The End

So, what have we learned? I hope your answer was “to have fun”. That is the main goal after all. But after that I hope you know now, you only change by feeling good. And that you can change. Change your mindset, change your abilities when it comes to being funny and that you can change slowly. Give yourself time to grow on your own time.

It’s not a race. It’s a dance.

But while growing, please remember that the most important ingredient to a joke is the sudden cognitive change which you get by following the Formula:

“Create or use an already existing assumption and fulfill or disappoint it in a surprising and satisfying way.”

Also that “a joke conveys information in a funny way”, which means that you have to have something to convey i.e. a topic. Which gets researched until you find two elements you can combine in a new and surprising way. Et voilà, as the French speaking Swiss say, you have a joke.

And finally get yourself a writing habit that you can sustain. Showing up daily doesn’t mean that you have to produce genius amounts of work every day.

Showing up daily just means that on average you will produce good work. Some days it will be great, some days not great at all. So be kind to yourself.

Try your best every day! But remember that what your possible best is, changes from day to day.

Someone once said, the most important thing while traveling isn’t the destination or the gear or the mode of transportation. It’s the company.

And writing is - most of the time - a very lonely activity. You are your own company. So don’t be shitty to yourself. Someone once told me, that the best piece of advice her therapist ever gave her was something along the lines of this:

“Whenever you call yourself stupid or lazy or anything else negative, imagine yourself saying these things to a good friend of yours. Would you do it? You wouldn’t, right? Instead you would try to encourage them and to cheer them up. So if you wouldn’t be mean to a friend, why would you be mean to yourself?”

And it really helps me. Not that I don’t catch myself calling me stupid anymore, but at least I’m aware and then I try to do better next time.

Which is all we can do: Try again next time.