At one stage, I was like, “I don’t have much money. I thought, “Maybe I’ll do that for a year, write about it and see if anybody benefits from what I’m learning the hard way by doing this.” That project grew and got a bit out of control. The experiment entered my mind influenced by the work of AJ Jacobs, Tim Ferriss and other writers who’d gone deep into topics that interested them or scared them and wrote about it. It was born out of trying to host that charity show for him and keep going with it. I’ve always been afraid of public speaking, but this seems like the most horrendous way ever but also the most sensible way ever to get over a fear of public speaking because it’s sheer repetition in the most difficult format you could ever throw upon somebody. The idea was to spark that if he can do this, I might be okay doing this. I don’t remember thinking he was funny in any way, but somehow, he was making his thoughts funny on a nightly basis enough to pursue a stand-up comedy. How is he doing this?” I don’t remember laughing at him. I remember thinking, “He wasn’t super funny. I suggested it because I happened to know a stand-up comedian.
It might be the stage where I need something else to do it by existence.” A friend of mine, unfortunately, suffered a spinal cord injury and we ended up doing a bunch of fundraisers for him and one of them turned out to be a comedy show. I remember when I came back, I only had one voicemail on my work phone number and it was a lady who’d found my dog, Murphy, and wanted to return him and I didn’t have a dog. When there wasn’t something happening, there wasn’t a bit of an emergency, nobody knew where I was or what I was meant to be doing. I would have to do God knows what, make it all work pretty quick and dedicate a lot of errors to doing it. When there was a big problem to solve something in the world, I had to be there. I’ve had enough of working for a while.” It got to the point where I took a month’s holiday, I went to Bolivia hiking and I never told anyone at work because my job had got so ridiculous that I could go missing for months at a time and nobody noticed. I needed an excuse, a bit of a side project, some random idea that would give me an excuse to say, “Screw it. I was a resident in San Francisco and I didn’t want to move to London. Why? What changed? How’d you go from that to this?
It was quite a tangent to go down the humor road, to say the least. It was working all around the world doing weird problem-solving stuff for them. Before I went down this rabbit hole, I was working as a troubleshooter for the world’s largest private education company. David, if you weren’t working as a comedian, author or business consultant, what would you be doing with your life? They’ve had them all over the place, but not where he’s from or not where he went to school. It’d be wrong if I didn’t squeeze the University College Dublin in there somewhere. He has lectured at Stanford Graduate School of Business, UC Berkeley, University of Oxford and University College Dublin. David also performed stand-up comedy and was the winner of the prestigious 43rd Annual San Francisco International Comedy Competition. He’s a sought-after international speaker. His work has been featured by Inc., Lifehacker, The Huffington Post, Fast Company, Entrepreneur, Forbes, NPR and The Wall Street Journal. David is the author of the bestselling book, Do You Talk Funny? and the Founder of the FunnyBizz Conference of which I have been a member of. His work has been featured in Inc., Lifehacker, The Huffington Post, Fast Company, Entrepreneur, Forbes, NPR, and The Wall Street Journal. David Nihill is the author of the best-selling book Do You Talk Funny? and the Founder of FunnyBizz Conference.
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