Watch me tell this story on stage, without notes at a Moth StorySlam competition:

About a month ago, I decided to be an extra. You know, one of those people who stands around in the background while a scene is going on. I’d never really acted before, except a tiny amount in high school, but I was short on cash, and I figured it would give me something to talk about at parties, other than computer programming.

I signed up on a web site, and next thing I knew, I was playing a trendy gallery attendee in a pilot for a major TV network, although my formal title was “Magazine Hipster.” Considering I’ve seen a role entitled “Big, Italian Thug,” I got off easy.

As it turns out, I am “accidentally” suited to this kind of work. As a talent agency (and several casting directors) explained, I was handsome enough, and I had a really cool, unique look. The very day after my first extra gig, I was cast without applying or auditioning for an ABC comedy as a “featured background player,” meaning I was in a weird spot between extra and principal, in which  one is sometimes alone, but often with two or three other people, and doing some specific thing, generally with no lines.

I played a stylist this time, and while two of the main characters walked past me, I pretended to spruce up a supermodel’s outfit, while standing pretty still, and keeping out of the way, just like I was supposed to. Of course, I wasn’t really a stylist, I just played one on TV, so for the duration of each ninety-second take, I would poke, pull, fluff, and blindly yank away at some thousand-dollar outfit on a six-and-a-half feet tall supermodel (in heels). And sure enough, each time the director would yell “cut,” the actual stylist for the show would walk onto the set and discretely, politely repair all the damage I had done while disheveling that outfit. It was like clockwork: “Action.” I messed up the outfit. “Cut.” The actual stylist tirelessly repairs my damage. Over, and over again.

“Well, that wasn’t too bad,” I figured. “I’m on top of this.” So I applied for another “featured background” role as a photographer at a Downtown gallery opening, once again for a major TV network. More of the same, I figured. An hour later, I got a phone call telling me that they have cast me- great.

The next day, I got a fifteen-minute phone call from the head of wardrobe, talking about what I should bring, what they have on site, etc. “That’s pretty nice of them,” I figured. More attention than I’d gotten in the past, but I didn’t have enough experience to think much of it.

I showed up to holding that evening, and there was a copy of the script taped to wall. Everybody, including me, was ignoring it. I was asked to report to wardrobe, where the guy I talked to on the phone spent about fifteen minutes dressing me (I looked pretty sweet, I gotta say). Then, the casting manager escorted me to the set. When we got there, he’s like “you read the script for your scene, right?”

“Uhh…no.” Come on! I’d never even held a script for the other two gigs. Why the hell would I have read the script? (Obviously, I didn’t say any of that, though.) Then the casting manager said “What!? You didn’t even look at the script? Dude, you were specifically cast for this role. Always read the script. Hey props, get this guy his camera.” Then he walked off, probably to go talk to a freaking professional about…TV stuff or something.

So, props brought me a thousand-dollar camera, which I was wearing around my neck, and the director’s assistant, this native New Yorker, took me in the next room, and pointed to the floor, where there were lines of tape in four different colors. He told me that three of those colors were for the three stars of the show, and the fourth color- that was for me. Multiple lines- I have to move around…on queue? While doing stuff?

My brain was crunching all that stuff, and I realized, at some specific point, when I had this “oh, shit” moment, that I would actually have to act. How did I not ever think about this? Suddenly all these thoughts were running through my head, like “what should my face be doing?” “how should I stand?” “I did not need that Red Bull an hour ago.” I was thinking about all this stuff that, were I to have any aspirations for being a professional actor, I would have thought about for years. But I don’t, and I wasn’t. And I had ten minutes to sort it out in my head.

The director, who was British, had by this point, apparently noticed that I holding this camera in what was possibly the most unnatural way possible, because he came up to me with (recurring theme here) an actual photographer to show me how to make it look like I’d taken at least a single picture in my life. (By the way, the photographer, alias “Boogie,” was super-cool. Check out his work here.)

At this point, I’ve looked over the script, learned the art of fake photography (faux-tography), had a breakdown and then recovered from it- just in time for the extras to pour in. We were about to begin shooting.

I was in position, waiting for my queue to enter the camera’s focus. The director yelled “action!” and I ended up (of course!) missing my queue by probably twenty seconds. Realizing this, I came in long after the actual actors had recovered gracefully from my mistake. The scene was an absolute disaster.

We finished the scene, and the director yelled “cut.” Nobody said anything to me. After much waiting, the director’s assistant came out. “That camera is not lovin’ you. That camera is not lovin’ you. Get it together, Jim. We’ve got work to do.” Then, the director came out. “Jim, what were you doing? Eons passed while we waited for you. We were all waiting, Jim. Do you understand that tumbleweeds were blowing around between where you were, and where you were supposed to be?”

