I can't hold a note. I tried a singing lesson, but my vocal coach kept giving me the stink eye.
I was inspired by people telling me I should be a comedian. I tried it and had a really good first set, so I was like, 'OK, I'll do this forever'.
I had a blog where I tried to be transparent while giving away nothing. I tweeted and Facebooked badly. As a writer, your 'voice' is your calling card, yet my voice was becoming indistinguishable from billions of other voices.
I picked up yoga. I tried to do cooking a little bit. I almost burned my house down, but it's all good. So I just stuck to yoga.
I gathered as much reading material about Aung San Suu Kyi and about Burma as I could. And I read every article and every book she had written. I also had 200 hours of footage of her to watch. I tried to discover who were her heroes and where he desire and strength to pursue democracy in a non-violent fashion came from.
I tried putting teabags under my eyes because they say that the green tea - the caffeine - will help with under-eye bags and moisture. It worked! That's a new tip.
I burned out my drawing hand by using it too much. The common word for it is writer's cramp. The fancy words for it are focal dystonia. The symptom in my case was a pinky finger that went spastic when I tried to draw.
I can still remember. I was ill, and I was seven, and my father didn't want me to just read children's books. He came with Conan Doyle. I tried, and I liked it. I think the first I read was 'The Sign of the Four'; 'Study in Scarlet' was the next one. Then I guess I stayed home a few extra days from school to read.
The book is actually called 'A Mentor Leader, a Different Way to Lead.' It really talks about my experience in the way I tried lead our football team, things that I learned from, basically, the coaches that I played for and my parents about leadership. And it is a little bit different, counter to maybe what society says about great leaders.
I was really lucky that, through my 20s, I got to work with some amazing people, and I tried to sit back and watch and learn.
I did have a Twitter account that I tried for a couple days, but found I had nothing to say. There are some interesting facts I could share, but I don't want to share that part of myself.
When I had my first child, I didn't write for a year, and I felt when I tried to start again I might actually not be able to do it anymore. I really could not do it well, and I felt out of sorts with it.
What makes this story so remarkable is that throughout my early childhood I had ongoing learning difficulties, particularly in mathematics. I struggled to learn the multiplication table, and no matter how hard I tried, I simply couldn't remember 6 times 7 or 7 times 8.
Men's magazines in the period immediately after World War II were almost all outdoor-oriented. They were connected to some extent in the male bonding that came out of a war... And what I tried to create was a magazine for the indoor guy, but focused specifically on the single life: in other words, the period of bachelorhood before you settle down.
None of this 'different diets' lark. I can't remember the last time I tried some new fad.
I was an infantry Marine, and there are only so many things you can do when you get out of the military that you can apply your job to. Either a janitor or a cop. I tried to do both of those things because what else are you going to do?
My mother often mailed me articles from 'Reader's Digest' about advances in DNA chemistry. No matter how I tried to explain it to her, she never grasped the concept that I could have been writing those articles, that something I had invented made most of those DNA discoveries possible.
One time I tried bangs, and people just weren't feeling it at all, but it's my hair. It's my unicorn mane, and it's definitely very important to me. It's also my body, and so I don't really care about other people's opinion of it.
I've always been a rule-follower. Even when I was a kid, I tried to do everything by the book.
I tried to go to the gym a while ago and hurt my foot. I thought, 'Well, exercise and I just aren't meant to be.'
Growing up on stage, I was introduced to makeup at a young age and I will never forget the first time I tried on a L'Oreal Paris iconic lipstick - it was instant glamour and I've been hooked ever since.
I'm not on fire for the Lord, so I tried to make myself generate this fire for the Lord.
Somebody told me I should put a pebble in my mouth to cure my stuttering. Well, I tried it, and during a scene I swallowed the pebble. That was the end of that.
The kinetic quality of New York, the kids, dirt, madness - I tried to find a photographic style that would come close to it. So I cropped, blurred, played with the negatives.
Wanting to be understood by an audience that didn't know Russian, I tried to paint musical pictures by emphasizing the phrasing, using voice color more boldly, and varying the shade and nuance.
For a while, I tried to masquerade as somewhat of a hippie because I was under the impression that was the kind of guy girls would like. I was pretty unsuccessful because I liked the idea of camping more than actually camping. I did go to a Grateful Dead concert, but I was pretty bored.
I had two passions growing up - one was music, one was technology. I tried to play in a band for a while, but I was never talented enough to make it. And I started companies. One day came along and I decided to combine the two - and there was Spotify.
I have a big ego, and I'm a confident person, but when it comes down to being a jerk, that doesn't work for me, I tried it... for about ten years.
Animals in general have sparked a weird depression in me, because as much as I tried, I couldn't layer a personality over them. You know what I mean? I would stare at the cows, and I would sing to the cows, and they would always just look at me blankly.
I didn't try and do fashion pictures. I tried to do portraits of girls wearing dresses.
There was so much pressure to fit in, I tried to force myself to be like everyone else. The last thing any teen wants is to be 'uncool.'
I hear the way people talk about the children of famous people. They're not treated very well. The presumptions are usually quite awful. So I tried to establish myself with a couple of movies. After 'Juno' I thought: 'I think I've defined myself enough as my own director that I'd love to work with my father.'
I tried to be like the richer kids as much as I could because I wanted to live on their streets, at least hang out on their streets and eat their amazing food and walk barefoot on their shag carpets. I became something of a pest in that way, and in general, other people's parents didn't like me.
My 15-year-old threw open the door the other day to my room and screamed, ''Freaks and Geeks' only has one season? Can they make another one?' And I tried to explain to her that it happened a long time ago. She didn't understand that because it felt very relevant to her.
I tried playing for the public, and I selected music that I thought would be pleasing to them. Times are different now. Today, I play the music I want, and I just try to do my best.
I tried out for 'Jeopardy' once, when they came to Cleveland, but I didn't make it.