We recently connected with Nick Leydorf and have shared our conversation below.
Nick, looking forward to learning from your journey. You’ve got an amazing story and before we dive into that, let’s start with an important building block. Where do you get your work ethic from?
Without a doubt, my parents. I’m an only child, and I grew up in a very rural area, so I was around my parents all of the time. We lived in a trailer for most of my childhood. My parents were always working hard to give me a better life. My mom worked about 45 minutes away so she was up early every morning to get to work by 7am. Eventually, we moved into a home that didn’t have wheels! That always stuck with me. If you have a goal in mind and you work hard at it, eventually you can achieve it.
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 comedian but I wasn’t always a comedian. I went to school to become a lawyer and quickly found out that being a lawyer wasn’t the best fit for my personality. I’ve made the transition into another area of law (estate planning – wills and trusts) that is better suited to who I am. In the meantime, I rediscovered my creativity. My dad was an art teacher and my mom was a graphic designer and I surrounded myself with music and art as a kid. I got away from that side of me. I’m doing the work and discovering what money wounds I have and how that affected my initial career choice. As I got older, I decided to get back into creative pursuits. Making people laugh was always something I enjoyed doing. About 11 years ago, I decided to go to an open mic to tell jokes and I was immediately hooked. I have been writing and performing ever since. I will probably always be a lawyer because I enjoy helping people, but now I don’t look at it as all that I am as a human being. I don’t want to be remembered only as being a lawyer. I’ve been working hard and putting my energy into becoming the best writer and performer that I can be, and it’s been an amazing journey of self-discovery. New opportunities seem to be presenting themselves to me and I’m looking forward to the opportunity to record a special in the near future.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
I would say that one quality that has helped me tremendously along the way is the ability to be honest with myself. If a show didn’t go how I wanted it to, I didn’t ignore it and move on immediately. I think there’s so much to be learned by sitting in those uncomfortable moments with yourself. I didn’t always have that and I haven’t perfected it yet, but there’s so much to be learned from failure. Our society focuses so much on success that I think it discourages people from trying. There’s going to be so many micro-failures but you’re going to learn from them if you’re able to sit with how uncomfortable they make you.
Next (and let me preface this by saying that I am by no means some sort of monk or guru I struggle with this every day) is the ability to ignore the opinion of others. Whatever it is that you’re doing, you have to be able to detach yourself from what people will think about it. I know with comedy, I want to talk about things that I think are funny. I don’t want to focus on doing jokes that I think other people want to hear. If I do or say what other people want to hear, I may enjoy some short-term success, but in the end I won’t be happy with myself because I wasn’t honoring my opinions and values.
Another quality that has been helpful is coming up with a routine. When I’m working on something, I want to set up times with myself that I’m going to work on the project. Having a family and another career makes carving out time difficult, but I’ve found that I am most productive when I look ahead and put specific times on my calendar when I’m going to work on a project. People think that creative pursuits just hit them like a bolt of lightning. Those things can happen, but putting in the work with things like writing every day will help you be open to accept the new ideas that come your way.
As we end our chat, is there a book you can leave people with that’s been meaningful to you and your development?
One book that I recently discovered that has helped me refocus is “The Creative Act: A Way of Being,” by Rick Rubin. It is broken down into small chapters that make it an easy read. As I’m getting ready to record a special, I have a lot of material that I am able to pull from. There are some jokes that I wrote early on in my career and there are some jokes that I have recently written that I am excited about. One quote from the book that has helped me process what it is I want to talk about in the special is “[a] work of art is not an end point in itself. It’s a chapter in our lives. We acknowledge these transitions by documenting each of them.” There’s so much going on in that quote. Whatever I choose to talk about in the special isn’t going to be the end for me. It’s just a small part of my life and represents what’s going on for me at the moment. There are so many great things about the book that I find myself telling everyone about it.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.comedianat.law
- Instagram: @comedianatlaw
- Facebook: @comedianatlaw
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCv3QqmLNLMLvQVRWXaseDpA