We did another take. When I walked up, the actress was supposed to act surprised. Of course, I’m such a noob that when I walked up on cue, I thought that she iwas genuinely surprised, so I almost messed up that take, too. But I didn’t, and both director and assistant came out and said that I’m on point, and that they were happy with me. I should make it clear: these aren’t mean guys, and I don’t have anything against them. They had a lot of people to manage, all at once, and I was the one wasting one hundred dollars a minute with my laughable amateurishness.

We continued to shoot, and as it turned out, I did pretty well for the rest of the takes. The cast and crew treated me with respect, and called me by name, and the extras acknowledged me as their king, their just leader.

My victory that day was small, but it nonetheless felt great. I survived a trial by fire, one scene at a time.

3.5 Stars (out of 5)

Like my review on Predictably Irrational, this post exists because Obie Fernandez’s great talk, Do the Hustle told me to read this book. I obeyed, and I’m better off for it. Thanks, Obie!

The sub-subtitle is “How to Build a Lifelong Community of Colleagues, Contacts, Friends and Mentors.” Frankly, Keith explains how to do exactly that. Although I have not managed to validate the large majority of his claims, he seems to bring a lot of good advice to the table, and I will put it into action in my own life.

Lest you squirm in your seat and take a long, elitist drag from your latte, I’ll reassure you that Never Eat Alone isn’t a sleazy treatise on business networking. However, it is a book on networking, whether Keith likes the term or not. The main reason I didn’t rate the book higher was that it felt rushed near the end, with substantial changes to the writing style. However, Keith’s suggestions are worth ingesting, from the first chapter to the convenient quick-reference index following the manuscript.

I hope you don’t need convinced that the “dog-eat-dog theory” of human interaction is sooo 80’s, and that meeting (and then helping and getting along with) people is how most successful people accomplish their goals. If you’re still riding the aggro train, you are in dire need of this book.

And for everybody else? In my experience, the majority of people, even those in networking-intensive careers, are sub-par at forging relationships. This book will guide you.

A central reason why the book is useful is its concreteness. It is neither abstract nor touchy-feely. Yet it is not obnoxiously direct, either. The chapters are spiced with mini-biographies, which provide examples to follow. Too many relationship/success books are vague. Never Eat Alone contains numerous nuggets of actionable advice.

SurveyGizmo, a web-based tool for creating and administering surveys (with an API), has written about my RailsRumble team in one of their recent blog posts. Our application, which ties into the user’s SurveyGizmo surveys, will “manage the coding of verbatim survey responses,” said teammate Pauli Price in her interview with SurveyGizmo. Big thanks to SurveyGizmo for their support and encouragement!

Read more here.

4 Stars (out of 5)

I first learned about Predictably Irrational by watching Obie Fernandez’s great talk on consulting, Do the Hustle.

According to Ariely, people behave irrationally. Though seemingly innocuous, this statement defies classical economics, a world in which buyers and sellers consistently make rational choices in their best interest. You may be thinking that markets must therefore be a hodge-podge of random transactions, which are unable to be aggregated into any kind of meaningful model. However, according to Ariely, there is hope: there is a (wait for it) predictability to the irrational choices we make.

Ariely explains this through a series of amusing anecdotes in which his studies (and their results) are stories told, rather than results analyzed and conclusions drawn.

Predictably Irrational’s conclusions have a left-leaning bent, which I find unusual for a book on any kind of economics. However, politics is not at the heart of Ariely’s book, people are. I recommend this book for a quick, easy-but-substantive read on what actual empirical evidence shows what people actually think and do, and why.

Am I crazy? Don’t I want my projects and compensation to be “set it and forget it?” Not really; with that kind of thinking I’ll look at my watch one day and realize a decade passed- and probably what should have been one of my cooler decades.

I want to work with a variety of other people’s startups, and my own, as well. Both types of work complement each other well. Next thing you know, you’ve got an upward spiral of success up in here, like whoa.

Who wants complacency? I know that the classic version American Dream is to get a job and be guaranteed employment for life in exchange for hard work and good behavior (at least according to my grandparents). I don’t see how someone could work with the same people, in the same company, for more than four years without feeling stagnant. There are plenty of exceptions- investment bankers, lawyers, and others whose jobs are inherently dynamic and ever-changing. However, according to my experience, most people’s jobs aren’t really like that.

Well, the hope is that this will be pretty well-maintained, and more on the side useful than whiny or mundane. That being said, I’ll probably write about things other than software and startups with some frequency.