When I'm working, I'm insufferable because I get stuck with myself, and suddenly I become obsessive, thinking about how to make something better.
Sometimes I'll come up with a lick that I really love, and I'll try to put the right words to it for years. Suddenly something comes to me that works just right.
For the cable news guest, nothing happens for a while until suddenly everything happens very quickly. After you receive your television face, you stand around for a while, ignored, until you're sat down at a desk and asked to argue with strangers.
For most of the millions of people who watch TED videos at the office, it's a middlebrow diversion and a source of factoids to use on your friends. Except TED thinks it's changing the world, like if 'This American Life' suddenly mistook itself for Doctors Without Borders.
During the 2012 Olympics, I decided to put on some cheesy pop because I knew Ellen White liked it. The first song was 'Reach for the Stars' by S Club 7, and before I knew it, everyone was singing it - suddenly it was our song.
Then came the hostage crisis during which Carter did nothing to rattle the ayatollahs who hung tough until Ronald Reagan was inaugurated, when they suddenly backed down.
Power isn't real, and it isn't earned. If you act like you have it, suddenly you're leading everyone. Perception is reality.
There is the possibility to be suddenly arrested for hacking.
I think of workshopping as a way to read your own work through the eyes of others - a scene that you write gets refracted by those around you, and suddenly you have several different readings of it, each with a different momentum for how it might be retooled or reshaped.
You think you can drive accurately in confined spaces until someone puts something like a shipping container in the way and you suddenly think: 'I'm going to hit that.'
