The unexpected thing about making something universally loved? Specificity. The more personal it is, the more people feel it. Listen to the full episode on A Bit of Optimism wherever you get your podcasts 🎧

Was Raymond your big break? Yes. I get a tape of a comedian named Ray Romano. I don't know if you've been watching TV, the crap it's on now. I just asked him, tell me about yourself, where you come from? And he just said, oh, I got twin boys and an older daughter. My family lives close by. They're always bothering me. My brother is older, and he's a police sergeant, and he lives with them. He's divorced. He's jealous of me. He saw an award that I won for stand-up, and he said, never ends for Raymond. Everybody loves Raymond. I thought, that's a good place to start. The lesson is, the more specific you get, not just in writing, but in everything in life, the more specific you get, the more universal it becomes. The more people you hit, because we all deal in specificity. So even if there's a crazy thing about you that is not something I do, I'm going to relate to it, because I do a crazy thing too. We try and make things general to have mass appeal. Always fails. Always fails, because people can find no relevance in themselves. It's weak. It's weak. And so the specificity is a Trojan horse that allows somebody to find their specificity. What is general and relatable are the feelings that go along with the stories. Exactly. The hook is the specific.