Joel McHale Quotes

Everybody makes a decision about where they want their career to go. If I really want something, I put a lot of effort into it. If I don't want something, I won't.

I've always had ambition, and the acting was successful and put my name on the map, but it was never the plan to stop there.

I was 20 years old and I said, 'Okay, if I can't get on TV by 25 then I'll consider another career.' You have to give yourself these arbitrary deadlines just to keep yourself focused and on track.

I'm very much focused on my career.

Many people don't have an internal vision to go after something, fight for something, make a plan. So the biggest thing is - until you get picked up by a major label or until something breaks, you need to plan out what your dream is going to be.

Not too many people know what they want to do at 3 and then go do it.

Maybe I'd be in a different place in my career if I'd had that 10-year plan, a lot of people went at it with this voracity that I never had. My only voracity was to have fun and to be in the mix.

Most professional women I know - myself included - long since gave up looking for a rulebook or a roadmap; we make it up as we go along. Every day presents a new choice, a new challenge, which makes long-term career planning seem like an especially abstract exercise.

I've always had a very clear vision of what I wanted to do.

There's a lot of obsession about people's personal ambitions.

I think I started to have thoughts to really want to be serious about my work when I was about twenty-five, and I just kind of started to look into that direction and moved into it.

I'm patient when it comes to my career, which is unlike me, but there are no stars in my eyes. I make where I go. It's that sort of thing.

From the time I left the Marine Corps after serving as an infantry platoon and company commander in Vietnam, I decided that I would focus on immediate goals that inspired me to devote all of my energy to them, rather than putting together the more cautious and traditional building blocks of a predictable career.

I have a very clear idea of what kind of career I want and the choices I need to make to get there.

I try to shut out ideas about why you should do things. Trying to do good architecture and really designing a career? There's some attention to be paid to that, but I don't think it's everything.

I always focus on what is next in my career.

A career is forward planning.

I'm a big girl. I prioritize. I want to be acting, I want to be singing, but there will be time for that.

My focus has to be on my career.

I have never taken my career seriously. My only ambition was to grow as an actor.

My plate is full with just acting. I want to focus on that, and then maybe direct in the future.

I'm really focused and committed to teaching now. Maybe when I'm about 30, which is in 10 years, I would like to consider doing something like speech therapy. That's what I really would like to do. I could go and do that now but it's not my drive at the moment. My drive is acting right now.

Each of my career decisions has been very much about doing what I wanted to achieve in the role and then finding another challenge.

Hopefully I'll be successful with the singing, but there are so many other things I want to do, like acting. I'll do them one at a time first!

I really moved through my career based on curiosity about something. I never looked at a title and said, 'I want that.'