The Nerdist Way_ How to Reach the Next Level (In Real Life) - Chris Hardwick [2]
When I was twenty-two, I started working for MTV through a fluke audition. It was a weird accident, but it launched a better career for me right out of college than I would have had otherwise. At least, it seemed like it was a good thing. Had I been mentally prepared to handle the responsibility it would have been good. The erroneous lesson that I learned was “Work just falls in your lap.” Again, if you’re prepared for it, that’s good. I was not.
What followed were several years of laziness, drinking, and fuckups on my part. This “woo-hoo/par-tay” attitude piloted my brain through my twenties. Then, when I hit thirty, I began to look around at my life: I was consuming a baby elephant’s weight in alcohol EVERY DAY. I lived in a shitty apartment near UCLA (where I went to school—apparently I had become the dude who wouldn’t leave and bummed out the college partygo-ers), my place was always a mess, I had ruined my credit, and I had no real work prospects. I had become a thing I had always feared—the fat, drunk guy who used to be on television. Back when I was working on MTV (which, oddly, at one time, aired short films set to popular music), there was sort of a curse that dictated that one might not “hit it any bigger,” after his or her time there, as it were. I always recoiled at the thought of this curse, and here I was taking active steps every fucking day to make it happen.
Long story not much shorter, I somehow had the good sense to take stock and ask myself what was important. I knew that I had two choices: I could continue living the way I was living or make broad, sweeping changes. I knew the latter at least gave me a prayer of salvaging my life. In the former, I die in an overweight booze-tomb. It occurred to me that I had sent all of the Nerd qualities that defined me as a youth to the attic, like so many old comic books and outdated game consoles. However, I distinctly remembered that I had pretty intense focusing capabilities. Programming computers (in BASIC, no less), winning chess tournaments, playing video games, collecting action figures, playing D&D, ruining bell curves in Latin class . . . there was something there that I could use in the present day. Deep down I was still the outcast kid who had decided to abandon all of his passions in exchange for simply “trying to fit in” by partying all the time. But that had to end. I was pissed at the volume of time I had been wasting, and being pissed created the necessary friction to light a fire.
I decided I would devote myself to self-improvement. For all the years I had spent tearing down my life, I would now be dedicated to rebuilding it, and hopefully better than it was before. Even if not, I knew it would at least be different, and different was good. I immediately began consuming as much improvement stuff as possible. (Replacing alcohol, anyone?? Maybe, but it was a better option at this point.) Some of it was crap, a lot repetitive, but mostly it was useful. Today, I stand before you as someone who was able to resurrect his life and career.
At any given time, I’m usually juggling four or five jobs that I enjoy. I’m healthier than I’ve ever been and in the best shape of my life. No, I am not a degree-holding specialist claiming to have all the answers. I’m a Nerdy kid who fucked up a lot and learned through trial and error how to make his brain work FOR him, as opposed to AGIN him (which it has a tendency to do, as we’ll see). I have determined that our abilities to effectively take action and make changes can be broken into three dimensions, which not coincidentally will make up the three sections of this book:
Mind: How you can trick your brain into working for and not agin you.
Body: A fertile mind can only be properly