#485: Jerry Seinfeld — A Comedy Legend’s Systems, Routines, and Methods for Success

You have to have an end time to your writing session. If you're going to sit down at a desk with a problem and do nothing else, you got to get a reward for that—and the reward is the alarm goes off and you're done. You get up, and walk away, and go have some cookies and milk, you're done. If you have the guts and the balls to sit down and write, you need a reward at the other end of that session, which is stop now, pencils down.

You gotta treat your brain like a dog you just got ... The mind is infinite in wisdom; the brain is a stupid little dog that is easily trained. Don't confuse the mind with the brain. The brain is so easy to master—you just have to confine it... and it's done through repetition and systemization.

Of all the things I would trade, if you could take your experiences and ask to trade them in, the last ones I would trade would be the failures—those are the most valuable ones.

Here's a little fine point of writing technique that I'll pass along to you writers out there: Never talk to anyone about what you wrote that day that day. You have to wait 24 hours to ever say anything to anyone about what you did.

Pain is knowledge rushing in to fill a void with great speed.

My writing sessions used to be very arduous, very painful, pushing against the wind in soft, muddy ground with like a wheelbarrow full of bricks. And I had to do it because, as I mentioned in the book ['Is There Anything'], you either learn to do that or you will die in the ecosystem. And I learned that really fast and really young. And that saved my life and made my career—that I grasped the essential principle of survival in comedy really young, and that principle is you learn to be a writer. It's really the profession of writing—that's what stand-up comedy is.

I think I could solve just about anyone's life—and I don't care what you do—with weight training and Transcendental Meditation. I think your body needs that stress, that stressor, and I think it builds the resilience of the nervous system, and I think Transcendental Meditation is the absolutely ultimate work tool.

The key to... being a good writer is to treat yourself like a baby, extremely nurturing and loving, and then switch over to Lou Gossett in 'An Officer and a Gentleman,' and just be a harsh prick, ballbusting son of a bitch. 'That is just not good enough. That's got to come out, or it's got to be redone, or thrown away.' So, flipping back and forth between those two brain quadrants is the key to writing.

You know who's great? The people that just put [a] tremendous amount of hours into it. It's a game of tonnage. How many total hours are you going to work per week, per month, per year? You might even want to chart that.

It's the most difficult thing in the world ... The most difficult thing in the world is to write. People tell you to write like you can do it, like you're supposed to be able to do it. Nobody can do it. It's impossible. The greatest people in the world can't do it.

I have two sons and a daughter ... The two things I would want to pass along would be ethics and boldness in life.

I don't like discord ... I am fearless in routing it out and solving it. And if anyone's having a problem, I'm gonna walk right up to them and go 'Is there a problem? Let's talk about this.' ... I cannot stand that kind of turmoil.

If you're getting on stage and standing in front of a group of strangers and trying to make them laugh, God bless you. I don't give a shit what you do. I don't care if it's old stuff, new stuff. I don't care if you're dirty, if you're clean. If you're going to stand up there by yourself and try to make me laugh, I love you, and I'm not going to criticize anything you do beyond that. I'm not going to criticize it, and you shouldn't criticize yourself either.

Success is the enemy of irritability and crankiness because now you have money, and you can remove the difficulties from your life—and that's not good.

Survival is the new success ... In my business, if you're 60+ or if you're 55 and you're getting paid to work, paid well, you have crushed it.