Learn from stand-up comedian

In the 2022 Grace Hopper Conference, my biggest learning was at a dinner with a group of women engineers from Amazon’s Vancouver office. It turned out, one of them was also an amateur stand up comedian. She wasn’t particularly talkative or funny in the party. If the girls who came with her didn’t “tell” her out, I would have never guessed! So we asked about how she got into the stand up comedy business. “It was purely out of a joke.” she said. Her friends threw her name onto the stage when they were in a bar hosting a stand up comedy show. She got picked, so she just did it. And she loved it. I asked how stand up comedians wrote their scripts. “Yeah we mainly just bring up the silly things we did and laugh at ourselves.” “Why do you want to do that? I mean … make yourself silly in front of people?” “Well, when you laugh at yourself with the audience, you let go the negative energy you accumulated, then you can move on”, she said joyfully. Ha! Do you replay the things you did at work, what you said to others, what other people said to you, someone took away your credit, someone wronged you, someone belittled you, someone ignored you … all these negative emotions from work ruminating in you mind, eating you alive? I did. I am doing better now but I am definitely not immune to these stuff yet. I run, I swim, I read and write. That is how I deal with these negative energies. Maybe we should also learn to tell our silly stories, laugh at ourselves, very importantly together with others. It is like we get out of this body and mind we call “self”, and we watch humorously at the “self” doing and saying all these silly things that the “self” took so seriously. And we laugh! Then all these sadness, anger, jealousy, resentment, ego … resolve into nothingness. And we are free.