Takeaways from Jerry Seinfeld on Tim Ferriss:

To survive in comedy you have to be a writer
“As any writer can tell you it’s 95% re-write”
“I think I could solve just about anyone’s life, I don’t care what you do, with weight training and transcendental meditation” Jerry Seinfeld
“If you could take your experiences and ask to trade them in, the last ones I would trade would be the failures, those are the most valuable ones” Jerry Seinfeld

Jerry’s Writing Process

Jerry finds systematizing his processes extremely valuable
- He writes every day in the morning
- Writing sessions should not be open-ended, that’s torture
  - You should have an end time to reward yourself
His writing process hasn’t changed much over time
- He divides his writing into a free play, creative phase, and a polishing phase
  - Jerry spends lots of time in the polishing phase until each sentence creates a pleasing sound in his ears
Great writers are those who dedicate a tremendous amount of time to it

A lot of Jerry’s writing material comes from his “cranky” nature and sensitivity to being provoked by many things
- Success is the biggest enemy to this because it allows you to remove all difficulties from life

On Seinfeld

Jerry attributes the success of Seinfeld to his obsession with every little detail
- He decided to end the show after 9 years because it was getting too big and difficult to manage
- He thought that if he kept going the quality and the audience’s experience would have suffered
Jerry managed to keep conflicts low among the people involved in Seinfeld by immediately addressing them as they arose

“If you could take your experiences and ask to trade them in, the last ones I would trade would be the failures, those are the most valuable ones” Jerry Seinfeld

If Jerry could write anything on a billboard seen by Billions of people it would be “Just Work”. To learn to become competent in comedy and most other things in life, you have to put in the work