At the gym where I work out, there’s a program called Pro Camp that specializes in training professional athletes. They train basketball players, football players, hockey players, track athletes. And they train high school and college athletes whose ambition is to make it to the pros. I was standing with the chief of Pro Camp, T.R. Goodman, watching a 15-year-old high school football player go through his workout. “He’s a winner,” T.R. said. I was immediately curious. I asked T.R. what he meant. What qualities did he see in this young boy that marked him as an athlete with a…

I studied ballet at the old Metropolitan Opera when Antony Tudor, the famous choreographer, was the head of the ballet school. In fact, Margaret Craske was the teacher most students considered to be more important. She had danced with Pavlova in the ’20s. Miss Craske instructed us: “Leave your problems outside the classroom.” This excerpt comes from an upcoming book by my mentor, David Leddick. David continues: Such good advice. And in that hour and a half of intense concentration on every part of your body, the music, the coordinating with other dancers you really couldn’t think about your troubles…

Shawn, Jeff and I just did an hour-long “Ask Me Anything” podcast called Organizing a Day, Organizing a Year. We’ll be e-mailing it on New Year’s Day to everyone who has signed up for First Look Access. Our aim is to help get 2014 off to a productive start. One of the subjects that came up during the taping was Predictable Trouble Spots. We were talking about looking ahead to the new year, starting out strong, staying strong—and then we remembered the horrors that inevitably lie ahead. Bank on it, there will be moments for you and me during 2014…

Several of the streets I normally drive are blocked these days by construction for a new light rail line. As I was detouring around one blockage yesterday I thought, “Mass transit is a great idea but it’ll never work here in Los Angeles.” The reason it won’t work is that it runs counter to the culture of the city. L.A. is a car culture. Even when the Metro Line gave away free passes, the trains were still 90% empty. That got me thinking about cultures in general. Institutions have cultures. Apple has a culture, IBM has a culture; so do…

This happened in New York, can’t remember what year. Early one frozen morning, I’m schlepping home from somewhere—probably a girlfriend had kicked me out—and I find myself on 53rd Street passing the Museum of Modern Art. There’s a line out front. If you’re a New Yorker, you’re like a Russian during the Stalin era. You see a line, you get on it. A line means something good is happening. There must be, or people wouldn’t be lining up waiting for it. Even better this particular morning, the line is short. Six people. That means I’ll be up front. I’ll get…

Though it’s sometimes hard for me to take in, I know that numbers of people look to me as a mentor. Well, I have a mentor too. His name is David Leddick. He was my first boss, in advertising, on the Revlon account at Grey Advertising in New York. David will be 84 in January. Is he a doddering old fart? You judge. Since ’95, when he “retired,” David has written 25 books (no, that’s not a typo), including six novels. Since 2000 when he resumed his performing career (he had been a dancer at the Metropolitan Opera and with…

[Some quick notices before we get into today’s post: [Remember the “Ask Me Anything” Q&A we did a few weeks ago? The hour-long audio went out then to everyone who had signed up for First Look Access. Well, since then Shawn and I and Jeff have recorded three more half-hour AMAs from that original batch of questions—questions we didn’t have time to get to in the first AMA. [We’ll be sending the first half-hour audio out by e-mail on Monday. The other two will follow between then and the New Year. All are free, no sales pitches. [If you have…

When I was a kid my dad’s dream for me was that I would become an engineer and work all my life for Lockheed or G.E.  In other words be an employee. That was how the middle-class dream expressed itself in the days of American pre-eminence post-WWII, before the European countries had rebuilt their shattered economies, before the rise of Asia, India, South America, before outsourcing, before globalization, before the satellite and the microchip and the web. Now all we hear is that the American Dream is dead. As I write this, I’m looking at an article in the L.A.…

Hang on while I make the case that self-loathing is a good thing. I don’t mean only within the comedic-material sphere, within which self-loathing has been mined for years by Woody Allen, Howard Stern, Richard Lewis, and the godfather of them all, Philip Roth in Portnoy’s Complaint. What exactly is self-loathing? It appears almost always as that nasty, brutal voice in our heads. “You’re a loser, you’re a bum, a worthless waste of oxygen. Look at you. Do you imagine that someone like you could produce something original, something of quality, something that anyone else would care about? What ideas…

In last week’s post I made a case for writing out of love. This week lemme dig into that idea a little deeper. The profession of writer (or musician or filmmaker or athlete) is not really a “job” like other jobs. It’s not like working in a coal mine or toiling in a cubicle as a telemarketer. It’s not something we do purely to put food on the table. We write or paint or dance out of love. We would do it even if nobody paid us. In the fields of the arts and entertainment, the principles that apply to…