They Can’t All Be Classics...

Yep. That’s right. I’m mailing this blog post in. How does that make you feel, reader? Good? No? Well, here’s a picture of me not giving a shit:

You see, I’m living my life by a points system right now, and I get points for posting a blog entry. That’s right. In the system I’ve set up for myself, this shitty post means I reward myself.

So clearly, it’s a flawed system.

Flaws and all, though, it’s a system that has helped me have by far the most productive two weeks in New York since I’ve moved here. I hit some sort of bottom a couple weeks ago, and I decided to get back to something that I’ve tried off and on for years - making my own productivity into a game.

I’ve always had trouble staying focused and getting the things done that I want to in life. That has been helped immeasurably the past 8 months or so by taking Adderall, but there are other things that I’ve found help me to stay on track, too.

For whatever reason, my brain responds to numbers. If you tell me to do 20 things, I’ll probably do none of them. But if you tell me I can get 100 points - five points for each thing - then the odds are, I’ll try to knock some of them out. I don’t know why my brain responds differently when you tell it to do 6 things instead of a half-dozen. But somehow, I’ve found that it does.

And thus, the past few weeks, I’ve been giving myself points for each time I go out to shows, for each time I perform a set, and for each joke that I sit down and write out. And at least so far, the results have been really encouraging, and they’ve helped me bounce out of what had become a prolonged phase of hibernation.

Oh. And I get points for posting blogs, and for being active online, as well. Which is why you get this post, which I probably never would have written if I wasn’t going to get points for it.

But I do. And so even though it’s not a perfect blog, or inspirational, or perceptive....it’s a blog, damn it. It’s helping to define the experience of our move up here. So I think it’s totally worth rewarding myself for it. Because I did it, damn it. I wrote it. I went online, I wrote something, and I posted it. So now, I can update my points total:

That’s the trick to New York, by the way. It’s not going to be perfect up here. But 90 percent of it is going out, getting onstage, and being willing to put yourself out there. That’s what the game is up here: Be willing to put yourself out there.

That, and try not to be a huge dick. And be yourself onstage. 10 bonus points for each.