With success came an ever-growing burden of responsibility. I lived with a near-constant low-level anxiety that I would make a mistake that would not only threaten my career, but also my brothers' - not to mention the livelihoods of many people who work with us or for us.
Right after undergrad, I started doing low-level work on health issues in sub-Saharan Africa, and what struck me was the disconnect between how people in New York would speak about some of the issues people were facing. At the time, 2006-ish, there were a number of big media campaigns to raise awareness about HIV in sub-Saharan Africa.
We have a new lower class that's large and growing that has fallen away from a lot of the basic core behaviors and institutions that made America work, and we have a new upper class that's increasingly isolated from and ignorant of mainstream America.
The anger from Occupy Wall Street is coming from this simple fact: America no longer seems to be a place where you can work your way up, from rags to riches, from lower class to middle class to upper class.
Paul Lucas had a particularly amusing accent, so I chuckled. That was terrible; I shouldn't have done that, but he took it too big. He got up and said he couldn't work with people who laughed at him!
Long before the idea of a writer's conference was a glimmer in anyone's eye, writers learned by reading the work of their predecessors. They studied meter with Ovid, plot construction with Homer, comedy with Aristophanes; they honed their prose style by absorbing the lucid sentences of Montaigne and Samuel Johnson.
I have a great work ethic - from watching Lucille Ball, not necessarily my own family.
The harder I work, the luckier I become.
The harder I work, the luckier I get.
The harder you work, the luckier you get.
But no, I've just been very lucky. But I've worked hard, and the harder you work, the luckier you seem to get.
The harder you work... and visualize something, the luckier you get.
I'm a big believer in luck - the harder you work, the luckier you become.
I've been getting to work with Steve Carell and just feel like the luckiest kid in the world.
Luckily for me, snowboarding doesn't really feel like work unless I'm actually doing stuff that's, like, work-ish, but when I'm just snowboarding, I'm having so much fun.
I can tell you Kristen Hager is one of my all time favorite people to work with ever and one of the greatest scene partners, and I'm such a lucky guy.
When I first started directing, I could have chosen a more lucrative path, with sitcoms and things like that. But I knew enough after the experiences I had in front of the camera that I was not going to do that, because I was just going to work on my own things or work with people I respected.
