A Quote by Henry Petroski
Failures are much more dramatic than successes, and people like drama. I think this is why automobile races draw such crowds. People expect spectacular crashes, which we tend to find more interesting than cars just racing around the track. The same is true of bridges, buildings, or any structure or machine.
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Comedy has to be so much cleaner than drama. You can't layer it in the way you can a dramatic performance. Which is why it's more difficult than drama - you don't have so many tricks.
The longer I live the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will make or break a company . . . a church . . . a home.
The problem is that most people focus on their failures rather than their successes. But the truth is that most people have many more successes than failures.
With stand-up, it's more interesting to hear about people's failures than their successes.
I have done much more dramatic work than comedic work, but I think comedy is harder than drama in a way. I think it's one of those things that's constantly discussed - people who do comedy think it's harder, people who do drama think it's harder. Usually drama is the one that gets this highbrow respect.
I genuinely am sort of an emotionally stunted man-child, so if I just write to the top of my intelligence, it sounds like a teenager. I like being around teenagers. It's good for drama; they feel everything much more intensely than adults do, their lives are much more interesting than ours. They're mutants. They have these weird bodies that are rebelling against them and changing every day. Teenagers always equal good drama.
Far more people die in the developing world than in the West. At religious festivals mainly. That's not a myth - the numbers don't lie. I think it's just because in the West crowds tend to be manufactured by commercial interesting, and they have, or at least should have, a responsibility for keeping people safe.
By sort of combining the research of a lot of smart people, I came up with an equation for dread [dread=uncontrollability+unfamiliarity+imaginability+suffering+scale of destruction+unfairness]. The dread equation is a simplification, but it's a way to explain why we fear something so much when it is so unlikely. Part of it is the lack of control. That's why we're more scared of plane crashes than car crashes even though we know rationally which is more dangerous.
There is so little SF drawn from modern scientific thinking, in any discipline, that I'm much more cheered by the successes than the failures, most of which are forgivable.
Everyone wins the marathon. We all have the same feeling at the start-nervous, anxious, excited. It is a broader, richer, and even with twenty-seven thousand people-more intimate experience than I found when racing in track. New York is the marathon that all the biggest stars want to win, but has also been the stage for an array of human stories more vast than any other sporting event.
I know that my music is heard a lot in commercial circles. In academia, I think my music is taken in differently but I'm not sure why that is. Some kind of sixth sense tells me that people in that world are thinking differently about it. I don't know if it has to do with the structure of my music, which is probably more apparent to those in the academic world than it is in the commercial world, where people tend not to think of that aspect of music so much. They just listen for pure enjoyment.
I think all races are represented in America much more than in many other places, but it's also nice to remind people about that ethnic mix. I would like to see more black models and women from different ethnic backgrounds, but I also think that when you are casting, you just choose the most beautiful girl you can find.
As athletes, we're defined by what we've accomplished. Those are what most people remember and what you get paid for. But I learned more from my failures than from all of my successes put together - failures as an athlete and as a person.
Something wonderful begins to happen with the simple realization that life, like an automobile, is driven from the inside out, not the other way around. As you focus more on becoming more peaceful with where you are, rather than focusing on where you would rather be, you begin to find peace right now, in the present. Then, as you move around, try new things, and meet new people, you carry that sense of inner peace with you. It's absolutely true that, "Wherever you go, there you are.
We are too much in the machine world today. Even here in Tuva we've got every year more and more cars and other technologies, and of course it brings more pollution to our air, to nature. And I think the idea of the Kraftwerk song is people should not be very much mechanized or to be a machine in the world of machines. The idea is to try to find a golden middle between the world of nature and the world of machines.
Like any parent, they've been extremely supportive of my racing throughout my childhood. I mean, my mom says that she didn't want me racing, but I think my dad and I both knew she wasn't going to win that battle. She loves it more than anybody, so it's neat to have the archives of all my old races.
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