Stand-Up Comedy by Judy Carter

• Either you have a sense of humor, or you don’t.
• You shouldn’t give an audience what they want. Give them what you want. Most comics will go down to the audience level to make it work, when in fact what you should be doing is bringing the audience to your level.
• You can’t and won’t be able to make everyone love you.
• It is far more interesting to watch someone struggling with his or her problems than some spiritual, flawless know-it all.
• Keep away from telling stories. What’s funny is simply the way you look at even the most mundane events.
• Being funny has nothing to do with acting weird or outrageous. The weirder you are, the less people will understand you, and no one laughs when confused.
• The perfect act is funny to the audience and serious to you.
• The way to make people laugh is to:
• Relax and be yourself
• Find importance in your material
• Have fun
• You should never, I repeat, never perform another comic’s material publicly.
• The trick to dealing with fear is to go on in spite of feeling afraid.
• People who avoid risk-taking lead dull lives. They want to protect themselves from feeling afraid or out of control. Yet it is precisely this out-of-control feeling that creates excitement and makes a perform exciting to watch.
• Be serious about what you say onstage. Make a commitment to your material.
• Don’t try to be funny. Expect nothing from the audience.
• Don’t tell jokes or stories. Be yourself.
• Control your critic. When fearful, dialog with your critic.
• Relax. Have fun.
• The way to start developing material is to find: your attitude, your issues, and the connections between the two.
• Attitude is the heartbeat of an act. Material cannot be emotionally neutral. Your subject matter has to disgust you, pain you, thrill you, because audiences don’t respond to words, they respond to feelings.
• A persona is when a comic has one specific emotional attitude for their entire act and all of the material hangs on that hook.
• If you feel strongly about something and talk about it with commitment, you can blab about anything. Don’t check out to see if another comic is talking about it. Go ahead.
• Expressing your inner fears rather than complaining about others makes better material and makes you more likeable.
• Dirty words can become crutches for lazy and desperate comic.
• Ranting and raving is a technique to get your raw material out of you and down on paper. Once that material is out, if can be sorted through and developed into stand-up using the formulas in the next chapter.
• Remember that when audiences see a comic do five minutes on Johnny Carson, what they don’t see is all the material the comic had to throw out.
• Sometimes there might be one tiny shred of the idea in some of your ranting and ravings that you can use elsewhere.
• It takes about one hour of babbling for every three minutes of material--if you’re lucky.
• All stand-up material must be organized into the setup/punch format. If your material isn’t organized like this, you’re not doing a stand-up.
• The “punch” is where the audience laughs. The “setup” is the one or so lines leading to the punch.
• The first step in organizing your act is to identify what your laugh lines are--your punches.
• The best setup is a short setup.
• The faster you can get to the punch, the stronger your act.
• You can have more than one punch. A lot of times a comic will have one setup and then three punches.
• Establish your credibility by having truthful, honest, uncomplicated setups. Then get wild one the punches.
• Remember, every setup leads to a punch. If something is not a punch, then it has to be part of the setup. If it isn’t, then cut it.
• A good setup manipulates the audience to anticipate one thing and then presents the unexpected. Humor is created by going against what is expected.
• Being sarcastic about your physical attributes can serve as a great opener.
• The more voices, facial expressions, and body movement you can bring to an act, the more visually exciting your act becomes.
• A callback is when you make a reference, later in your act, to something you said earlier.
• Callbacks are popular with an audience, because they help the comic develop a special intimacy with the audience.
• When doing perishable material, it is necessary to find a place where you can perform weekly, if not daily.
• When doing political humor, remember that no matter how funny a joke is, in order to laugh, the audience needs to agree with your political point of view.
• Most impressionists will flawlessly duplicate a celebrity’s voice and physicality and put them into unusual situations.
• Once you get an impression down, the most important element becomes commitment. Totally commit to the impression by jumping into it with all your being.
• Doing characters is the same as doing impressions, expect that the person you’re imitating is not a celebrity, but rather a stereotypical character we recognize from everyday life.
• Song parodies, where a comic puts new lyrics to a recognizable tune, are a great way to make people laugh.
• Don’t be too quick to label and limit yourself. Most comics keep is simple, using the standard setup/punch format. However, don’t fight your natural tendencies.
• Your opening is the most important part of your act. Within ten seconds an audience will decide whether or not they like you. If you create a bad first impression, you’ll spend the rest of your act on damage control.
• Save controversial issues for later, when the audience is with you.
• A set list is a list of code words of your act.
• The set list is a comic’s personal, cryptic way of providing the one word or phrase that, when looked at, gives an immediate memory code.
• Most comics organize their materials by subject matter.
• I suggest starting with your least personal topics and ending with the most personal.
• Memorize your material, but always be willing to let go of it so you can deal with what is going on in the moment.
• Don’t open with new material. Throw it in between chunks that you are sure of.
• Always tape-record your performances. Listening to the tape the next day will help you to further evaluate your material and performance.
• Bombing is a part of the creative process.
• To be good you need to take risks, and that will increase your chances of bombing. But bombing will help you to realize what doesn’t work and your act can only get better.
• One thing that has always amazed me about comedy is that everyone thinks they’re an expert.
• Success comes to those who persist. If you are dedicated, if you believe in yourself and you really want to do stand-up, you will survive.
• All of the overnight successes have usually been slaving away at their act for years and then they happen overnight.
• The Catch-22 of getting jobs is that in order to work you need to be good, but in order to be good, you need work.
• The best place to start a comedy career is at your local comedy club.
• Stay far away from performing at the top comedy clubs until you have really developed your talent.
• Know that when you have forty-five minutes of good, solid material, you will get work. Until then, keep working on new material, hold in the reins on your desire to be seen, and when you are ready--let ‘er rip.
• Humor is a powerful tool.

Mastering Stand-Up by Stephen Rosenfield

• When a relationship is founded on comedy, there has to be absolute candor. Why? Because the truth comes out quickly in comedy. It comes out the moment you get in front of an audience. Either they laugh or they don’t.
• Here’s the truth: if you’re funny with your friends and family that’s a sign you’ll be funny montage and that you can be both a writer and a performer of comedy. You have the talent. What you need now is the craft.
• Craft is what will transform your comedy from an entertainment for friends and family to an entertainment for a mass national audience.
• Here is the stand-up comedian’s to-do list:
• Find your originality.
• Master the techniques of stand-up comedy writing.
• Master the techniques of stand-up comedy performing.
• Create your comic persona.
• Deepen your understanding of comedy.
• Study great comedians.
• Perform! Perform! Perform!
• Never blame your audience.
• Know the forms of stand-up comedy.
• Understand the business.
• Trust your nerves.
• Have fun.
• Get in touch with what is original about your sense of humor. Originality is a hallmark of exceptional art.
• Once you get your spontaneous comic creations on paper, you can start to apply the writing techniques that will transform your ad-libs into stage-worthy stand-up comedy material.
• A stand-up, like an actor, must have the ability to produce onstage the emotions that give life to his performance. He must be capable of creating this emotional life night after night, in a way that seems spontaneous and unrehearsed to the audience.
• To become a successful comedian, you must develop a viviee and distinctive onstange personality--a personality as individual as your real-life personality, only more so.
• Watching great comedians will help you learn and improve your act.
• The comedians you love are the comedians you want to study.
• To become a pro, performing must be a regular part of your workweek. Perform stand-up as frequently as you can.
• Because comedy club audiences have watched late-night TV comedians for years, they’ve been trained to expect laughs far more frequently.
• A joke that anyone can tell and get laughs with is the definition of a generic joke.
• In all art, including stand-up comedy, there is a form and there is content. They are two different things. Form refers to structure. Content refers to what is inside that structure.
• To this day observational stand-up is the go-to form for jokes about the news. These jokes are short, they can be written quickly, and audiences delight in hearing funny things about what just happened.
• The biggest laughs come when the audience thinks you’re making it up on the spot.
• There are three keys to transforming a funny story that your friends enjoy into anecdotal stand-up that can entertain a club audience. The three keys are as follows:
• Building frequent laugh lines into the story by…
• Organizing the story not chronologically but by subject, followed by laughter lines that…
• Seem genuine coming from your persona.
