The Best Advice Show

Niccole Thurman is a Los Angeles-based Actress and Writer. TRANSCRIPT:ZAK: Today's advice from actor, writer and comedian, Nicole Thurman, contains some explicit language. You've been warned.NICCOLE: Don't do wifey shit for a fuck boy. I saw that on a t-shirt once and I was like, fuck yeah.ZAK: Tell me more. I love this.NICCOLE: Ok. Ok. So, don't do wifey shit for a fuck boy. It's about not giving yourself and your time and your emotional labor to a man who is emotionally unavailable, stunted, not interested in actually being in a relationship...any of the above. I feel like when I saw that shirt I was in a relationship with a guy who was completely, emotionally unavailable, had told me he didn't want to be in a relationship to start the relationship. But I still was like, no no, I know what's best for us. Like, we like each other. We should be together. So then we ended up in a relationship that he did not want to be in and he was deceptive and not good the whole time because of it.ZAK: And you were doing wifey shit?NICCOLE: I was doing wifey shit! We lived together. He drove my car. His name was on my insurance. We went to weddings together. I was way more emotionally invested then he was, talking about future events, saying, I love you, to no return.ZAK: Did you see that shirt during the relationship?NICCOLE: During the relationship. I was downtown in LA and I was walking to work and I was almost, always in a bad mood cause the mother fucker was always doing something. So, I was walking and I saw this woman crossing the street and it said, Don't Do Wifey Shit For a Fuck Boy and I was like, damn!ZAK: What did you do in the moment?NICCOLE: It was one of those epiphany moments. I think it's like, you see it happen all the time where it's like, a man will tell you directly something about how he feels or he's not available to give you what you want and woman will be like, oh, I can see potential here. They see a project. They don't see a product. They don't see the person in-front of them that doesn't want the thing. And so I think it just put that in my head. Cause you don't think of your boyfriend as a fuck boy while you're dating them. After I broke up with him one of my friends was like, I always thought he was a fuck boy. And I was like, what!? Why didn't you tell me. But then you start to see the light like, I'm giving all this energy to someone who's not gonna be around in a year, six-months, whatever.ZAK: Did it change the way you are in relationships now?NICCOLE: I'm way more cutthroat, but in a good way for both me and the guy. If a guy's like, I can't be dating right now, I'm like, byeeeeeee!ZAK: My last question is. It was hard for you to acknowledge that he was a fuck boy during the relationship. For people that are in relationships now and want to figure out if maybe they're with a fuck boy. Is there a question you can ask yourself to help you see more clearly?NICCOLE: I think there's a series of questions. And there's also a series of moments that you need to pay attention to and not brush off because I think it's easier to brush the moment off and keep moving forward with this thing that's not happening. You have to say, did he ever say, I don't want to be in a relationship. You deserve more. Or, I can't give you what you need. Or, I don't know if I'm there yet. I don't know if we're on the same level. Like, those phrases...GET OUT. If you want a relationship. These are for woman that want a relationship. I'm a person that wants a relationship and I wasted a year and a half of my life on someone that didn't want the same thing because I wasn't listening to the...I wasn't getting the clues up front. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. ---Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow---Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better.https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9---Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at ZAK@bestADVICE.show---Share this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow

Liz Alpern is passionate about reimagining tradition and bringing people together. Liz is co-founder of The Gefilteria and co-author of The Gefilte Manifesto: New Recipes for Old World Jewish Foods. To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BESTTRANSCRIPT: ZAK: The Jewish holiday of Passover is coming up this week. It's a holiday commemorating the Israelite's liberation from slavery in Egypt. And today on Food Friday we have some advice about Passover, celebration, symbolism and liberation. Our guide is Liz Alpern. She's a Jewish food entrepreneur, educator and cook author.ZAK: To start, for our non-Jewish friends, what is matzah and why do we eat it on Passover?LIZ: So, matzah is a ritual food of Passover. A ceremonial food of Passover. And so, it is essentially like a cracker or a flatbread and it has symbolic meaning because in the story of Passover, in the story of Exodus that's told during the Passover holiday, the whole idea is that the Jews were slaves in Egypt and they fled very quickly. And they barely could bring anything with them and so they, like, didn't have time for their bread to rise and so they threw some flour on