The trick is to start early in our careers the stress-relieving avocation that we will need later as a mind-exercising final vocation. We can quit a job, but we quit fresh involvement at our mental peril.
Careers are here and they're gone. No matter how great we think we are, we're nothing but the temples of Ozymandias-we're ruins in the making.
My parents and friends, they're Ph.D.s that worked as custodians, that owned their own businesses, that went bankrupt, that moved seven times, that sent their kid to Harvard, that don't have any money for retirement. Highs and lows of life.
I had no regrets when I did it, I have even less regret now because I can't imagine staying on the West Wing show and then, six weeks later, Aaron Sorkin leaving.
I was fired from my own television show, CBS's Family Law. It was the second time this had happened in my career, the first being when I was fired from The Facts of Life. I had been grateful to work in TV for so long but had always been chasing a career as a feature writer-director and had completely failed.
A role can go from being a babe to anything, as long as it's something that makes me curious.
I walk around thinking job to job, trying to not have regrets.
A lot of times, guys leave WWE or get fired by WWE, but there's always that little bit of buzz right when they get out on the scene, but like all buzz, it fades. But I feel really flattered that, for whatever reason, it seems to be trending upwards.
By the end of the time I'm writing a book, I'm tearing my hair out and I want to go do stand-up. And then I want to do something else. I don't know why it is true with me that I can't just be satisfied doing the one thing, but I'm constantly flitting from one thing to another.
And every job that I had was a stepping stone to my next job and I never quit my job until I had my next job. And so opportunities look a lot like work.
I had no intention of becoming a comedian. I just wanted to make people happy. I tried everything-I shucked oysters, I painted houses, I sold vacuum cleaners. But there was always a voice saying, You should be doing something different. And it was usually my boss and I was being fired.
I am used to moving homes in football, and it seems to be a recurring theme in my career.
Did not the artists of the great age of Japanese art change names many times during their careers? I like that; they wanted to safeguard their freedom.
It's amazing to me in retrospect that I wrote as much as I did with full-time jobs. Each city gave me a new distance from - and a new way of looking at - India. I'm grateful for the movement. I feel as if I've crammed several lives into one.
I definitely divide my life into decades. Almost every ten years, something in my work life has changed. My twenties were my journalistic phase, then there was my screenwriting phase, then I became a director, then I started doing some plays.
When I was about 17 I knew that I was going to be serious about music. Before that I thought, fairly certainly, that I would be a writer. Before that, I thought I would be a forward in the NBA. And before that I thought that I would own a snake farm.
You have so many players all around the world in the NBA, a lot of different generations. If you don't take basketball as a tool in your life, you can get lost. I know a lot of teammates, a lot of players that had a great career and after that career, they just get lost.
I've been very lucky. I've had three separate careers: freelance illustrator, then set designer, puppetteer and animator, and now fine artist. I just bluffed my way into every one of 'em!
Bagehot did what so many thousand of young graduates before him had done,--he studied for the bar; and then, having prepared himself to practise law, followed another large body of young men in deciding to abandon it.
I think, certainly, in history, if you look back, a lot of people would go through their careers, build a business, or be a doctor, lawyer, and then they would go and do public service later on in their careers.
In college, I thought I wanted to be solely an artist, and then when I got here, to college, I was like, "Okay, well I want to be a songwriter," 'cause it was like close to Nashville.
I've come to the possible conclusion that being a comedic writer/director is like running track. You do it for a certain amount of time and then you have to stop. Or you at least have to accept that you're not going to be at the top of your game. And that's OK.
Careers go in cycles. I've plateau-ed. I've been at the bottom of the ocean... You win some, you lose some.
In the United States businessmen often do not trust their colleagues. If you trust your colleague today, he may be your competitor tomorrow, because people frequently move from one company to another.
I think the first thing is to recognize that there is an ebb and flow to your career. There are going to be moments that are really high, and then you're going to have moments where you step away for a little bit, and maybe that's just by choice or maybe you have a family.
