If you're doing what you do because you love it, you have room to be happy for others. And that's a lot of fun, when you get down to it.
You do not get gold stars for cleaning your toilet. In actual life, there is a depressing lack of stickers.
There is something about a mortarboard that gives otherwise sane and normal people the overwhelming urge to burden you with advice. Some of them cannot help themselves. They were asked to do it by a committee. But one can only take so many pieces of wisdom before they all start to blur together.
I would say 'competence' actually might be slightly more important than passion. I understand that it is important to feel strongly about things, but give me a competent dentist over a passionate dentist any day, if only because something about the phrase 'passionate dentist' is deeply unnerving.
At Harvard, people like to impart the idea that you are a mover and shaker.
The worst thing that happens to you at college if you fail to get out of bed in time is that you will miss two hours of someone reading scintillating anecdotes about Medieval Ireland. The worst thing that happens to you in life if you fail to get out of bed in time is that you might lose your job as a first responder.
At college, everyone's milestones occurred in shared clumps. Everyone studied, caroused, won, lost - simultaneously. Life is not like that.
Almost nothing anyone told me about Harvard has been accurate.
If you want to be famous because you do something well or badly, be it singing while fat or hitting balls of various shapes and hues, you have to be prepared to divulge. We live in the age of the chronic overshare.
The desire for attention has become a primal need along the lines of food, water, and clothing.
Every so often, when I am feeling plucky, I try to write a screenplay that combines all 10 of Americans' top phobias and market it as a sleeper hit.
Once you start worrying, it's hard to stop.
Bad things happen, and you can only be so prepared.
Wilde is an invaluable acquaintance. Often, in situations where I am required to appear witty, I simply steal large chunks from his works and attempt to pass them off as my own with minor modifications.
I know from personal experience that it is extremely difficult to read while you work out, especially on a Stairmaster.
Pleasure reading has long been an American ideal - generations of schoolchildren have headed home for the summer toting recreational reading lists. But try to pitch it to a group of non-readers, and they quickly become suspicious.
Books are wonderful. They are like people, except they mind less when you put them down and wander off to eat something.
No generation has escaped it - one morning, your skill with the eight-track or the record player or the cotton gin suddenly ceases to impress. It's just one of those inevitable disappointments that come with growing up, like the realization that Santa doesn't exist or the way that music always takes a turn for the worse after you turn 30.
The problem with technology, as with fashion, is that it's impossible to be 'in' forever.
Life has its trade-offs. As you age, you lose things like teeth and the ability to play in the ball pit at fast-food restaurants, and you gain things like experience and employer-based health insurance.
