Dare to Suck

How to Chase Your Dreams, Part 1

The t-shirt read “Dare to Suck.”

I was sitting in my first day of Intro to Sit-com Acting at Lesly Kahn and Co., a well-known acting school in Los Angeles where my instructor had just handed me a pre-shrunk welcome gift.

Considering the provocative command, I asked, “And, why in the world would you tell someone that they should suck?”

The instructor, a working TV actor with more than a decade in Hollywood, had seen plenty of new students cycle through this classroom, so he knew how to handle the new cohort’s resident smart-ass.

“Lesly’s not saying that you should suck,” he replied. “She’s saying that you do suck — at acting — now, but that you are here to suck less through study and hard work.”

This was in 2006, during my first stint chasing comedy full-time. A lot has happened since then, and I outgrew the t-shirt a long ways back, but the words “Dare to Suck” have always stuck with me. When I re-committed myself to stand-up and writing eight years ago, I became fully aware of what living the DTS motto really means. The scary truth about any new pursuit or reinvention — artistic, athletic, or…