Peck, Josh - Happy People Are Annoying by Peck Josh

Author:Peck, Josh [Peck, Josh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

11

The Fourth Hemsworth Brother

I’m running down the middle of the street in downtown Detroit, there’re explosions going off on either side of me, I’ve got an AK-47 strapped to my shoulder, cameras mounted on cranes and helicopters filming me, and all I can think is I’m fucking this up.

I want to talk about the duality of ego for a minute. It would be absurd to think that I could have made it to this point. Do your best to not do the knee-jerk, but-Josh-you-had-so-much-going-for-you reaction here, I appreciate the pathos but let’s actually look at this through the lens of logic. My birth was fraught with impossibility, my mom being a single mother and managing to support us was slightly if not completely remarkable. The fact that I was able to jump headfirst into a profession at a time when most kids are getting fitted for braces, with no connections, no in, no nepotism in sight, again, absurd. And to have made it all the way to this point one hundred pounds lighter, sober, and on the precipice of actually shedding the child star image? Insane.

I’m not trying to take a victory lap here, in fact we’re a few paragraphs away from me completely burning down the whole enterprise AGAIN so strap in. What I’m trying to highlight is what is required to surmount this kind of task. In 1964, Muhammad Ali stood over Sonny Liston and screamed, “I AM THE GREATEST.” Even more interesting though, is when Ali said, “I am the greatest, I said that even before I knew I was.” I said that even before I knew I was, is what I’m getting at here. This idea that some version of self-hypnosis, self-deception, self-manifestation is required for anyone to become the best at anything. And sometimes not even the best but pretty good or even okay at it. Ali had to believe he was the greatest for the world to know it too.

I think you would be hard pressed to find anyone who didn’t have to thoroughly brainwash themselves to deny the very prescient and real obstacles they could face. You could call it confidence, you could call it faith, you could even call it belief but, for me, I’m going to call it ego.

Ego is what got me through those impossible nights when I lost the battle again and again over whether to call the pizza guy for the umpteenth time. “You’ll do it Josh, you’ll lose the weight one day, I know you’ll do it.” “Yeah, yeah, yeah, where’s the ranch?” Ego is what told me at twelve years old that I deserved to be on the biggest kids’ show on television with basically no experience. Ego is what pushed me at twenty to turn my back on everything that had ever worked for me and try to make it as a real actor.

Ego, it’s a funny thing. We need it, in moments of extreme adversity; that voice, that inner Joe Pesci, can sometimes be the only thing that pushes you to get out of bed in the morning.

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