We recently connected with Nathan Timmel and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Nathan, thanks for sharing your insights with our community today. Part of your success, no doubt, is due to your work ethic and so we’d love if you could open up about where you got your work ethic from?
To speak bluntly, my family was poor white trash when I was a child. We were on food stamps for a while, and that makes a lasting imprint on you.
I saw my mom work her way out of the situation, and since my dad wasn’t willing to, she left him behind.
I realized you can’t wait for something to happen, you have to put in the effort to try and make it happen. There are no guarantees in life, but there is an old saying, “The harder you work, the luckier you get.”
The “luck” in that situation is, of course, your hard work paying off.
Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
I’m a stand-up comedian by trade, an author as a hobbyist, and occasionally (read: “sparsely”) voice “talent” when offered the opportunity.
I’ve been posting a video a day on all the silly social media sites for over a year now, and that effort has gained me just under (as of this moment) 100,000,000 views on YouTube alone.
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
The biggest skill I had was something I didn’t even have to work for: a lack of fear of public speaking. I’ve always been fine-n-dandy with speaking in front of crowds, and I couldn’t tell you why.
Today, everyone wants to be an influencer, and they’re more than comfortable speaking into their phone while recording a video, but they’re still afraid of standing on stage and putting voice to an original thought.
I guess if I were to have any advice for beginning comics, it would be to steak from Nike: just do it.
Get on stage, and start having your voice heard.
It doesn’t matter if you’re good or not when starting out, just make sure you challenge yourself to be unique.
Alright, so before we go we want to ask you to take a moment to reflect and share what you think you would do if you somehow knew you only had a decade of life left?
I live in Iowa, which makes it exceedingly difficult to be seen (or cared about) by the costal powers that be. New York and Los Angeles are where the power structures are, and if you aren’t in front of them, they don’t care about you.
Iowa is considered part of flyover country, and it’s easily dismissed.
I’ve got to do what I can in order to be seen, and whether or not it will ever happen is unknown.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://nathantimmel.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nathantimmel/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/nathantimmel