• Most stories are structured chronologically. This happened first, this happened next, and so on. That’s not the way comedians organize a story. They do it by subject. This is my first subject, and here are the laugh lines tied to that subject, and so on. Transforming a funny story into stand-up comedy material essentially involves formatting the story in this way.
• In good anecdotal stand-up the characters in the story are recognizable and their behavior is believable, even if the premise of the story is fanciful.
• Audiences laugh when the story matches up with the personality of the comedian telling the story.
• A stand-up sketch is essentially a one-person play where you act out all the parts. The comedian enacts the characters until the scene ends. He does not interrupt the scene with comments made as himself. It’s an uninterrupted performance of a single scene.
• The successful stand-up sketch has an additional key: its premise is believable.
• As a delivery system for laugh lines, the stand-up sketch can’t be beat. Once the initial setup is in place, the rest of the piece can be virtually all punchlines, nonstop laughs.
• Act-outs are another form of stand-up where the comedian acts out other characters or himself in a scene.
• It is better to show the audience something than it is to tell them about it. Let them see it. It’s almost always funnier.
• A great rewriting technique for a joke that is almost there, but needs punching up, is to retell it through act-outs.
• Put-down humor is comedy that gets laughs by putting someone down, making fun of them. Put-down humor has five targets:
• Celebrities
• People in your life
• Hecklers in your audience
• Innocent people in your audience
• And, of course, yourself
• There are two keys to creating successful celebrity-put-down jokes. The first is to be sure your famous people are famous, that your audience knows who they are. The second key is that your reason for ridiculing the celebrity must also be known to your audience, and they have to agree with you about it.
• Most of the time people laugh because they’re surprised by what you say. This isn’t the case with celebrity put-down jokes. They laugh out of pleasure, the joy they take in hearing the truth.
• To repeat: the person and the reason for ridiculing him or her must be well known, and the audience must agree with you.
• For a celebrity put-down jokes to work, a famous person must be lined up with his or her most famously recognizable foible.
• There’s one caveat about celebrity put-down jokes: they have a limited shelf life. After a while, people have heard enough, and it’s time to move on to the next train wreck.
• Don’t make the assumption that the audience is on your side when you complain about people they don’t know. For them to laugh at your jokes, you have to get them on your side first.
• A heckler is someone who is insulting you in a voice that others can hear. It’s important that you make this distinction between hecklers and loudmouth non-hecklers because you’re going to nuke a heckler with biting, comedic insults. You don’t want to nuke someone whose inhibitions may be down because he or she had too much to drink but who is enjoying your set.
• Let’s review. First, make sure the person is a heckler. Second, get the audience on your side by not responding at first. Third, have heckler jokes ready that keep them on your side.
• Your heckler material should do two things: First, it should get the audience laughing at the heckler’s expense; hecklers need to discover there is a price to be paid for their rudeness. Second, it should send a message to the heckler to shut up. If you don’t include that message, the heckler may feel that you’re inviting him to go tit for tat with you.
• You get the biggest laughs when audiences think you've come up with something funny on the spot. When you deliver a prepared heckler joke your audience thinks you’re being spontaneously funny.
• It’s important to know that, ultimately, you have the power when you’re being heckled. The audience is there to hear you, not the heckler. Because you and only you have a microphone, you can totally dominate the conversation.
• When you aim jokes at innocent people, the audience must clearly get from you that behind your insult jokes are feelings of fun and camaraderie.
• There’s a sound guideline in stand-up comedy that you have an expansive license to ridicule everything you are.
• Self-deprecating humor is a particularly endearing form of stand up. THere’s something liberating about someone who freely acknowledges his or her shortcomings.
• Comedy is a forum for unvarnished truth. It’s a [lace where we can openly and publicly face our weaknesses, imperfections, and fears.
• Ultimately, what gives an audience the license to laugh at your problems is a clear signal from you that you’re OK with them. If they feel you’re devastated by your problems, the audience can’t laugh.
• When a comedian invites a member or members of the audience to engage with him in a back-and-forth conversation, that is called “crowd work”. It’s a form of stand-up that, in addition to being entertaining, is enormously useful in a variety of specific circumstances you’ll encounter as a comedian.
• When you do crowd work you need people to engage with you in conversation, so you want to make it simple and easy for them to participate.
• They key to writing crowd wok is asking questions to which you can determine the range of answers, and then writing jokes that are set up by those answers. Written crowd work is accomplished by letting someone in the audience do the setup to your joke and then you delivering your written punchline.
• The biggest laughs you get onstage happen when the audience thinks you’re being spontaneously funny. Written crowd work creates the illusion of spontaneity, and for that reason can be a high point of your set.
• When the stakes are high, go with your tried-and-true material.
• The comic flaw comedian must not be aware of his or her flaws. The cheap person doesn’t know he’s cheap, the dumb person don’t know he’s dumb, and so on.
• Audiences often love comedians who master the comic flaw--in part because their vulnerability is so out there. THey make no attempt to disguise their flaws because they don’t know they have it. This creates a persona that is so very human and identifiable.
• To some degree, all successful comedians creat who they are behind the microphone. Sometimes their creations are drawn from aspects of their offstage sevles. And sometimes, as in character comedy, they’re entire works of fiction. As long as you get consistent laughs, you, behind the microphone, can be anyone you want to be.
• Look hard enough and you’ll see what the great comic playwright George Bernard Shaw saw in his own time and place: Our problem is not that we fail to live up to our ideals. Our problem is that too often we do live up to them, and too many of them are corrupt and self-serving.
• The duty of comedy is to correct men by entertaining them.
• Think out the special requirements of your act and make sure either that the club has what you need, or that you can provide it yourself and make it work at the club.
• To successfully perform a specialty, you have to get really good at it. You have to nail your impression, your song, your magic trick. You don’t get a pass because you’re performing these feats as part of your comedy. Performing the specialties well is a requirement of doing them at all.
• If you do impressions in your stand-up, it’s not enough to master the speech and physicality of the celebrity you’re impersonating. YOu need to create comedy with your impression.
• This can be done by exaggerating one of the celebrity's vocal or physical traits [...]. Another way to create comedy with an impression is to put the celebrity into a situation for which he’s hilariously mismatched.
• The trick is to learn how to deliver written material in a way that seems so spontaneous, the audience thinks you’re making it up on the spot.
• When a club pays you to perform, and an audience pays to see you perform, you can’t take the risk of ad-libbing your entire set. Material that has never been performed before is bound to be hit and miss.
• For a person who knows how to make people laugh, comedy writing is work--nothing more, nothing less. And the harder you work at it, the better you get.
• I’m a believer in this maxim: talent is work, and brilliance is obsession with work.
• When you get good at writing and performing material that consistently delivers [laughs], people will start paying you. So get good at capturing what you think, say, hear, and see that is funny.
• What ultimately gives your writing originality and freshness is not your subject, but your way with the subject--how you think and feel about it.
• There is a challenging discipline involved in creating a successful first draft, and it comes into play right at the outset: do not throw anything out.
• IN writing comedy, nothing gets thrown out until it’s tried out. If you think something is funny even for a nanosecond, write it down and hold on to it: the odds are that something funny is there.
• The problem isn’t that you've stopped coming up with funny ideas but that you’re snuffing them out as soon as you have them.
• Sometimes what we initially think is a setup to a joke turns out to be the punchline, and you don’t want to mistakenly cut it because you think you don’t need it.
• Trying out the material will enable you to locate where the laughs are. Once you have a good sense of this, you’ll be in a position to make cuts without inadvertently cutting laugh lines.
• Develop each funny idea as a stand-alone piece of material. Once the first draft is developed into tightly written jokes, you will determine how to order the material and how to get it to flow.
• Don’t worry whether it’s funny or not. What we’re looking for in a first draft are strong comic ideas--funny ideas.
• Part of the craft and art of performing stand-up comedy is creating the illusion that you're being spontaneous on stage.
• Write about people, places, and things that annoy the hell out of you.
• Established stand-ups try out new material at small comedy clubs. TYpically, the new material is interspersed with tried-and-true material--material that has proven to reliably deliver us laugh. This way, if the new jokes don’t do well, there are still plenty of solid jokes in the set to entertain the audience.