their back and kind of got the hell out of dodge. You know what I mean? And so, matzah is bread. That biblical bread that is associated with this fleeing of Egypt and on a spiritual level there's this whole process that you do in your life but it's supposed to have a spiritual element to it. I mean, "supposed to" in air quotes. You clean your house of all of the leavened products. You get rid of them leading up to the holiday. And so there's this spiritual meaning that I've learned around this which is about confronting your ego. Confronting all the things that are puffed up. Confronting the stuff that you're carrying that is maybe taking up too much space, right? And so this idea of this cleansing process maybe the week before and then during Passover eating this humble, flat bread that is like, the literal symbol of what it is to be humbled has a lot of spiritual meaning and the way it's translated is that it's the bread of affliction...this bread that symbolizes the experience of slavery.ZAK: How do you do it? How do you make your own matzah?LIZ: My gosh. So easy. You take some flour. You mix some water. Basically, it's 4 parts flour to 1 part water. So, I mix this very, very, very basic dough. I roll it out as thin as I can. I break it up into some chunks. Roll it out, thin, thin, thin, thin. Poke some holes in it and I throw it in the oven and I bake it for about 5-6 minutes total. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. ---Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow---Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better.https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9---Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at ZAK@bestADVICE.show---Share this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow

Emily Berman is a mom and audio-maker based in Washington DC.To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BESTTRANSCRIPT: ZAK: Do you ever gossip about somebody over text and then you realize to your horror you sent the text to the person you're talking shit about!? Of course you have, you're human. And if you haven't, good on ya. But if you have like the rest of us, you might appreciate this advice. EMILY: DO NOT TALK SHIT ABOUT PEOPLE IN WRITING. Don't do it in text. Don't do it in an e-mail. Don't write it on a piece of paper. Don't write it down. And this works on a lot of different levels. You can go very deep with this. Like, biblically deep. First of all, its saves you from being caught in a very embarrassing situation. It pauses you for a second. If you just like, have this rule that you're not gonna write things down. If you're not gonna say anything bad about someone else...you pause. You're not gonna text it. You have to call the person to say it. You have to call whoever you want to talk to. Are you gonna make the call just to say that thing? So, it gives you a second to reflect. And if you call, ok, you call and you say it and then maybe notice how you feel after that. Like, was it worth it to call to say that? Like sometimes maybe but generally speaking it feels pretty bad to say...you might start to notice. I've started to notice that it feels pretty bad to say negative things about people. EMILY: And, this is not my idea. This is one of the most important laws in the Torah, which is the laws surrounding Lashon Hora which means evil speech or evil tongue is what is means exactly. And it's really one of the worse things you can do in the Torah because it is so destructive. Things you say about other people can be destructive to them in their lives in so many ways. EMILY: It's an on-going practice. Everyday you're going to be confronted with this situation of like, you have the thought of something you feel about someone else. Something you need to get off your chest. And then you have your choice of like, what are you gonna do? Are you gonna quickly express those thoughts to someone else? Are you going to keep it to yourself? And like, you're gonna practice over and over not writing it down. Not making the call to express the feeling and then eventually, I don't know if I can say I think the thoughts less, but I feel like it's becoming a smaller and smaller part of my personality and my goal is to be a person who does not say negative things about other people. ZAK: When you're suppressing the urge to write shit or talk shit, what do you do then with that feeling of like, man, this person just was being an asshole and I want some catharsis from it?EMILY: Ok, so like, sometimes I don't do it perfectly. Like, sometimes I do pick up the phone and call the person I want to talk to about it and vent for a second. But, it's like I'm getting quicker and being more empathetic to the person I would have said something negative about. Little by little it doesn't feel as much like suppression, although at the beginning when I first learned about this, it did feel like I was suppressing things and I felt stifled. I just want to say what I think. I just want to say...I just want say how I feel and that's important because I feel it. But it actually becomes a spiritual practice of empathy. Cause it feels terrible to think that other people are out there saying bad things about me. And if we're all just doing that, that's such a heavy reality to be living in. So, I guess I am trying to do my part to change the reality...change the way we all communicate with another and just, I'm not gonna do that. I'm not gonna say something bad about you, Zak. Laughter. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. ---Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow---Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better.https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9---Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at ZAK@bestADVICE.show---Share this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow

