reasonable. It’s weird. People won’t get it. It’s too smart. It’s too childish. It’s too strange. There’s not enough humor. There’s too much humor. It’s too long, it’s too short.” You get the picture—we heard all the reasons why it was not going to work. But guess what? It did work.
The lesson here, to me at least, is this: Don’t listen to anyone’s advice. At least, don’t listen to the advice of people who tell you what you can’t do. Instead, find some good advisers whom you respect and trust and care about and listen to them. Then integrate what they are telling you with your own thinking, and really listen to yourself, your own learning, your gut instinct.
I wanted to be crazy, and I advise you to be crazy. To be weird. To be unreasonable. That’s my favorite one. People are always saying, “Oh, come on, be reasonable!” And I want to shout, “No! I don’t want to be reasonable!” I want to be completely unreasonable. I want to change the world. I want to be creative. I want to change the world creatively. And I want other people to be unreasonable with me.
Phil Stanton
Co-Founder of the Blue Man Group and the Blue School
Inspiration Lives in Unexpected Places
Something important took place in my life at the age of eighteen. It seemed mundane and pedestrian back then—maybe even a complete waste of time—and I never thought it would have any relevance to my future life. But in fact this experience has proved to be not only relevant but essential to the path I’ve taken in life: my first job out of high school.
I was born in Texas and raised in Georgia. I grew up being a little bit of a tinkerer and a builder, and I got those traits from my dad. He was a minister and a self-taught architectural designer, so he built homes and churches with his own two hands. At the time, I didn’t have the slightest inclination to pursue a life in the theater. Even though both my mom and my dad were musicians and singers, I considered myself kind of shy and had no desire to be onstage. After graduating from high school, I needed to find work for the summer and a friend of the family got me a job in a hardware store—not a Home Depot like you find on every corner these days but a store that sold tons of industrial materials. I developed this geeky fascination with gears and nuts and bolts, PVC pipes, stainless steel, and different kinds of metal. Eventually, that job ended and I forgot about it for ten or twelve years. I ended up at a liberal arts college, where I bounced around between several majors until I finally found my element: acting. A few years later I was living in New York, where I met Chris Wink on my very first job as a waiter, and we became friends immediately. I met Matt Goldman soon after. Years later, the three of us would go on to create the Blue Man Group, a multimedia theatrical production that mixes music and comedy. But when we were just starting out, as we were conceiving the character of the Blue Man, all that stuff from my job at the hardware store years before came rushing back to me. All that fascination with pipe and metal and building materials. Matt, Chris, and I constructed strange instruments and other kinds of mechanical things as set pieces, and after scores of performances, television appearances, and tours around the world—well, the rest is history. The point here is that you will find your element, you will find your intelligence, if you pay attention to each and every experience life has to offer. Something you find along the way—even by accident—just might have the power to change your world.
Thomas Friedman
Bestselling Author and Pulitzer Prize-Winning Columnist for The New York Times
Be an Untouchable, Do What You Love
Do what you love. This is not sappy career advice but an absolute survival strategy, because, as I like to put it, the world is getting flat. What is flattening the world is our ability to automate more work with computers and
The lesson here, to me at least, is this: Don’t listen to anyone’s advice. At least, don’t listen to the advice of people who tell you what you can’t do. Instead, find some good advisers whom you respect and trust and care about and listen to them. Then integrate what they are telling you with your own thinking, and really listen to yourself, your own learning, your gut instinct.
I wanted to be crazy, and I advise you to be crazy. To be weird. To be unreasonable. That’s my favorite one. People are always saying, “Oh, come on, be reasonable!” And I want to shout, “No! I don’t want to be reasonable!” I want to be completely unreasonable. I want to change the world. I want to be creative. I want to change the world creatively. And I want other people to be unreasonable with me.
Phil Stanton
Co-Founder of the Blue Man Group and the Blue School
Inspiration Lives in Unexpected Places
Something important took place in my life at the age of eighteen. It seemed mundane and pedestrian back then—maybe even a complete waste of time—and I never thought it would have any relevance to my future life. But in fact this experience has proved to be not only relevant but essential to the path I’ve taken in life: my first job out of high school.
I was born in Texas and raised in Georgia. I grew up being a little bit of a tinkerer and a builder, and I got those traits from my dad. He was a minister and a self-taught architectural designer, so he built homes and churches with his own two hands. At the time, I didn’t have the slightest inclination to pursue a life in the theater. Even though both my mom and my dad were musicians and singers, I considered myself kind of shy and had no desire to be onstage. After graduating from high school, I needed to find work for the summer and a friend of the family got me a job in a hardware store—not a Home Depot like you find on every corner these days but a store that sold tons of industrial materials. I developed this geeky fascination with gears and nuts and bolts, PVC pipes, stainless steel, and different kinds of metal. Eventually, that job ended and I forgot about it for ten or twelve years. I ended up at a liberal arts college, where I bounced around between several majors until I finally found my element: acting. A few years later I was living in New York, where I met Chris Wink on my very first job as a waiter, and we became friends immediately. I met Matt Goldman soon after. Years later, the three of us would go on to create the Blue Man Group, a multimedia theatrical production that mixes music and comedy. But when we were just starting out, as we were conceiving the character of the Blue Man, all that stuff from my job at the hardware store years before came rushing back to me. All that fascination with pipe and metal and building materials. Matt, Chris, and I constructed strange instruments and other kinds of mechanical things as set pieces, and after scores of performances, television appearances, and tours around the world—well, the rest is history. The point here is that you will find your element, you will find your intelligence, if you pay attention to each and every experience life has to offer. Something you find along the way—even by accident—just might have the power to change your world.
Thomas Friedman
Bestselling Author and Pulitzer Prize-Winning Columnist for The New York Times
Be an Untouchable, Do What You Love
Do what you love. This is not sappy career advice but an absolute survival strategy, because, as I like to put it, the world is getting flat. What is flattening the world is our ability to automate more work with computers and
Similar Books
