I was jealous as hell.
Whose work makes you jealous?
I would always be tempted to take a movie I liked less if the payday was twice as much, and I’ve interviewed a couple people that grew up with wealth and I’ve watched them navigate their career and I’ve been envious of it. Nick Kroll comes to mind. He has so much creative integrity. He just does what fascinates him.
Tim Ferriss, The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, 19 November 2020 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 11 →
David Hare
Playwright and screenwriter
Nick Cave
Songwriter, musician and novelist
I’m envious of people who don’t need that. There are people that just wander round the world and ideas fall down from wherever, and they sit and they strum a guitar one day and they write a song, and then they carry on living. I could never work in that way.
Richard Hamming
Mathematician and computer scientist; Turing Award, 1968
I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell Labs. He had tremendous drive. One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode's office and said, "How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does?" He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, "You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years." I simply slunk out of the office!
Recorded
Bell Communications Research Colloquium Seminar, Morristown, New Jersey, Bell Communications Research Colloquium Seminar (transcription hosted by the University of Virginia Department of Computer Science), 7 March 1986
source ↗
Darren Aronofsky
Film director; Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler, Black Swan
I think I’ve always been jealous of musicians. You hear the story where Bob Dylan wrote a song in the afternoon and it became the anthem for a generation.
More on craft & work
- What is the worst job you have done? 232 answers
- What do you consider your greatest achievement? 193 answers
- How does a new work begin for you? 70 answers
- How do you know when a piece of work is finished? 69 answers
- What do you do when you feel creatively blocked or stuck? 69 answers
- How much rewriting or revision do you do? 51 answers
Also answered this
Darren Aronofsky, Nick Cave, Matthew Walker, Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, Orhan Pamuk, Cheryl Strayed
Search the directory for somebody in particular.
Explore further
- All craft & work questions
- Explore the archive — by field, age, era, and subject