Marty Maddin is a husband, father and a leadership and performance coach.Tell me your regrets at 844-935-BEST OR ZAK@BESTADVICE.SHOW TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: Ok, it's July, 1995. Where are you in your life at that point?MARTY: So, I am in high school and it's summer time and I'm working at a day-camp. ZAK: And so, in your mind you've got a lot going on?MARTY: It sounds funny when you say it now, but yes, at the time I thought I was pretty busy with life.MARTY: I have an older brother and he thought it would be really fun to go to Chicago to see the Grateful Dead. They were playing at Soldier Field and I thought it was a great idea and I thought about it for a day or so and then I just kind of got a little lazy and felt like I was kinda busy with all the different things that I thought were going on at the time and so I told him, you know what, lets just wait until next year. Maybe I'll join you next year. I think he was planning on going either way so he was nice enough to invite me but I kind of told him I was too busy. ZAK: Is it I don't have the time? I don't want to put the energy into going? What do you think was your headspace then?MARTY: Probably the biggest thing was I felt like I could just do it at any point in the future so why do it right now.ZAK: That was July 9th, 1995. Grateful Dead plays at Soldier Field. They open with Touch of Grey. They close with Box of Rain and that ends up being their last show ever. Because one month later...ARCHIVAL NEWS: Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead guitarist who kept the counter-culture of the 1960s rocking and rolling right into the 90s died today in California. He was 53. MARTY: It was a crazy moment because I was on the bus working when I found out that he passed away and I really did have a moment of, oh my gosh, I blew it. That can never happen. I can never get that chance to go to that concert with my brother and see Jerry Garcia perform and so it was sad. I chose incorrectly. I, you know, being a little lazy there was not the right choice. I think the advice is to...well it's really two things. It's to live in the moment because it's so easy to have regrets about the past and to be worrying about the future and what you have to do or what can happen or how much time you have and to stay present to what you have right in-front of you right now. What I had in-front of me in that moment was an amazing opportunity to go spend time with my brother and go see an amazing band and because I was worrying about things that I needed to get done, I missed that opportunity. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. ---Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow---Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better.https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9---Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at ZAK@bestADVICE.show---Share this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow

Alice Bagley is a gardener, biker and time-banker from Detroit. Throwing Seeds with AliceTo offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BESTTRANSCRIPT: ZAK: Welcome to The Best Advice Show where everyday a different guest offers a little morsel of wisdom for you. ALICE: Hi, this is Alice Bagley from Detroit, Michigan where I am a gardener and biker and time-banker and probably some other things. My advice today is to wait to clean-up your garden until it's warmer. Here in Detroit we're having a warm spell. Its gotten up to 60 or 70 degrees the past few days but it's gonna get cold again and if you clean up all the leaves and sticks and other brush in your garden you can clear away the eggs and cocoons of a bunch of insects that we like such as butterflies and preying mantises and lovely, native bees. So if you can you should wait to clean up your garden.ZAK: But, Alice says, if you feel like you need to be more productive in your garden. There are some things you can do, like...ALICE: Prune your fruit trees and your bushes. This is the right time of year to do that. There's a bunch flower seeds that actually like to go through freeze/thaw cycles. Especially wildflowers so you can put some seeds around to do that. If you must plant some thing which I totally feel that too, some seeds you can plant this time of year are peas, carrots, beets, spinach, salad greens. You can also look in your vegetable garden to see if some stuff lived through the winter like spinach usually does and I was able to find some beets and carrots out in the garden too. So if you do have to clear-off the garden you put on your mulch, like maybe you put down some leaves and straw, you can just clear them off of the place where you're gonna plant things. You don't have to clear your whole garden out. You can just push the leaves or straw off to the side, plant the seeds that you want to plant and hopefully it will be more spring-like soon when the temperature is more reliably above 40 or 50 degrees everyday. That's the time of year to start clearing out your garden beds and all the old, dead plants from last year. