Watch a Metalhead’s TED Talk: “Don’t Dress for Success”
Perhaps you remember Australian metalhead Nat’s What I Reckon from the article we posted about his hilarious cooking show last October, or more likely you’ve seen episodes of the show on your own time because they’re funny, quick and to the point, all around well-executed and, most importantly, really fucking popular.
Nat has now parlayed the success of his metal cooking show into a TED Talk, giving a presentation on how to lean into your passions and idiosyncrasies, even if they make you a so-called “outcast,” instead of caving to the man and being miserable forever.
In the eight-minute talk (brief and digestible, just like his own show!), Nat, who was inspired to start making his own sauces at home (“Death to Jar Sauce!” he says) when the dawn of the Covid-19 pandemic sparked a run on grocery stores that cleared out shelves, explains how he was beaten down by one shitty job and lost opportunity after the next:
“I ended up repeating a year at school. Eventually left school at the end of Year 10, went to music uni. I gave that a crack, I went and studied music and guess what? Buggered that up as well.”
“I worked all these shitty jobs. I worked jobs, jobs that tell you, like, ‘Dye your hair back from green to brown, take your piercings out and try and sell that person over there as much popcorn as humanly possible and we won’t fire you. Well, I still managed to get fired from the cinema… and a lot of jobs.”
“I just filmed videos and it seemed to be the only success I could find. We had a show offering here, I was able to host a show that was gonna tour around Australia. I met an agent, they’re like, ‘You should book a tour.’ We sold them out really quickly and I was fuckin’ stoked … and then COVID hit and I fuckin’ lost it, I lost all of it like that, like a lot of us lost their jobs. So I sat in my car with my girlfriend and I just fuckin’ cried. That’s it, I’ve lost it. Dead shit again. I’m just gonna have to go and bust my ass and get fired somewhere else.”
He goes on to detail how and why he launched his cooking show and how you can apply his career path to your own:
“I seen on the news that all these people had been buying all the toilet roll and all the jar sauce and I’m like, ‘The fuck’s going on here? Why are you buying all this pasta sauce in jars? You’ve got heaps of time, just make it yourself. Maybe I’ll make a video about that … Well, holy shit, the first video got millions of views within a couple of weeks.”
“I suppose what I’m here to say is, this success rhythm and this normalcy that’s presented to you … maybe that’s not your success. Maybe you having green hair and piercings and swearing a little too much isn’t really the problem. Maybe they’re the problem. Maybe you’re seeming under-qualified makes you qualified for your success.”
You can watch Nat’s full TED Talk below, with a couple of his cooking show episodes posted underneath.
[via Loudwire]
