Bill Murray on taking chances and saying "No" | Hacker News Reader

Bill Murray on taking chances and saying "No"

ninjasandrobots.com

78 pointsnate24 comments

Interviewer, Scott Raab: A lot of folks worry that if they aren't available or don't say yes, they'll stop getting asked.

Bill: If you keep saying yes, they'll stop asking you, too. That's a much more likely event.

I don't know if the conclusion is for everybody to start saying 'no' more. Doesn't it depend on where you are? I know friends I stopped asking to hang with because all I have gotten is some form of repeated 'nos' in past. On the other hand, I have very few friends I stopped hanging with because they said too many 'yes' and I'm not sure if the reason was that they kept saying 'yes'.

Now, there are definitely times when you are saying too many yesses but in general, I think more people would do better by saying 'yes' than 'no' in their life.

To actually know whether you should be saying more of 'yes' or 'no' for yourself requires a much more nuanced evaluation than this generic post could offer.

In the interview he's talking specifically about saying "Yes" or "No" to an acting job.

If he says "Yes" to everything he'd be in a lot of terrible films. This could be a detriment to his career.

I think it's a completely different situation when you're talking about whether or not you hang out with a friend. In that case, I'd agree with you.

This guy should take an intro level improv comedy class. If BFM's quote was that inspiring to him, he's got a lot of learning yet to do.

As a comedian and an entrepreneur, I can say there are many overlaps between the two, and the willingness to take bold steps is just one of them. Another is to trust your team members. Another is to build on others' ideas, not tear them down. And many more.

Everyone should take an improv class, in secondary school and again in college.

Like the bard said, everyone's an actor; most people are just really bad ones. Knowing how your own facial expressions, gestures, voice and words really work is a crucial survival skill in human society, and one which you are very unlikely to pick up without a little training.

> Knowing how your own facial expressions, gestures, voice and words really work is a crucial survival skill in human society

You may want to rephrase this. I'm willing to accept it's useful, but it's clearly not a survival skill or there would be a lot of dead nerds out there.

I expect you're being downvoted for your derogatory and inaccurate use of "nerds"-- I know several theater nerds who are phenomenal actors.

Thanks. I meant nerds in the common meaning, derogatory or not. Let's try again and elaborate in more neutral terms:

I'm willing to accept it's useful, but it's clearly not a survival skill or there would be a lot of dead people with weak social skills but otherwise reasonably successful white collar lives out there.

Very very few cog-in-the-machine can't-talk-to-people tech people that otherwise lead reasonably comfortable middle class lives in our current society die because they don't know their own facial expressions, gestures, voice, or words.

In that case, I'll readily admit I was using "survival" in the hyperbolic sense of "NYC survival skills" than the literal sense of "wilderness survival skills". I'll downgrade it to "crucially significant determiner of success" if that's easier to stomach :)

And I'll again point out that most cog-in-the-machine can't-talk-to-people tech people are successful by the standards of majority of North Americans, let alone the world :)

I never said it was the sole determiner. If you can't talk to people but you can do tech, you can do all right for yourself; if you can talk to people and you can do tech, you can write your own check.

People in tech need this most-- we're way too willing to write off the primary importance that other people have in our lives.

This is getting silly, but: what percentage of cases of success would you say should exhibit a crucially significant determiner of success?

A lot of those lessons are within this speech by Amy Poehler, who is an amazing improviser and co-founder of one of the most important improv theatres in the game. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7N_L_pu74k

If that's the case, you should take an entrepreneurship class from him.

I'm sorry -- is this really a "great quote"...?

"The essence of design lies in the process of discovering a problem shared by many people and trying to solve it."

Just seems kind of obvious to me.

Yeah, fairly obvious.

Design is about delivering to a brief. Not necessarily discovering a problem, or necessarily a problem many people have.

"(noun) a specification of an object, manifested by an agent, intended to accomplish goals, in a particular environment, using a set of primitive components, satisfying a set of requirements, subject to constraints;"

It's really hard to judge a design without knowing the circumstances behind it. That is the first clue that someone does not really know about design - they will judge some design where they know nothing about the goals, constraints, or requirements.

Probably should have taken his own advice when it came to Garfield.

He thought that was a Coen Brothers movie: http://www.vulture.com/2010/07/bill_murray_only_did_garfield...

"Fair enough. But this doesn't explain why he returned for the 2006 sequel, Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties".

Probably a two picture deal.

Err, that's him being funny. No one at his level just has chats on the phone and has contracts written up and walks into a studio to do lines.

He saw a paycheck and took it. Come on, a brooding Garfield movie by the Coen brothers?

Joel Cohen (Garfield) is different Joel Coen.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0169505/

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001054/

Also, he made fun of himself in Zombieland over it.

"Do you have any regrets?"

"Garfield, maybe."

Actually I've heard him say that it was a misunderstanding in multiple interviews, quite candidly.

He doesn't have an agent. so . . it's possible.

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