A Very Punchable Face

by Colin Jost

“You need to say what you’re thinking a lot more and not be afraid of being judged or being inarticulate or offensive or even boring.”

Any time a story starts with one child chasing another child with large metal scissors, it never ends well.

“Look for the job you’d take if you didn’t need a job.” —WARREN BUFFETT

Lorne always says, “You never want to be the smartest person in the room,” because you always want to challenge yourself and try to get to the level of the people you admire.

That’s two lessons I learned very quickly: (1) You don’t need to do anything in life—if it feels wrong or unnatural, it probably is. And (2) I had no one but myself to blame for not trusting my own instincts and pushing back when I felt something was wrong.

Isn’t that dumb? I was embarrassed about getting help. And I was embarrassed about trying. I was scared to put myself out there and commit to getting better, because if I committed and failed then I would have no one to blame but myself.

I’ve realized that part of my reason for doing a hundred things at once is a deep fear of doing one thing as well as I possibly could—and failing. I’ve always been reluctant to throw myself fully into one project because if it doesn’t work out or people don’t like it, then I would have to face the reality that my best effort wasn’t good enough.