Use Your Gifts

I would say to uplift and assist others and to also try to be an example of possible. I was the youngest of four kids, and so my mother was a joyous woman and my father was probably a little more serious, but I was the baby. So I was always spending a little time by myself. About the time that I was four or five years old, I would notice that my dad would come home from work and my mom would be handling the kids, and he would be a little stressed, but he loved music and he loved dance and my mother the same. And so it would seemingly be my mission to come up with a funny thing to say to him or a funny thing to say to my mom. I think that was one of the first moments that I realized that if I could do that, I could find little joy in myself that I wanted to convey to my mother and my father so that they could have the same kind of joy. So that I thought was an early kind of identifier of what I felt like, at least in my family structure, my purpose was. That's when I kind of had a personal ownership in this court jester disposition that I thought was part of my purpose, to help people smile, help people get out of their ruts, if not comically, then energetically. By college, I was very clear about who I was and what I intended to do. I knew that I was a creative. I knew that I wanted to make people laugh. I knew I wanted to try to elevate the fortunes of other people if I could.