combined my corporate life with my love of comedy
and I wrote 10 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings.
That was this viral blog
that got seen by millions of people.
It turned into a book, I ended up leaving Google.
I was working on that book, and I was still doing stand-up,
and I started speaking at conferences,
and then I wrote
How to be Successful Without Hurting Men's Feelings,
which was another book based on
my life in the corporate world.
Those books did fine,
I really wanted them to become something bigger.
I wasn't really getting any calls back
from agents or from TV people,
I wrote a pilot, people read it,
but they never wrote me back, and so I'd kind of given up.
Then the pandemic happened.
I was forced to try something new.
And that thing that I tried
was lip-syncing President Trump on TikTok.
It really took off.
People really enjoyed seeing his voice
coming out of my mouth, for some reason.
I don't shy away from trying weird things.
All of a sudden there was new attention on my books.
I got signed with an agent.
My agent was like "You should put together a special."
And I pitched it to Natasha Lyonne and Maya Rudolph.
And they were like, "Yeah, let's do it."
And I was like, "I just met you.
You're my heroes, I just met you,
and now you wanna work with me?"
Even just meeting them was this moment of,
"How am I on a Zoom call
with Maya Rudolph and Natasha Lyonne?"
Sometimes we were able to actually meet in person
with masks and being socially distanced.
When I met Maya, I was like, "I wanna hug you!
(laughs)
But I can't!"
Fred Armisen.
When I was texting with Natasha, she was like,
"Fred's here, Fred thinks everything's great, you know?"
And I was like
"Oh my God, Fred Armisen is reading things that I wrote?"
I used to own the domain fredarmisenfans.com.
(laughs)
I was gonna make a whole website about Fred Armisen.
I never actually did it,
but I did own the website for a little while.
It's been a really interesting process
of just trying things and giving up
and trying another thing and giving up again
and trying another thing and then finally something working
to the point where so many people have seen it
and love it and support it.
And now I have so many opportunities
that I've been looking for, pretty much my whole life.
You always think that you're too old.
And the thing is, you're never too old,
if you still have a passion for something,
you should still be doing it.
Getting through Imposter Syndrome is impossible,
it's really hard,
it's something that never goes away
and you never feel like,
"Okay, I'm done, Imposter Syndrome gone,
I feel like I totally belong here,
I deserve everything I have, I'm not a fraud."
Those feelings of feeling
like you don't deserve what you have,
they'll never really go away,
I think it's more about ignoring them.
I think as women,
we constantly question everything we do as not good enough.
And so many ideas, that we all have, just sit in a notebook.
Get that notebook out,
because those ideas
are probably way better than you realize.
Stop over-judging everything
put everything out there, give yourself a chance.
Don't sleep on yourself.
And that's how I got started, I hope you enjoy it,
and I hope you'll watch Sarah Cooper: Everything's Fine,
it's now streaming on Netflix.