Matthew Lesko

Matthew Lesko Got some advice from Matthew Lesko yesterday.
(How could I make this stuff up?)

For those who don’t know, Lesko is the guy on those infomercials who wears the colorful suits with the question marks and yells about the government giving away free money.

You know who I’m talking about.

Anyway, yesterday as I was surfing around, I came across a web page that had a video of Lesko and a chat box. Turns out, he was in the middle of a 72 hour live help-a-thon. I’m not even kidding.

He was on hour 37 or so – and had only taken a brief nap since he began – so as you can imagine, he was kind of dragging. Not at all his usual “THE GOVERNMENT WILL GIVE YOU FREE MONEY” self.

There’s nobody else watching this, so I figure I might as well start chatting. It was really obvious he was pretty tired.

So I tell him about my situation; that I’m going back to college in a new city, and ask if he has any advice. I was gearing up for him to rattle off some grants that I need to apply for or something of that nature, but instead, he gets real serious.

“Follow your heart. If you know something is the right decision, don’t let anybody talk you out of it. Also, it’s more important to be good at recovering from failure than to be good at succeeding.”

This shocked the heck out of me. This crazy guy from the TV infomercials is actually being a real human, giving me real human advice.

We talked for another ten minutes or so about life and success and everything in between. He really stressed that something are really worth more than money. It was really cool.

For those of you keeping score, Lesko is joining the ranks of several other pseudo-celebrities that have given me life advice including Corey Taylor from Slipknot, and that one guy from Office Space who turned out to be a real jerk.

There are two reasons I am posting this.

  1. It was good advice and I'd like to pass it along.
  2. I think it’s cool when ever anybody (especially *cough* older folks) try new ways to connect to people (especially young people)
Sleeping So, much to my surprise, Lesko is actually a really cool, down to earth type of guy who has a passion for people, but I still think he's a little nuts for doing the whole 72 hour thing.

At least he finally got some sleep.