First figure out your partners, then figure out what ideas to pursue. The most important thing isn't the market you target, the product you develop or the financing, but the founding team.
When I first appeared, people couldn't figure out whether I was gay, straight, black, white or whatever, and I loved that. I loved the fact it scares people.
It doesn't matter that Bush scares the hell out of me. What matters is that he scares the hell out of a lot of very important people in Washington who can't speak out, in the military, in the intelligence community.
My advice to anyone is to figure out what you're good at - what it is that you love doing the most in life - and figure out a way to make a living from it.
I'm starting to figure it out - figure out my spots, where I should be on the court, where I'm most effective, and how I handle double teams - and it's paying off.
The scene that scares you the most, that you don't want to write because it's the most difficult to write-that's the one you have to write. So I think when people have writer's block, it's because what they have to write scares them. And that's usually the heart of the book.
I had a tough time fitting in, as I guess most kids do. I felt like school was kind of a grand opportunity to figure yourself out and to figure out what you wanted.
I mean, we're all going to die. We know that on an intellectual level. We figure it out when we're still fairly young, and it scares us so badly that we convince ourselves we're immortal for more than a decade afterwards.
The two mistakes that come to mind are people who introduce a flood of characters in the first few pages. Where the reader has to stop and get out a flow chart and has to figure out who is who. And you just can't do that - introduce the first four generations of a character's family in the first chapter. You can introduce four or five characters at the most in the first chapter. Another mistake is to use big words that are not normally used in conversation to try to impress folks with your vocabulary.
Most people, originally when Google Earth first came out in 2005, they thought, well, what can I do with it? I can figure out where to go on vacation, or I can look at my neighbor's backyard from space. But the point is, you can do so much more.
Your first most typical figure in any new place turns out to be a bluff or a local nuisance.
I mean, comedy's hard. If you go back and look at the first season of 'Seinfeld,' it's a work in progress and that's what happens. It just takes time for people to figure each other out, and figure out timing, and to develop creatively with the writers.
I mean, comedy's hard. If you go back and look at the first season of Seinfeld, it's a work in progress and that's what happens. It just take time for people to figure each other out, and figure out timing, and to develop creatively with the writers.
The truth, whether we admit it or not, is that grace scares us to death. It scares us primarily because it wrestles control and manageability out of our hands - introducing chaos and freedom.
Do you want to know what scares the Washington cartel? Actually, not remotely. I don't scare them in the tiniest bit. What scares them is you. What scares them is that old Reagan coalition is coming back together, of conservatives.
When I first came to college, it was a time that I was trying to figure out, 'Who am I? What makes me special?' and I started to find most of my value in the fact that I was thin.