Crazy ideas and hard work: The nuts and bolts of a fulfilling life | Nick Offerman | Big Think

Our society has become so clickbait-y and superficial. It’s very seldom in interview situations that you’re asked anything of substance – the thing I get asked the most often is, “So tell us about this movie. Why should we go see it?” To which I always want to answer: Don’t go see it, go fuck yourself. I’m not like – that’s not my job to tell you why you should go see this movie! “Because you want to.”

It just goes to show how lazy most media outlets are. I would simply say ignore all of the channels. Ignore all channels of popular culture and focus on what you like and what you and your friends and/or family like. Because the stuff that I grew up that was like my weird bits that I did with my cousin and my sisters and brother, the stuff that I thought was weird of that stood out to me, I focused on that and through my theater training and then through my career it was always the counter culture weirdness that spoke to me that made people – it’s interesting the jobs I get to do often come from like-minded people.

There’s a very specific group of us and we find each other and say oh, now we’re 47. Let’s make a TV show together. And so by focusing, if you just consume what’s being fed to you then you never find out if there’s a really stinky cheese that might be your favorite thing to eat. One thing that really attracted me to this script, I had worked on the previous film The Hero with Brett and his co-writer Mark Bash. But he makes these really thoughtful movies about humanity.

And I loved when I read the script and there’s this element of the father-daughter relationship where they kind of take turns at who’s being the parent and who’s being the kid. And I thought that was really attractive and fun to play and realistic. It’s a strange thing to see a kid want to go away and become a doctor and not only that but like we see her studying hard. She’s an erudite student. She’s very serious about where she’s going and yet she has this musical talent that she doesn’t take as seriously.

And to see the dad sort of saying, “Come on, I really want you to think about throwing away all your responsible dreams and run away and join the circus with me, your dad!” In my own life I grew up in a very conservative small town in Illinois in a very conservative family. Every – it’s an amazing family of heroes. There’s about 30 of us now in this extended family and I’m the only one that doesn’t live within an eight-mile radius.

And every single family member is either farmer, school teacher, librarian, paramedic, nurse—and we have one craft brewer, my brother. He’s the king of the family. But I’m the only one, and I always had this idea that I wanted to entertain people but I didn’t have the culture coming in to – I never learned of the channels by which I might achieve that.

And so when I was a junior in high school—and you had to begin to declare what do you want to do, where do you want to go to college if so. And it was pretty wild that I said, “I think I want to become an actor.” And the whole county was like “No, I don’t believe you can do that from here.” And I said “Well, but those other people must have come from somewhere.”

And really like all the channels, like the guidance counselor at school had a list of the 36 things you could study. And not only was actor not on there, there were no arts on there! The only one was musician. One guy from my town had gone to music school and he became a band director at a college. And so that was their precedent, and they said, “What do you want to do – go be a band director at a college?”

I was like no, I want to like make people laugh, or I want to be in movies and stuff. And so it was pretty crazy but here’s where some serendipity happened. I was with my girlfriend who was auditioning for a dance department at the University of Illinois. I met some theater students and I said, “What the hell are you talking about? You’re ‘theater students’?” And they said, “We study theater.” And...