Adam Carolla - Daddy, Stop Talking! - And Other Things My Kids Want but Won't Be Getting

Plus, you can’t get a personal pizza right. The ratio is off. Once you get below eight inches there’s no way to achieve optimal cheese-to-crust balance. All pizzas should fall between nine inches and fourteen inches. The cheap losers that go for those places where they serve trays of pizza the size of a Winnebago for five bucks know what I’m talking about. That pizza sucks, too.

I’ve got a plan to beat the personal pizza problem, too. If you’re saying to yourself, “I’m hungry for pizza, but I’m alone” I’ve created an app that hooks you up with other lonely fat people in your area to eat pizza together. Think Christian Mingle or Tinder, but for pizza. This way you meet other like-minded individuals and you’re not crying into your personal pizza. You can post your pictures and interests, people can list their preferred toppings and you get matched up with the right loser to share your pie with. You’ll hit reply to the post and say, “Yeah, I’ll come by your place… well, your folks’ place.”

Your Job Doesn’t Require a Vest or Apron: Is there anything sadder than the old guy in the vest who greets you at the Home Depot or Wal-Mart? That seventy-eight-year-old guy who’s making minimum wage to hand you the flyer of what’s on sale that week?

I want you, Sonny and Natalia, to go meet this guy. I’ll grab a couple of milk crates, sit you down in front of him and I’ll fire away. “What happened? What went wrong in your life to get you here? Pill addiction? Dropped out of high school? Go ahead, Walt, tell them what happened.” This is what I call Scared Straight — White Edition .

The close cousin to this guy, except stationed at the exit instead of the entrance, is the receipt checker/security guy. I’ll head over to the Home Depot and buy 129 finish washers, thirty-seven joist hangers, fifty-one TICO clips. Inevitably, the receipt will be twenty feet long, and the guy with the GED and the lazy eye will give it a glance and a cursory marking up with a highlighter, then send me on my way. His job is to make you pause for a moment and if you don’t start sweating or make a run for it, he’ll let you pass. These guys aren’t security. They’re always overweight, wearing ill-fitting clothes, and missed three out of five of their belt loops. The only weapon they’re carrying are way too many keys. This is just the corporation saying to the insurance company, “But we had security posted at the door” when something does go wrong. This guy is the human equivalent of the plastic owl on top of the seafood restaurant. And as intelligent.

All right, kiddies, tally up your score: How did you do? If you fall on the successful side of things, well good for you. Just prepare to get sued.

As a guy who has had multiple jobs and multiple careers, please let me pass down a little fatherly advice in this arena. Having multiple gigs is a good thing. There is a certain kind of math that goes into this approach. One job is what most people have and that can either be all you need or not nearly enough. Having three jobs usually means they all pay shit. But when you cross over to a place where you have four jobs, chances are you are a rich person. No one can put in the time to work four minimum-wage jobs to make ends meet. But they might be able to pull off three. So four or more jobs means you’re the entrepreneur/businessman/real-estate mogul/celebrity. You’re serving on the boards of several companies.

As far as the multiple gigs, to me it’s about even numbers. One job, even if it does pay well, can be mind numbing. This is the kind of job where you work at a postal sorting facility from age twenty-one to forty-three and then kill yourself and/or several coworkers. Three is just too much for too little return. Go with two so you have variety and aren’t bored, or go with four so that you have so many plates spinning that you’ve got money trickling in from every direction and you have a cushion of cash in case one of the plates crashes to the floor. That way, you can start another business and start spinning that fourth plate again right away. Now, if you do start a business, make sure it’s one that has legs. Create something that people want to buy over and over again. When I was getting my liquor brand, Mangria, off the ground it occurred to me that liquor is a product that people consume and thus need to replenish, often, especially if they are drunks like me. I make much more on booze than I ever will writing books. The person reading this will pass it on to their friends once they’re done, or maybe even put it back on the shelf at the Barnes & Noble after flipping through a few pages. The guy who bought Mangria will be pissing it out in a few hours and then buying another bottle. I can sum up my business philosophy with the following phrase: “Don’t make toilet seats, make toilet paper.”

But take heed: Real entrepreneurs don’t call themselves entrepreneurs. I’ve met several super rich guys, the true one-percenters, at some of my vintage race events and when you ask them what they do they all say “a little of this, a little of that” or “I had a company and I sold it.” Those vague answers mean the little of this and little of that is done from a helipad on their yacht. It sounds a little defensive to constantly call yourself an “entrepreneur.” That’s a little like “right now.” It means you haven’t had a salary in years. Every time you say “entrepreneur,” you lop twenty thousand off your pull for the year. I’ve met several self-proclaimed entrepreneurs who want advice from me on starting a business, since I’ve started several. But once I start digging into their schemes, I come to realize they’re selling candles or e-cigarettes on Craigslist from their parents’ basement.

So I’m not going to tell you to “follow your bliss.” Yes, it worked out for Daddy, career-wise. I knew I was funny and have made a living from that. But many people, like everyone who tries out for American Idol, for example, are delusional about their skills and talents but got fed so much “You can do anything” and “Don’t let anyone hold you back” bullshit by their schools and parents that they will go through life being perpetually disappointed.

When choosing your career path, it’s important that you figure out who you are and what you’re good at and go in that direction. Try different things. Don’t pick one career idea when you’re thirteen and devote your life to it. If you put your eggs in that one basket, you’ll likely be a failure (unless that career is putting eggs in baskets, in which case, go nuts). Your career will find you, not the other way around. It will be based on the inherent strengths you have. If you’re Lebron James, the NBA is a great choice; if you’re Danny DeVito, it’s not. Maybe it was Danny’s “bliss” to play basketball, but guess what? There was no way that was happening.

Factor in all the aspects before you pull the career trigger. Natalia, you once told me that you wanted to be a schoolteacher. I then had to explain to you that teaching is indeed a noble profession, just not one that pays. I remember having a sit-down to say, “You may want to be a schoolteacher when you grow up, but you won’t be in a house in the hills like Daddy and driving a loaded Audi like Mama if you do. You’ll have a condo in Sherman Oaks and be driving a Jetta.”

I’m not poo-pooing an average middle-class job and income. I just think we need to have a little more realism about that life. During career day when the fireman, policeman and nurse are talking about their jobs, we should take the class out to the parking lot to show the kids what those guys drove to the school that day. That way they’ll know how little we actually pay those people we routinely refer to as “heroes.” If we really walked the walk, they’d be able to roll up to the school in a Jag.