• There is no better way to evaluate new material than performing it in front of a paying audience.
• An audience that includes paying customers is a more reliable gauge of new material than an audience made up exclusively of beginning comedians waiting to perform. Often other stand-ups are more focused on reviewing their own material than taking in a colleague's performance.
• Focus on getting laughs from the audience out front. Inside jokes can sometimes get big laughs from fellow performers but fall completely flat with the paying audience.
• Feedback should resonate with you; it should feel right. If it doesn’t, reject it. The only feedback you cannot ignore is the laughter or absence of laughter that your jokes receive from paying audiences.
• Stand-up comedy is a subject a lot of people think they know about. But in fact, it’s a rare person who can read or hear a piece of stand-up comedy material and have a good sense of how it will play in front of a club audience.
• The benchmark of great comedias is their capacity to get lots of big laughs. This has always been so, and so it will always remain.
• The setup is the essential information the audience needs in order to get the punchline.
• Part of the art and craft of comedy writing is the ability to identify and eliminate words that aren’t needed to get the laugh. The first move a comedy written makes to punch up a joke, then, is to shorten it.
• There is one exception to this short-setup guideline. A long setup is justified when its purpose is to ratchet up tension that will pay off in a big laugh.
• If your long setup builds tension and pays off with a big laugh, it’s OK. If your joke doesn’t require tension to set it up, keep it short.
• The best technique for keeping setups short is to make sure they contain only one subject. Rookies don’t know this and end up creating overly long setups.
• One attribute of a good setup is that it has one, and only one subject.
• Most of the time people laugh because they’re surprised by what is said in the punchline. So another feature of a good setup is that it protects the surprise of the punch. It misdirects the audience so they can’t tell where you’re going.
• If the audience can tell what your punchline is before you deliver it, the laugh will be weak or nonexistent.
• In summation, here are the attributes of a good setup:
• It is concise
• It is clear about its single subject
• It is clear about your attitude toward the subject
• It leads directly to a punchline
• It protects the surprise of the punchline
• The punchline is what triggers the laugh. Usually in stand-up it’s expressed in words. But it can also be a facial expression, or a piece of physical comedy, or a sound effect.
• If your punchline continues after the audience gets the joke, you’re stepping on your laugh and you may kill it.
• A punchline usually needs to be a surprise. Often this surprise is created by an unexpected shift in attitude from the setup to the punchline.
• Let’s review. A good punchline is:
• Concise
• COmes as a surprise
• Clearly expresses your attitude
• Part of the art and craft of comedy writing is learning not to get in the way of the laughter.
• THere’s an important variation of the setup and punchline format. It’s called a roll. A roll is a setup followed by multiple punchlines, all of which key off the one setup.
• Part of the art and craft of comedy writing is learning not to get in the way of the laughter. Rolls, by having a single setup with multiple punchlines, are a great way to accomplish this.
• After you’ve tried out your first draft, you need to work backward in order to format the material into setup and punchline jokes.
• Knowing where your punchline is enables you to write a concise setup.
• A setup needs to be clear about the subject and also clear about how you feel toward the subject.
• If you tighten up the writing of a joke and it gets less of a laugh than the original did, restore the cut words. You need them.
• You want your audience to get who you are, right up front. YOu want to be a vivid presence onstage. So another factor in determining which jokes to open with is to identify the ones that establish your comic personality.
• The more you write and perform, the clearer your comic personality will become.
• If you want to be edgy or shocking up front, keep in mind that you have to take the audience with you. THey have to like you to go along with your edgy material. You don’t want material up front that pushes the audience away from you.
• You want to end your best jokes.
• In stand-up, you are the transition. It is your comic personality that ultimately links together all of your jokes.
• Energy onstage is essential for a performer. Your energy stimulates the audience and enables you to dominate the room. Low-energy, listless performers bore their audiences.
• The ability to communicate to your audience, “I am so excited to be up here talking to you,” is the single most important part of performing stand-up.
• Gifted comedians create a distinct comic persona; they’re so clear about who they are that we feel we really know them.
• Being emotionally full means that the audience knows moment to moment how you feel about what you’re saying. It doesn’t mean that you’re expressing your feelings loudly. It means you’re expressing them clearly. Your way of expressing feelings will help define who you are to your audiences.
• Remember that every setup should be clear about its subject and about your attitude toward it. Your punchlines should also be grounded in clear emotions.
• A stand-up always performs the form of emotion, not the real emotion. The reason for this is simple: in order to laugh, the audience must know the stand-up is all right. We can’t worry and laugh at the same time.
• For a stand-up, there is one simple key to acting: know what attitudes you’re playing and act them out.
• Some new stand-ups don’t realize that performing stand-up is acting.
• For a comedy club audience to give its full attention to a stand-up, they need to feel that he or she is talking not at them or even to them, but with them, as if they are in a conversation with the stand-up.
• Make eye contact with people. It’s important for them to know you see them.
• People in the audience pay full attention to you when they feel you are paying full attention to them--when they feel that you are not up there delivering a speech to them, but rather are convivial conversing with them.
• The factors that constitute delivery are pacing, timing, emphasis, and pauses.
• Pacing refers to the overall speed of your delivery--you either talk fast or slow or in between. For a stand-up, the optimal pace is slow. Slow is funny. Underline that last sentence please.
• Going slow while maintaining strong energy is one of several performance skills that separate the pros from the wannabes.
• The key to effective timing is knowing the specific attitudes that underpin each of your jokes.
• To put a finer point on this invaluable piece of advice, there is always one specific word in the punchline that triggers the laugh--the punchword. Frequently the punchword is obvious: it’s the last word in the joke. BUt there are times when this isn’t the case and the obvious choice may be the wrong one.
• Identifying the punchword and the setup’s key word will help guide you to the right emphasis for your delivery.
• There are two places in every joke where a pause is necessary. The first is before the audience starts laughing. After you’ve delivered your punchline, if you don’t briefly pause, you’ll step on your laugh; the moment you start talking again is the moment they stop laughing, and you don’t want that moment to be right after you’ve delivered a punchline.
• The second place where a pause is necessary comes after the audience start laughing. This pause is called a hold.
• People can’t hear you while they’re laughing.
• During the hold, you want to silently keep performing the attitude that underpins your punch.
• A pause can build tension, create suspense, express confusion or astonishment, to name just a few. Working out the delivery of your jokes in performance will guide you to where a pause will contribute to getting the biggest possible laugh.
• The way to memorize your set is to repeat it over and over again. This will hardwire it into your brain, so that it’s there for you when you need it.
• Our first impressions of people based on how they look. Use this to your advantage. Pick out clothes that will help the audience see you the way you want to be seen.
• Also keep in mind the old show business rule of thumb that you want to be at least as dressed up as your audience is. You can be more dressed up than they are, but not less.
• An important part of establishing a comic persona is finding the right look.
• Do not drink alcohol or do recreational drugs before you get onstage. When you perform stand-up, your workplace, essentially, is a bar. It’s a place that encourages its patrons to drink. You are not a patron; you are a performer. Don’t get this confused.
• The signal light signals you to either wrap it up or stop. Make sure you know where it is. If you don’t have someone point it out to you. Also, be certain of what the signal means.
• The important thing to remember no matter how you are feeling is this: it doesn’t matter how you feel. What matters is that you give a solid performance. That’s a big part of being a professional stand-up (or a professional anything).
• The first thing to do when you get onstage is to adjust the microphone; you want to make sure the audience can hear you.
• When you handhold the mic, put the stand behind you; don’t leave it center stage. You should be center stage, not a metal pole.
• You have no idea how an untested spur-of-the-moment quip will be received, and the worst place for a joke to fail is right up front. This is the time the audience is making up their minds whether or not you’re funny.
• The time to take changes with untested material is after you’ve already got the audience laughing.
• The sooner you embrace the following concept, the sooner you’ll get good at stand-up: If you have a good time when a joke words, your audience will have a good time. If you have a good time when a joke doesn’t work, your audience will still have a good time.
• A save is what you say or do to acknowledge that a joke didn’t work. It’s another way of being in the room.
• Saves have to be used sparingly. If done too often, they bring attention to the fact that a lot of your jokes aren’t working. Used sparingly, they enable you to get laughs on jokes that don’t work.
• Every comedian bombs. It happens. The only people who never bomb are people who never perform. Don’t blame the audience; don’t get angry at them or at yourself. Finish up and thank them. Afterward, work to figure out why you bombed.
• Bombing doesn’t mean you’ve failed. It means you’re engaged in the process of becoming a professional stand-up.
• Never apologize during your set. When you’re performing stand-up, you are your own public relations firm. Don’t put negative thoughts about your work into your audience’s minds. Stand-ups who end their performance with that apology are inviting a friendly audience to suddenly question their work.
• In order to start getting paid as a stand-up, you need a set that elicits an unbroken string of strong laughs from beginning to end, consistently, night after night. This is what I call an all-”A” set.
• If you have an all “A” 5-minute set, you’ll get paid nothing. If you have a 10-minute all “A” set, you may get paid by a headliner to be one of his or her opening acts. [...] If you have 20-minutes of “A” material, you can start getting booked at roadhouses.
• The featured performer, who needs to have about 30 minutes of solid material, is usually paid in the high three to the low four digits.
• The headliner--who needs to have an hour of “A” material, television performing credits, and/or a very large social media following--can easily make 10 times what the featured act makes.
• Headliners can make between $40k and $70k to appear in shows over a weekend.
• The more you write, the more “A” jokes you’ll come up with--and the more you’ll get paid.
• I urge you to schedule time during the week to write. Don’t make the schedule idealistic, make it realistic.
• Treat [writing] the way you treat your other work-related responsibilities. Because bottom line, stand-up comedy is a business, and it’s a business that you own. If you get good at it, people will start paying you to perform.
• An actual recording of your performance is a far more accurate means of capturing the audience’s response to your jokes than your memory is. When you record, leave your device in the back of the club; don’t bring it onstage with you.
• The primary thing you want to capture is the audience’s laughter.
• Make sure the setup has only one subject so that you’re pointing the audience clearly in the direction of the punch. Make sure your attitude toward the subject is clear. See if you can restate the punchline in fewer words.
• The essence of punching up a joke is taking out all unnecessary words.
• The final and ultimate way of moving a joke up to an “A” is to change the attitude underpinning the joke to its exact opposite.
• If a joke has potential but needs a significant rewrite, the best way to start is by coming at it with an attitude that’s the opposite of its original one.
• Audiences have to feel that you’re talking about things that are red-hot issues for you right here and now. In comedy, the past is only funny when it still has you by the throat.
• It’s important not to forget the discipline of the first draft:
• Don’t throw anything out until you try it out
• Be an easy grader at the outset of a joke’s life
• The biggest mistake you can make in a first draft is to throw out a joke prematurely. If you apply the same rigorous standards to a new joke that you apply to the jokes you’re already using in performance, the chances increase that you’ll throw out material that could become “A” material jokes.
• Don’t forget that it took you time and effort to hone your tried-and-true material. It’s a mistake to get too conservative.
• Trying out new jokes is a risk, but it’s a risk you need to take in order to meet the demand for fresh material and stay vibrant and alive as a comedy artist.
• Big laughs are invitations to write more about those subjects.
• Learning which subjects work for you and, just as important, which one’s don’t, helps you to crystallize your persona.
• By writing more jokes about the subjects and with the attitudes that work best for you, and by eliminating the subjects and attitudes that don’t work, you will, over time, find your persona.
• The best way to find the subjects that work for you is to talk about whatever enters your comic mind. The second thing is to be emotionally full when you perform. The way to find the emotions that work best for you is to vividly perform a wide range of them.
• What makes people memorable both offstage and on is their personalities. Successful stand-upds develop memorable personas.
• The people who successfully break the rules are people who know them.
• The bottom line is the audience has to believe you. If they don’t they won’t laugh.
• Achieving genuineness starts with your joke writing. What comes out of your mouth doesn’t have to be true. It has to seem true.
• Don’t write generic jokes. If you do, try to sell them to generic stand-upds. Write jokes that no one else could possibly tell as well as you.
• The more the audience likes you, the more they will laugh. If they don’t like you, they won’t laugh. If they love you, you are on the way to becoming a star.
• Whatever you’re talking about in your stand-up, strive to make it personal; make it clear how strongly you feel about it and why it matters to you. And position it so that it’s something you’re struggling with not in the past but right now--this moment onstag.
• WHen the audience sees you wrestling with something that really matters to you, they laugh and they love you, because you’ve just made their own struggles easier to bear.
• It’s important to realize that having a struggle does not make you a victim. It makes you the leading character in your comedy. It makes you the person the audience is rooting for.
• Good entertainment provides us with the opportunity to exercise our feelings.
• So an important key to gaining stage presence for a stand-up is to write and perform jokes that convey to your audience how you feel about everything you say.
• A performer succeeds to the degree that he or she engages the emotions of the audience, moves an audience, provides them with a heightened sense of being alive. The performers who are capable of doing this are the ones who have learned to use their medium to express, in their own way, a vibrant emotional life.
• A lot of what is credited to talent is actually the result of hard work. Studies of people who excel at what they do [...] have shown that such people have one thing in common: they work harder than their colleagues.
• You can be as funny as you want to be if you are prepared to put in the work, if you refuse to settle for so-so laughs.
• As you add higher-quality material to your set, what once was a killer joke may now be marginal. That’s why the joke is bombing. This is the best reason in the world to cut a joke. You’ve become a much better writer and your old stuff is not up to your new stuff.
• In order to host, stand-ups need to have a conversational, cordial, and convivial dimension to their comic personalities. If you possess these qualities, you can and should seek opportunities to host shows. If you get good at it early on in your career, it will open up more gigs for you.
• A good MC is an essential component of a good show. Good MCs know how to get an audience laughing right up front. Further, they know how to maintain the laughter and decorum in the room throughout the show.
• The key to MCing, revealed to us by Mr. Sullivan, is to be enthusiastic. Be enthusiastic about everything--the show, the club, the waitstaff, the audience, and the acts. Remember, the audience feels what the performer feels.
• Traditionally, a flashing red light means wrap it up and a solid light means stop.
• A good MC never brings a performer to the stage when the audience is dead or inattentive. Never.
• For skilled comedians, business is always good. It’s the business of presenting stand-up that changes.
• Training under the guidance of a gifted stand-up teacher will speed up your development, and fortify your decision to pursue standup as a career.
• Perform as often as you can, anywhere and anytime you can. The techniques you learn from good stand-up comedy books and classes can significantly speed up your development. Applying what you’ve learned over and over again in performance will deepen, expand, and advance your stand-up capabilities.

PHILOSOPHY 101 by Paul Kleinman

• The word philosophy means “love of wisdom.”
• In a very broad sense, there are six major themes philosophy touches on: Metaphysics: The study of the universe and reality Logic: How to create a valid argument Epistemology: The study of knowledge and how we acquire knowledge Aesthetics: The study of art and beauty Politics: The study of political rights, government, and the role of citizens Ethics: The study of morality and how one should live his life
• While Socrates is widely regarded as one of the wisest men to have ever lived, he never wrote down any of his thoughts, and all that we know about him is based on the written works of his students and contemporaries (mainly the works of Plato, Xenophon, and Aristophanes).
• Socrates believed that in order for a person to be wise, that individual must be able to understand himself.
• Socrates is perhaps most famous for his Socratic method.
• By continually asking questions, Socrates was able to expose contradictions in the way an individual thought, which allowed him to come to a solid conclusion.
• By using the Socratic method, students are able to start thinking critically and using logic and reasoning to create their arguments, while also finding and patching up holes in their positions.
• One of the key ideas of existentialism is that the meaning of life and discovering oneself can only be attained by free will, personal responsibility, and choice.
• Aristotle breaks down how things come to be through four causes: The material cause: This explains what something is made of. The formal cause: This explains what form something takes. The efficient cause: This explains the process of how something comes into being. The final cause: This explains the purpose something serves.
• According to the tripartite theory of knowledge, knowledge is when a true belief is justified.
• Hard determinism is the philosophical theory that, because every event has a cause, all human action is predetermined and therefore choices made by free will do not exist.
• Hard determinism asserts that nothing happens without a cause, that no act is free from the law of causality.
• Consequentialism is the philosophical view that an action is morally right when it produces the best overall consequences.
• There are two basic principles to consequentialism: An act is right or wrong based solely on its results. The more good consequences created from an act, the better and more right that act is.
• Immanuel Kant is one of the single most important philosophers to have ever lived. His work forever changed the shape of Western philosophy.
• In philosophy, idealism refers to the various notions that share the belief that the world is composed not of physical things, but of mental ideas.
• There are three major types of dualism:
• Substance Dualism: Substance can be broken down into two categories: mental and material.
• Property Dualism: The mind and body exist as properties of one material substance.
• Predicate Dualism: In order to make sense of the world, there needs to be more than one predicate (the way we go about describing a proposition’s subject).
• In act utilitarianism, only the results and consequences of a single act are taken into account, and an act is deemed morally right when it creates the best (or less bad) results for the largest number of people.
• While act utilitarianism looks at the results of a single act, rule utilitarianism measures the results of an act as it is repeated through time, as if it were a rule.
• Empiricism is the theory that all knowledge comes from sensory experience.
• Rationalism is the theory that reason, not the senses, is where knowledge originates.
• Descartes is most famous for his statement “Cogito ergo sum,” translated as “I think; therefore I am.” According to Descartes, the act of thinking is proof of individual existence.
• Hobbes believed that basing philosophy and science on the observations of nature alone was too subjective because humans have the ability to view the world in many different ways.
• Hobbes believed that factionalism within society, such as rival governments, differing philosophies, or the struggle between church and state, only leads to civil war. Therefore, to maintain peace for all, everyone in a society must agree to have one authoritative figure that controls the government, makes the laws, and is in charge of the church.
• Intentionality is defined as the particular mental states that are directed toward objects or things in the real world.
• Metaphysics focuses on the nature of being and existence, and asks very complicated and profound questions relating to God, our existence, if there is a world outside of the mind, and what reality is.
• In metaphysics, existence is defined as a state of continued being. “Existence exists” is the famous axiom to come out of metaphysics; it simply states that there is something instead of nothing.
• In metaphysics, identity is defined as whatever makes an entity recognizable.
• Actions are considered to be unpredictable and are not caused by external events; rather, they come from us. In order for there to be free will, there must also be alternative possibilities, and after an action has been performed, the notion that it could have been done a different way must be present.
• The Enlightenment refers to a radical shift in thought that occurred in Europe (particularly France, Germany, and Britain) during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This movement completely revolutionized the ways in which people viewed philosophy, science, politics, and society as a whole, and forever changed the shape of Western philosophy.
• The introduction of the scientific method, which is based on observation and experimentation, allowed scientists to explain various theories through the use of reason and logic, and removed tradition from science.
• One of the most significant philosophical changes that came about during the Enlightenment was the embracing of rationalism (the notion that we gain knowledge independent of the senses).
• Nietzsche believed that there is always a need for people to identify a source of value and meaning, and he concluded that if science was not that source, it would appear in other ways, such as aggressive nationalism.
• Meanings of words are not fixed or limited. The meaning of a word can be vague or fluid and still be just as useful.
• There are two ways to value art: intrinsically and extrinsically. Those who believe art has an extrinsic value appreciate art as a way to express a recognized moral good and to educate the emotions, while those who believe art has intrinsic value believe that art is valuable in and of itself.
• Language is cultural (and can differ from culture to culture), and therefore, its effects on thought must be considered cultural effects.
• Language (which is affected by culture) has great influence over our thought processes, and therefore, it also affects our perception.
• Emotions are not only fundamental to culture; they are fundamental to being a mammal
• Ethical and moral systems are different for every culture. According to cultural relativism, all of these systems are equally valid, and no system is better than another.
• The basis of cultural relativism is the notion that no true standards of good and evil actually exist.
• Voltaire was greatly influenced by John Locke and the skeptical empiricism that was occurring in England at the time.
• There is evidence that there are certain cultural, linguistic, and cognitive universals among all people, regardless of their specific group, and the existence of these universals goes against descriptive relativism.
• The philosophical principles of Buddhism are based on the Four Noble Truths (the truth of suffering, the truth of the cause of suffering, the truth of the end of suffering, and the truth of the path that frees one from suffering).
• Put simply, the demarcation problem is how one can distinguish between science and non-science (this question also deals with pseudoscience in particular).
• FALSIFIABILITY: In order for a hypothesis to be accepted as true, and before any hypothesis can be accepted as a scientific theory or scientific hypothesis, it has to be disprovable.
• According to inductive reasoning, if a situation holds true in every observed case, then it holds true in all cases.
• Pseudoscience refers to those theories and doctrines that fail to follow the scientific method. Essentially, pseudoscience is nonscience that poses as science.
• The most significant argument against theism is known as “the problem of evil.”
• According to Epicurus, there exist four possibilities: If God wishes to prevent evil and is not able to, then God is feeble. If God is able to get rid of evil but does not want to, then God is malevolent. If God does not wish to get rid of evil and is not able to get rid of evil, then God is malevolent and feeble, and therefore, he is not God. If God wants to get rid of evil and is able to get rid of evil, then why does evil exist in the world, and why has God not gotten rid of it?
• There are three main types of arguments for the existence of God: ontological, cosmological, and teleological.
• Ontological arguments use a priori abstract reasoning to claim that the concept of God and the ability to speak of God implies that God must exist.
• Ontological arguments are flawed, for they can be used to show the existence of any perfect thing.
• The cosmological argument claims that since the world and universe exist, this implies that they were brought into existence, and are kept in existence, by a being. There must be a “first mover,” which is God, because an infinite regress is simply not possible.
• The teleological argument, which is also referred to as intelligent design, claims that because there is order in the world and universe, the world must have been created by a being that had the specific purpose of creating life in mind.

THE JOY OF X by Steven Strogatz

• numbers are wonderful shortcuts.
• Sure, they are great timesavers, but at a serious cost in abstraction.
• Just as numbers are a shortcut for counting by ones, addition is a shortcut for counting by any amount.
• The right abstraction leads to new insight, and new power.
• Subtraction can generate negative numbers.
• in many real-world situations, especially where money is concerned, people seem to forget the commutative law, or don’t realize it applies.
• Roman numerals may look impressive, but they’re hard to read and cumbersome to use.
• Roman numerals are only slightly more sophisticated than tallies. You can spot the vestige of tallies in the way Romans wrote 2 and 3, as II and III.
• Ten is marked by a position—the tens place—instead of a symbol. The same is true for 100, or 1,000, or any other power of 10. Their distinguished status is signified not by a symbol but by a parking spot, a reserved piece of real estate.
• All numbers can be expressed with the same ten digits, merely by slotting them into the right places.
• Any calculation involving any pair of numbers, no matter how big, can be performed by applying the same sets of facts, over and over again, recursively.
• With place-value systems, you can program a machine to do arithmetic.
• But the unsung hero in this story is 0. Without 0, the whole approach would collapse. It’s the placeholder that allows us to tell 1, 10, and 100 apart.
• All place-value systems are based on some number called, appropriately enough, the base.
• In the past few decades we’ve come to realize that all information—not just numbers, but also language, images, and sound—can be encoded in streams of zeros and ones.
• Algebra, for example, may have struck you as a dizzying mix of symbols, definitions, and procedures, but in the end they all boil down to just two activities—solving for x and working with formulas.
• Solving for x is detective work.
• Working with formulas, by contrast, is a blend of art and science.
• In fact, you never get back to even when you lose and gain by the same percentage in consecutive years.
• Complex numbers are magnificent, the pinnacle of number systems. They enjoy all the same properties as real numbers—you can add and subtract them, multiply and divide them—but they are better than real numbers because they always have roots.
• a grand statement called the fundamental theorem of algebra says that the roots of any polynomial are always complex numbers.
• So multiplying by i produces a rotation counterclockwise by a quarter turn.
• Electrical engineers love complex numbers for exactly this reason. Having such a compact way to represent 90-degree rotations is very useful when working with alternating currents and voltages, or with electric and magnetic fields, because these often involve oscillations or waves that are a quarter cycle (i.e., 90 degrees) out of phase.
• By looking at an extreme, or limiting, case, we can see that that answer can’t possibly be right.
• relationships are much more abstract than numbers. But they’re also much more powerful.
• Today, algebra is less beholden to geometry and we regard the positive and negative solutions as equally valid.
• A mathematician needs functions for the same reason that a builder needs hammers and drills. Tools transform things. So do functions.
• Power functions like these are the building blocks that scientists and engineers use to describe growth and decay in their mildest forms.
• Exponential growth is almost unimaginably rapid.
• it’s useful to have tools that can undo the actions of other tools.
• We perceive pitch logarithmically.
• In every place where they arise, from the Richter scale for earthquake magnitudes to pH measures of acidity, logarithms make wonderful compressors. They’re ideal for taking quantities that vary over a wide range and squeezing them together so they become more manageable.
• The Pythagorean theorem tells you how long the diagonal is compared to the sides of the rectangle.
• EVERY MATH COURSE contains at least one notoriously difficult topic. In arithmetic, it’s long division. In algebra, it’s word problems. And in geometry, it’s proofs.
• What’s important is the axiomatic method, the process of building a rigorous argument, step by step, until a desired conclusion has been established.
• Parabolic curves and surfaces have an impressive focusing power of their own: each can take parallel incoming waves and focus them at a single point.
• This focusing property of parabolas is just as useful when deployed in reverse.
• Mathematicians and conspiracy theorists have this much in common: we’re suspicious of coincidences—especially convenient ones.
• Sine waves are the atoms of structure. They’re nature’s building blocks.
• The key to thinking mathematically about curved shapes is to pretend they’re made up of lots of little straight pieces.
• Calculus is the mathematics of change.
• Roughly speaking, the derivative tells you how fast something is changing; the integral tells you how much it’s accumulating.
• Change is most sluggish at the extremes precisely because the derivative is zero there. Things stand still, momentarily.
• The optimal strategy, however, is to stop playing the field a little sooner, after only 1/e, or about 37 percent, of your potential dating lifetime. That gives you a 1/e chance of ending up with Dreamboat. As long as Dreamboat isn’t playing the e game too.
• In all cases, the business of theoretical physics boils down to finding the right differential equations and solving them.
• things that seem hopelessly random and unpredictable when viewed in isolation often turn out to be lawful and predictable when viewed in aggregate.
• The normal distribution can be proven to arise whenever a large number of mildly random effects of similar size, all acting independently, are added together. And many things are like that.
• Power-law distributions have counterintuitive properties from the standpoint of conventional statistics.
• Events don’t have to follow their probabilities;
• And just as everything is composed of atoms, every number is composed of primes.
• Like straight lines in ordinary space, great circles on a sphere contain the shortest paths between any two points.

23 THINGS THEY DON'T TELL YOU ABOUT CAPITALISM by Ha-Joon Chang

• Being critical of free-market ideology is not the same as being against capitalism.
• Human decisions, especially decisions by those who have the power to set the rules, make things happen in the way they happen,
• We do not live in the best of all possible worlds.
• 95 per cent of economics is common sense made complicated, and even for the remaining 5 per cent, the essential reasoning, if not all the technical details, can be explained in plain terms.
• There is no such thing as a free market
• The free market doesn’t exist. Every market has some rules and boundaries that restrict freedom of choice. A market looks free only because we so unconditionally accept its underlying restrictions that we fail to see them.
• Overcoming the myth that there is such a thing as an objectively defined ‘free market’ is the first step towards understanding capitalism.
• We accept the legitimacy of certain regulations so totally that we don’t see them. More carefully examined, markets are revealed to be propped up by rules – and many of them.
• Breaking away from the illusion of market objectivity is the first step towards understanding capitalism.
• Companies should not be run in the interest of their owners
• Shareholders may be the owners of corporations but, as the most mobile of the ‘stakeholders’, they often care the least about the long-term future of the company (unless they are so big that they cannot really sell their shares without seriously disrupting the business). Consequently, shareholders, especially but not exclusively the smaller ones, prefer corporate strategies that maximize short-term profits, usually at the cost of long-term investments, and maximize the dividends from those profits, which even further weakens the long-term prospects of the company by reducing the amount of retained profit that can be used for re-investment.
• Running the company for the shareholders often reduces its long-term growth potential.
• Limited liability means that investors in the company will lose only what they have invested (their ‘shares’), should it go bankrupt.
• Most people in rich countries are paid more than they should be
• The wage gaps between rich and poor countries exist not mainly because of differences in individual productivity but mainly because of immigration control. If there were free migration, most workers in rich countries could be, and would be, replaced by workers from poor countries. In other words, wages are largely politically determined.
• We should reject the myth that we all get paid according to our individual worth, if we are to build a truly just society.
• What an individual is paid is not fully a reflection of her worth.
• Most people, in poor and rich countries, get paid what they do only because there is immigration control.
• The washing machine has changed the world more than the internet has
• In perceiving changes, we tend to regard the most recent ones as the most revolutionary. This is often at odds with the facts.
• The emergence of household appliances, as well as electricity, piped water and piped gas, has totally transformed the way women, and consequently men, live.
• We vastly overestimate the impacts of the internet only because it is affecting us now.
• Human beings tend to be fascinated by the newest and the most visible technologies.
• Assume the worst about people and you get the worst
• Self-interest is a most powerful trait in most human beings. However, it’s not our only drive. It is very often not even our primary motivation.
• Greater macroeconomic stability has not made the world economy more stable
• Hyperinflation undermines the very basis of capitalism, by turning market prices into meaningless noises.
• However, there is actually no evidence that, at low levels, inflation is bad for the economy.
• The experiences of individual countries also suggest that fairly high inflation is compatible with rapid economic growth.
• Moreover, there is evidence that excessive anti-inflationary policies can actually be harmful for the economy.
• However, the truth of the matter is that policies that are needed to bring down inflation to a very low – low single-digit – level discourage investment.
• Anti-inflationary policies have not only harmed investment and growth but they have failed to achieve their supposed aim – that is, enhancing economic stability.
• Another sense in which the world has become more unstable during the last three decades is that job insecurity has increased for many people during this period.
• Free-market policies rarely make poor countries rich
• With only a few exceptions, all of today’s rich countries, including Britain and the US – the supposed homes of free trade and free market – have become rich through the combinations of protectionism, subsidies and other policies that today they advise the developing countries not to adopt.
• Free-market policies have made few countries rich so far and will make few rich in the future.
• Virtually all of today’s rich countries used protectionism and subsidies to promote their infant industries.
• To sum up, the free-trade, free-market policies are policies that have rarely, if ever, worked.
• Few countries have become rich through free-trade, free-market policies and few ever will.
• Capital has a nationality
• People migrate in search of a better life, sometimes literally to the other side of the world,
• A business will do what it has to do in order to increase its profit, even if it means hurting its home country by shutting plants down, slashing jobs, or even bringing in foreign workers.
• As long as the company generates wealth and jobs within its borders, the country should not care whether the company is owned by its citizens or foreigners.
• In short, few corporations are truly transnational. The vast majority of them still produce the bulk of their outputs in their home countries. Especially in terms of high-grade activities such as strategic decision-making and higher-end R&D, they remain firmly centred at their home countries. The talk of a borderless world is highly exaggerated.
• Different activities have different potentials for technological innovation and productivity growth, and therefore what you do today influences what you will be doing in the future and what you will get out of it.
• We do not live in a post-industrial age
• We may be living in a post-industrial society in the sense that most of us work in shops and offices rather than in factories. But we have not entered a post-industrial stage of development in the sense that industry has become unimportant.
• The US does not have the highest living standard in the world
• The average US citizen does have greater command over goods and services than his counterpart in any other country in the world except Luxemburg. However, given the country’s high inequality, this average is less accurate in representing how people live than the averages for other countries with a more equal income distribution.
• The US is not the richest country in the world any more. Now several European countries have higher per capita incomes.
• There is no simple way to compare living standards across countries.
• Africa is not destined for underdevelopment
• Having more detailed information does not guarantee better decisions – it may actually be more difficult to make the right decision, if one is ‘in the thick of it’.
• The reality is that winners are being picked all the time both by the government and by the private sector, but the most successful ones tend to be done in joint efforts between the two.
• Making rich people richer doesn’t make the rest of us richer
• Despite the usual dichotomy of ‘growth-enhancing pro-rich policy’ and ‘growth-reducing pro-poor policy’, pro-rich policies have failed to accelerate growth in the last three decades.
• The problem is that concentrating income in the hands of the supposed investor, be it the capitalist class or Stalin’s central planning authority, does not lead to higher growth if the investor fails to invest more.
• Even when upward income redistribution creates more wealth than otherwise possible (which has not happened, I repeat), there is no guarantee that the poor will benefit from those extra incomes.
• However, the trouble is that trickle down usually does not happen very much if left to the market.
• Simply making the rich richer does not make the rest of us richer.
• US managers are over-priced
• US managers are over-priced in more than one sense.
• American managers are not only over-priced but also overly protected in the sense that they do not get punished for poor performance.
• worker pay in the US has been virtually stagnant since the mid 1970s.
• Markets weed out inefficient practices, but only when no one has sufficient power to manipulate them.
• People in poor countries are more entrepreneurial than people in rich countries
• People who live in poor countries have to be very entrepreneurial even just to survive.
• What makes the poor countries poor is not the absence of entrepreneurial energy at the personal level, but the absence of productive technologies and developed social organizations, especially modern firms.
• In contrast, most citizens of rich countries have not even come near to becoming entrepreneurs.
• most people from rich countries spend their working lives implementing someone else’s entrepreneurial vision, and not their own.
• The point is that what really makes the rich countries rich is their ability to channel the individual entrepreneurial energy into collective entrepreneurship.
• Even at the firm level, entrepreneurship has become highly collective in the rich countries.
• We are not smart enough to leave things to the market
• People do not necessarily know what they are doing, because our ability to comprehend even matters that concern us directly is limited – or, in the jargon, we have ‘bounded rationality’.
• The world is very complex and our ability to deal with it is severely limited.
• Most of us create routines in our life so that we don’t have to make too many decisions too often.
• More education in itself is not going to make a country richer
• There is remarkably little evidence showing that more education leads to greater national prosperity.
• The importance of apprenticeship and on-the-job training in many professions testifies to the limited relevance of school education for worker productivity.
• mechanization is the most important way to increase productivity.
• In many lines of work, what counts is general intelligence, discipline and the ability to organize oneself, rather than specialist knowledge, much of which you can, and have to, actually pick up on-the-job.
• Education is valuable, but its main value is not in raising productivity. It lies in its ability to help us develop our potentials and live a more fulfilling and independent life.
• What is good for General Motors is not necessarily good for the United States
• Despite the importance of the corporate sector, allowing firms the maximum degree of freedom may not even be good for the firms themselves, let alone the national economy.
• not all regulations are bad for business.
• what is good for a company, however important it may be, may not be good for the country.
• Despite the fall of communism, we are still living in planned economies
• Capitalist economies are in large part planned.
• The fact that communism has disappeared for all practical purposes does not mean that planning has ceased to exist.
• In most capitalist countries, the government owns, and often also operates, a sizeable chunk of the national economy through state-owned enterprises (SOEs).
• Equality of opportunity may not be fair
• Equality of opportunity is the starting point for a fair society. But it’s not enough. Of course, individuals should be rewarded for better performance, but the question is whether they are actually competing under the same conditions as their competitors.
• Big government makes people more open to change
• A well-designed welfare state can actually encourage people to take chances with their jobs and be more, not less, open to changes.
• A weak welfare state was not such a big problem before, because many people had lifetime employment. With lifetime employment gone, it has become lethal.
• Financial markets need to become less, not more, efficient
• The problem with financial markets today is that they are too efficient. With recent financial ‘innovations’ that have produced so many new financial instruments, the financial sector has become more efficient in generating profits for itself in the short run.
• Labour services are expensive in high-income countries (unless they have a constant supply of low-wage immigrants, as the US or Australia), making everything more expensive than what the official exchange rate should suggest
• What makes financial capital necessary for economic development but potentially counterproductive or even destructive is the fact that it is much more liquid than industrial capital.
• A financial system perfectly synchronized with the real economy would be useless. The whole point of finance is that it can move faster than the real economy. However, if the financial sector moves too fast, it can derail the real economy.
• Good economic policy does not require good economists
• Good economists are not required to run good economic policies. The economic bureaucrats that have been most successful are usually not economists.
• Economics, as it has been practised in the last three decades, has been positively harmful for most people.
• To begin with: paraphrasing what Winston Churchill once said about democracy, let me restate my earlier position that capitalism is the worst economic system except for all the others.
• The profit motive is still the most powerful and effective fuel to power our economy and we should exploit it to the full. But we must remember that letting it loose without any restraint is not the best way to make the most of it, as we have learned at great cost over the last three decades.
• Likewise, the market is an exceptionally effective mechanism for coordinating complex economic activities across numerous economic agents, but it is no more than that – a mechanism, a machine. And like all machines, it needs careful regulation and steering.
• Second: we should build our new economic system on the recognition that human rationality is severely limited.
• The fundamental problem is not our lack of information but our limited ability to process it.
• Third: while acknowledging that we are not selfless angels, we should build a system that brings out the best, rather than worst, in people.
• Material self-interest is a powerful motive.
• Fourth: we should stop believing that people are always paid what they ‘deserve’.
• People from poor countries are, individually, often more productive and entrepreneurial than their counterparts in rich countries.
• Fifth: we need to take ‘making things’ more seriously. The post-industrial knowledge economy is a myth. The manufacturing sector remains vital.
• Sixth: we need to strike a better balance between finance and ‘real’ activities.
• A productive modern economy cannot exist without a healthy financial sector.
• Seventh: government needs to become bigger and more active.
• Eighth: the world economic system needs to ‘unfairly’ favour developing countries.

SQUAT EVERY DAY by Matt Perryman

• Any practitioner, whether we’re talking the line technician who keeps the phone lines working or the MD who keeps you healthy, has more knowledge than is immediately evident from their educational background and formal training. There is an unspoken ― and unspeakable ― element in the Doing. The term for this is tacit knowledge.
• Some things are going to remain fuzzy, and you’ll have to make judgment calls based on necessarily incomplete information.
• If doing everything wrong works better than doing it by the book, is it really wrong?
• Take the lifts you want to improve and, perhaps, a bare minimum of assistance work, and hammer it as often as you can.
• This is a trend among top weightlifters ― lots of pulling and squatting, then more pulling and squatting, leads to a strong squat.
• Strength sports aren’t bodybuilding. Strength means lifting things.
• A central theme of this book is that there’s more than one way to get strong.
• The “bulk and power” method, effective as it can be, is not for everyone, and probably has little place outside brief and occasional growth spurts.
• Paraphrasing Vladimir Zatsiorsky, the idea is to train as heavy as possible and as often as possible while staying as fresh as possible.
• Whatever you want to call it, the idea is to get as much exposure to heavy weights as you can stand.
• If you want more than modest results ― if doing it all “right” hasn’t worked out for you ― then you should be open to new kinds of training instead of resigning yourself to being a genetic reject.
• Circumstances matter. The people around you, the people in your gym, the atmosphere of your gym, what you read about training, who you talk to about training, what you believe about training ― this all matters, and I believe it is key to making any type of training effective.
• What you’re going to find in this book is affirmation of the basics: squatting, picking up, and pressing heavy weights on the regular.
• Strength training is Not That Complicated. The hardest part is showing up and putting in the effort. If you can do that, just about anything will work.
• Seek to lift gradually heavier weights and over weeks and months and years those tiny increments eventually add up to a respectable number. This is the fundamental principle of exercise: to stimulate physical fitness, we must present our bodies with ever-increasing challenges.
• For most of us, progress doesn’t happen in a straight line.
• Progress fluctuates. Progress is nonlinear.
