If you do have something you love to do, the fun part of the job is no different than what was fun about doing it in high school for no money. I thought there would be some greater reward in succeeding.

We're all working hard, but so far away from what we actually want to be doing. We're all peering in at the window of a party we aren't invited to yet, a party we wouldn't know how to dress for, or what kind of conversation to make, even if we came as someone's guest.

Perspective is the most important thing to have in life.

I remember feeling a huge amount of anxiety and worry and pressure. At that point I was headed into acting school. That was 100 percent the only thing I thought I wanted to do. But then I got through my first year of college, and I was, like, humming and rolling around, pretending to be a lion in acting classes at NYU and visiting our classmate Charlie Gregg at Harvard, where he was actually learning things. So I changed my mind: I decided I actually wanted a different kind of education, and that was an incredibly freeing idea.

I would rather be a person who struggled there than someone who had a great, easy time and then got out in the world and was like, "Wait a minute, I didn't get voted class president? What's going on?" You know, "popular" doesn't necessarily correlate to anything. "Popular" still has to get up at 7:00 in the morning and go to work and do something worthy too. There's no edge, really, that you get from being whatever was popular in school.

Maybe I should sit. Plenty of people use sitting as a way to pass the time.

The best part of getting to do what you like is just doing it. That doesn't have to do with being famous or even successful or even powerful. I see people in life who are just doing a job and seem to be having a good time. And that's the trick.