The year of poverty-level living I did, burning off three years of savings (which wasn’t much to begin with), from the summer of ’92 to the summer of ’93 in San Francisco. I got onstage at least once a night and grew ten years as a comedian in a year. I burned off any safety net I had becoming proficient. If you can swing it—and I know a lot of people can’t—and you can scam a way to live off of nothing, it almost always pays off.