• Muscle mass will always determine the upper limits of strength, but only in terms of potential strength. The more muscle available to contract, the more potential for generating force and torque around joints.
• You become what you do.
• Hebb’s rule, as this came to be, says that “cells which fire together wire together”. Nerves learn through repetition.
• The more you practice a skill, the better you become at that skill. Practice enough and the skill hardwires itself into your brain.
• A skill is just a movement. Once you learn it, you’ve learned it.
• In principle, the more practice you get with an exercise ― not just the gross movement, but the weight and technical conditions of that weight ― the better you get at it.
• To get good at lifting heavy things, you must practice lifting heavy things.
• It’s hard to draw a line between too much training and just being out of shape for what you’re doing.
• A high work capacity allows you to handle the volume you need to improve.
• The more quality work you do in training, the more your whole body ― muscles, nerves, organs, everything ― experiences a demand to adapt.
• More workouts mean more opportunities to practice under weights without the boredom and exhaustion of three-hour workouts. You get in shape through sheer repetition and consistency.
• Strength is about skill, teaching your brain how to handle both a movement and a maximum weight, but it’s also about building your body’s capacities.
• Progressive overload and neurological adaptation tell us that, at least in principle, the more you do, the stronger you can become.
• In principle, more frequent training should add up to more progress.
• Getting strong is not what the cliques would have you think, but neither is it complicated.
• If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science.
• Exercise science defines intensity as a physical measure: your output relative to your maximum capability. In strength training, intensity is given as a percentage of your one-rep maximum (1RM).
• Stress has a specific meaning: the biological response to a threat encountered by a living being. Stress is your body’s reaction to a threat.
• Train hard, then rest and recover.
• Supercompensation is all about timing.
• The supercompensation model dominates the way we think about exercise. Train hard, then take time off to recuperate. You grow outside the gym, not in it.
• Think patterns, not pieces.
• Muscles heal, and they heal fast ― especially if you’ve got a background of training.
• No single measurement can describe you as “recovered” or “not-recovered”.
• “Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.” ―Marcus Aurelius
• Fatigue is just a fancy way of saying that you’re tired and not operating at peak capacity.
• We’re often physically capable of doing much more work, at a higher effort, than we typically do, but from a survival standpoint, voluntarily working to a point of catastrophic failure isn’t the best idea.
• the brain is receptive to physical signs of fatigue as well as being the site of mental fatigue.
• CNS fatigue is nothing more ― or less ― than “getting tired” during training.
• The more you exert your will and train your attentional focus, the better you get at staying focused and in control.
• The survival systems in your body are dumb. They can’t distinguish between a deliberate exercise program and physical labor that might kill you. Your body treats conditions as they come without concern for the intent behind them.
• Reactivity can be thought of as how sensitive or numb you are to this environmental noise.
• Top lifters are natural intensity responders.
• Practice builds proficiency with lots of repetition at the edge of our limits.
• The lesson is that if you don’t find that “less” works for you, then you might be better served by upping the amount of work you do.
• High volumes of tissue-damaging exercise can, like infections and trauma, trigger a feeling almost like a mild form of depression.
• A prepared body can handle more than an unprepared body, differences in reactivity and constitution aside.
• Scaling back the stress of heavy lifts by way of periodization is certainly one way to address recovery.
• Exercise is supposed to be uncomfortable.
• Nothing says you have to train to deliberately maximize the discomfort.
• With repeated exposure to the stresses of heavy weights, lifters become better able to handle those stresses.
• The link between mental well-being and physical health is becoming clearer by the year.
• Your mind follows your thoughts.
• Every single thing you do, everything you encounter, every event or activity that elicits a response from you can influence the way your genes express themselves.
• Practice, however, is not just a matter of logging hundreds of uninspired hours. According to “expert on experts” K. Anders Ericsson of Florida State University, what defines the high performers is how they practice.
• You become an expert by pushing outside your comfort zone and working on those things just outside your grasp.
• Consistent practice working through not-so-great genes yields athletes who are still well above average.
• So that’s our target: to think of training as deliberate practice instead of another round of beating ourselves to paste.
• The brain, as we know, is particularly sensitive to the intensity of physical sensations, and when you exercise, fatigue in heart and lungs and muscles begins competing for our attention.
• Forcing yourself to pay attention, to reflect on and honestly evaluate each set, adds information that percentages and sets can’t quite capture, and this helps you keep your work sets dialed in to that zone of quality.
• To get good at lifting a really heavy weight one time, you need to practice lifting really heavy weights one time. Singles let you do that.
• Fatigue, not weight, causes injuries.
• That’s all autoregulation is: adjusting the next set based on the set you just did. You plan on the day, not in advance.
• A black swan is an event that appears unlikely in the extreme, at least according to our forecasting methods, but actually has a substantial probability of occurrence.
• Your body is the outcome of a few million years (at least) of mammalian musculo-skeletal evolution.
• Your training (and eating) gains no benefit from over-analysis and detail-fixation. Good enough isn’t just good enough – it’s all there is.
• Your body needs the kick provided by environmental stresses; it just needs them at the right levels.
• Lots of small doses and occasional extremes can create better long-term results than a gradual, incremental process.
• As we know by now, your mental and emotional condition is a crucial part of stress, and it’s also key to workout performance.
• Learning to relax in the rest of your life is as critical to this process as what you do during training.
• When you go hard, go hard. Push your weights, add more volume, and lift all the time. When you rest, don’t half-ass it by saying you’re “deloading” while hitting the gym for a couple of PR attempts. Rest. Stay away from the gym. In fact, donft think about the gym. Eat bad foods and drink beer.
• “If it’s worth doing, do it every day.” ―Dan John
• Experimenting costs you very little, but it has a potential for large payoffs.
• Don’t be afraid to tinker around and see what suits you – and if you feel like hitting a different lift, hit that lift. Be volatile.
• The “dead” in deadlift refers to the starting position: the bar sits on the floor, and you have to lift the weight from a dead stop.
• To summarize the two approaches: Squat a lot and limit deadlifts to fast pulls or one hard deadlift day. Or pull a lot, limit squatting, and cycle the daily training intensity and the range of motion (by pulling out of the rack or off blocks).
• When you squat every day, it will hurt no matter what weights you lift. Frequency has it’s own break-in curve.
• In my experience, losing your motivation for training and falling out of the habit is the hardest thing to recover from, and preventing that is always better than trying to fix it later.
• The people who focus on the doing, rather than the achieving, tend to get better results.
• Success happens when you do for the sake of doing. Success happens when you see outcomes as a result of effort, practice, and consistency, rather than the exclusive province of natural talent.
• Going through life as an unfocused zombie with an unsharpened mind. That’s dangerous.
• Act with intent. Focus your attention on the task at hand and cultivate self-discipline. Make the effort without making it effortful.

Winning Wrestling Moves by Mark Mysnyk, Barry Davis, Brooks Simpson

• A basic skill is either a fundamental wrestling technique or a skill that is key to several other moves.
• In either case, all wrestlers should master these seven basic skills: stance and movement, penetration step, lifting, hip heist, back arch, step back, and coming to a base.
• Stay on the balls of your feet when you move; take short steps, and never cross your legs. Your knees should be comfortably bent and your body flexed slightly forward at the wait. Your elbows stay close to your side to protect you from your opponent's offensive attack, ahdn your hands should remain in front so you can stop your opponent if he shoots in.
• In the hip heist the hips are lifted, or hoisted, off the mat and then rapidly and powerfully turned. The move can be used as an escape from almost all positions.
• Coming to a base refers to getting up from flat on your belly to your hands and knees. The correct way of getting to your base after you’ve been broken flat onto the mat is to bring one knee up to your side and then to push back over that knee.
• A more effective way to grab his wrist is with your palm facing out and your thumb on the bottom. It is much more difficult to break this grip.
• One of the basic things you want to do consistently is to get your opponent’s head down.
• Whenever you have an underhook, your opponent has an overhook (and different offensive possibilities of his own). It is therefore essential that you are lifting his arm and elbow with your underhook, thus controlling him.
• The most important basic principle for escapes and reversals is to always have hand control. Getting hand control should be the first step in almost every escape. Without it, good position, effort, and all subsequent moves may simply be wasted.