One thing that I went through and I was able to understand is: It's OK to not be OK. Right? Like nobody's perfect.

Yeah, I remember exactly that—I was in San Francisco, playing at a beautiful venue, and the siren of an ambulance came through, and it fit so well with the song that I started to play more to draw it out. I like to play in more noisy places so that I can take advantage of all the sounds helping me to build new things. But the one I remember the most is that siren in that venue. Sometimes I’ll play in venues where they’ll have coffee machines or milkshake machines—all these noises that I hated maybe five years ago—I love them now.

The reason why so many vivid, undeniably convincing characters in novels, films and plays so often failed to touch me was because these characters didn’t connect to any of the other characters in an interesting human relationship. And immediately, this next thought came regarding my own work: What if I stopped worrying about my characters and worried instead about my relationships?

Sleeping by 9 pm & getting a workout at 5 am has been helpful. Sleeping early reduces the chances of bingeing when we are drained and have low self-control at the end of the day. A workout in the morning also increases the odds of making healthier choices throughout the day.

I was going to say work on what you love, but that's not really it. It's so easy to convince yourself that you love what you're doing — who wants to admit that they don't? When I think about it, the happiest and most successful people I know don't just love what they do, they're obsessed with solving an important problem, something that matters to them.

No one has a 5.0 in real life. In fact, when you finish school, the whole notion of a GPA just goes away. When you're in school, every little mistake is a permanent crack in your windshield. But in the real world, if you're not swerving around and hitting the guard rails every now and then, you're not going fast enough. Your biggest risk isn't failing, it's getting too comfortable.