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. ---Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow---Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better.https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9---Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at ZAK@bestADVICE.show---Share this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow

Evangeline Garreau writes the Good Questions newsletter. Read it!Shira Heisler is a physician and complimenter.To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BESTTRANSCRIPT: ZAK: I'm pleased to welcome back Best Advice Show regular and the love of my life, my wife, Shira.SHIRA: If you have a compliment for anyone. Like, if it just crossed your mind and you're like, hey, that guy has beautiful eyes. Or, oh, you're really kind and generous. Or, you look pretty today. Whatever compliment you have for anybody who crosses in your life, stranger, friend, partner...tell them.ZAK: That's a great piece of advice, Shira.SHIRA: That's why it's on the show.ZAK: For sure, but I was complimenting you.SHIRA: Oh. Laughter. Good. Good.ZAK: I love this advice. I recorded it with Shira a long time ago and I finally got around to putting it together today and actually, literally, five-minutes after I finished editing this episode and uploading it, I got this voicemail on the advice hotline. This is unbelievable! EVANGELINE: Hi, my name is Evangeline Garreau and my advice is to say the nice thing. I don't remember where I first heard this but the idea is that every time you think something nice about someone, you should tell them. For me this mostly shows up with clothing. Anytime I notice a cool shirt or a nice piece of jewelry, I want to tell the person how great it is. This happened a lot more pre-pandemic but still on Zoom calls when I notice that people make an effort, I want them to know that they look great. It makes me feel good to give them a compliment and it makes them feel good to receive a compliment. And often it leads to friendship. People tend to like you more when you tell them nice things about their clothes. I also feel like it's the kind of thing that when you practice in a low-stakes context, like, complimenting someone's outfit, it gets easier in a high-stakes context like, telling someone you love then for the first time. I have an example that's not quite that high-stakes but recently I had a moment where I was feeling really grateful for my mom and my sister. We were navigating a hard family issue and I felt really good about how it was being handled. And, I had a moment where I thought, should I say something or is that totally sappy to just tell them, oh, man, you guys are so great. And then I thought, say the nice thing, and I'm glad I did because they deserve to know how much they mean to me and who knows what's gonna happen tomorrow. So, whether it's about shoes or true love...say the nice thing. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. ---Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow---Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better.https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9---Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at ZAK@bestADVICE.show---Share this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow

Ma'ayan Plaut (@maayanplaut) is Senior Manager, Audience Development & Engagement at PRX.Plating with Ma'ayan To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BESTTRANSCRIPT: ZAK: It's Food Friday and today return contributor, Ma'ayan Plaut is here to talk about sandwiches. Not just any sandwich, though. MA'AYAN: I don't know if it's cause I miss my parents a lot right now but I've been making a lot of what my mom likes to call the two-handed sandwich. And it's actually more of an idea than it is a recipe and it's delicious because it's filled with all sorts of crunchy vegetables...usually lettuce, cucumbers, sprouts, for my mom it has to have avocado in it. If you're me, any type of savory spread, avocado included, also welcome. And the main thing here is that it's piled super-duper high. It's absolutely beautiful to look at and it's the best. First bite, last bite, all of them are great. The only challenge with the two-handed sandwich is that it's really just that. It only works best if you're holding it with two hands and whoa is you if you decide to put it down for any reason whatsoever. So, the thing is with all of those crunchy vegetables and all of the spreads, everything starts sliding in every direction, so the bread might fall off completely because of all the stacked, multiple dimensioned things on top. The vegetables, especially if they're slide-y vegetables like cucumbers or sprouts, they just slide side-ways and you kind of just end up with something I call a miserable tossed salad with bread that just so happens to be on the side or on the bottom. So my solution is actually to self-contain the sandwich and that usually comes from one of two things. It's either a well-places toothpick or you can wrap your sandwich up either in wax paper or aluminum foil and that just gives you some extra, internal stability when all of the slide-y and crinkly and gravity-defying fillings have all these ideas about what a strong, free-standing structure really should look like. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. ---Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow---Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better.https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9---Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at ZAK@bestADVICE.show---Share this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow

Dr. Glenn Gass is a provost professor emeritus at The Indiana University Jacobs School of Music.To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BESTTRANSCRIPT: ZAK: This is Dr. Glenn Gass.GLENN: I'm a provost professor emeritus at The Indiana University Jacobs School of Music and just retired this past May.ZAK: When I was Professor Gass' student in his History of The Beatles class. Yes, that's a real class and yes it was most the beloved class on campus and one night in class, professor Gass told us this Beatles story which remains one of my favorite Beatle's stories. And I think the essence of this story has a jewel of wisdom that I've been thinking about a lot, which we'll get to. But first, let's go back to the spring of 1966 when The Beatles were recording the song, Yellow Submarine.GLENN: And they had a bunch of friends over. Marianne Faithful, Brian Jones, Hunter Davies, Alf Bicknell. They just said, come on in. They just wanted normal voices singing the chorus, so it didn't sound like The Beatles singing in perfect harmony. They had Mal Evans with a parade bass drum and they had the cocktail party. That's actually Patty Boyd, George's wife that has the big shrieking, high life in the middle of that and the glasses clinking and all the sound effects. So, anyway they did this and they did the overdubs singing, we all live in a Yellow Submarine and everyone was having a great time. Who knows, it's 1966, so they're probably having a really great time. The engineer, Geoff Emerick went to lock up the tapes and turn off the lights and he came back out to turn out the lights in the studio. He walked in the control room and looked down to Studio 2 and saw everyone was still there. They were there with Big Mal Evans and that parade drum in the front of this conga line with everyone on the person in-front of them's shoulders, swaying back and forth singing, we all live in a yellow submarine. I mean there's no tape running. The song is done. They're having so much fun, they didn't want it to end. That's so beautiful on so many levels. The Beatles just want to be together. They want to sing and have fun together. You wouldn't likely do that on a George, Paul or John song but for Ringo, lets all gather round our friend and just have a good, old sing-a-long.ZAK: I love it so much. I love thinking about how, the song in this instance, maybe not with all their output, but maybe in this case, the song was just a by-product of their friendship.GLENN: Yes.ZAK: The song wasn't even the point. The point was them being together and having fun and, awesome, this amazing song came out of it.GLENN: The point was being together, having fun and the song expresses that. My friends are all aboard. Many more of them live next door. The whole song was about being together with your friends and the fact that Paul wrote it not for himself but for his friend. So, it not only is about friendship, it sort of embodies friendship.ZAK: We have these really loud baseboards cause we have a boiler with hot water heat and in our bedroom it sounds like we're in a submarine right now and I've been thinking about the song and thinking about how, all of us, are in our own...if we're lucky to have our own proverbial submarines with the people in our lives we love. Like, we're just kind of very insulated in our own yellow submarines right now.GLENN: Yeah and everyone's submarine is so different.ZAK: At the beginning of the pandemic, parents with young families were talking about how they would have impromptu dance parties. It's like finding fun where they can because we don't have access to all these old ways of having fun outside our houses. So, I feel like that's another thing that this song makes me think of. It's just like, make meaning amid the isolation.GLENN: Create the world you want to be in. Create the atmosphere you want. And damn the torpedoes we're gonna do this submarine song and we're gonna have fun with it. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. ---Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow---Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better.https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9---Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at ZAK@bestADVICE.show---Share this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow

Karen Semone is a senior director of innovation at Salesforce. To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BESTTRANSCRIPT: ZAK: Warning, today's episode might put you to sleep. But if it does, that's a good thing. Here is Karen Semone's advice for falling asleep easier and dreaming better. KAREN: You basically think of a place that you loved as a child. For me it's my grandma's house. And you take a visualized tour of that house. It's not about the people in the house. It's about the place. But it's very much a sensory experience. So you really feel what the handle of the door feels like. You smell. You visualize the smell. You try to remember details of where the photos are on the photo wall, where her art was. And you walk through the rooms. And more often than not, by the time I've gone through the whole house, I'm asleep which is awesome. You enter through the garage and she has this very old-school screen door and I think it is a form of meditation because you have to be really methodical and sort of, slow. Sometimes I like to pretend like I can smell her famous pecan sticky buns that she would always make in the morning. ZAK: Is it always your grandma's house that you do?KAREN: It's funny. I change it up but it usually tends to be places I visited in summertimes as children. So I have a couple of cottages that I did or my aunt's house where she had a pool. And I think that might just be because it's light-hearted memories. Like, positive associations. And I tend to have nicer dreams since I started doing it. My name is Karen Semone. I am a senior director of innovation at Salesforce. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. ---Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow---Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better.https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9---Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at ZAK@bestADVICE.show---Share this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow

Tiffany Paulsen (@thetiffanypaulsen) is a screenwriter, producer, director. Her most recent film, Holidate, is on Netflix. TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: Thanks for listening to another episode of The Best Advice Show where everyday I talk to someone new who's got a little morsel of wisdom for you. Something you can take with you and try, hopefully immediately. I've been in touch with some listeners recently who hear my daily call-out for advice but think they don't have anything good to offer. You're wrong. You do. It doesn't have to be sage and profound. My favorite type of advice is stuff the advice-giver is still working on. So, what is it? What are you working on in your life that you think might be valuable or helpful to some other people to work on? That's the stuff that I want to hear. Give me a call at 844-935-BEST. So, that thing about the advice-giver still working on the advice. That's true of today's episode. TIFFANY: Hi. My name's Tiffany Paulsen. I'm a screenwriter, producer, director. Most recently I wrote the romantic-comedy, Holidate for Netflix. The thing that I try to do and I want to get so much better at is, do the hard thing first. Doing the hard thing first is something I'm really working on and is helping me because I find when the hard thing is out there and I mean the email I don't want to send, the call I don't want to make, the thing that's broken in my house that I have to figure out...it just hovers. It hovers in my workspace. It hovers in my energy. And it slows everything down. So, getting that thing that I don't want to do that I'm regretting out of the way is really helpful. ZAK: And once you're able to do that. Once you actually get the hard thing done first, what does that do to the rest of your day?TIFFANY: Well, first of all I find that the hard thing is never as hard as I'm anticipating that it's gonna be. So, it instantly relieves anxiety. And for me as a writer, I just feel like anything I can do to free up my creative space and my brain-flow is always gonna be more positive to my work-day and have a better outcome with my work-day. So, I really am finding that getting that, however big or small, but the thing that I'm dreading the most about the day or the thing that I just don't want to tackle. If I could just not procrastinate it, it's gonna be far beneficial to get it done. And changing that mindset of, like, ok, what is it? What do I need to deal with? I'm gonna just get it done, it's that...ahhhh. Wasn't that bad. I don't need to think about it anymore. I can put that great line on my to-do list for the day and cross it out. So, I think for me I get an instant, positive, reaction. An instant, release of some negativity or some worry. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. ---Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow---Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better.https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9---Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at ZAK@bestADVICE.show---Share this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow