Adi Surendran is a comedy writer who grew up in NJ after his parents moved from India. Adi started his career as a lawyer but events in his personal life, along with his love of comedy, caused him to slowly work at developing his comedy writing in the form of mundane short stories. After going to open mics and joining writers groups for several years, Adi published a book called CheeseDosa: The Legend-Dairy Tales of a Suburban Dork, a collection of short comedy stories. In this episode he shares about his journey, his writing process, his views on creative identity, and some hot takes along the way! I hope you have fun listening!

Here were some of my take-aways:

• Creative constraints help you figure out what is important in life: “Constraints are not only just things you do to generate creativity that can be fun exercises like, oh, now let me make a joke only using the color green. But it can also be like, hey, these things are no longer important to you.”
• AI can enhance your creativity and allow you to do more of what is important to you: “It has been very important to me to figure out what's important to me. I don't know if people have necessarily unlocked that AI will give you the opportunity to figure out what's important.”
• Communities are key to nurturing creative growth over time: “That community eventually became my home, that was when I found my tribe, every time I would go there, which was once a month, I would tell a brand new short story, and they would eventually start to build and build, I'd take those stories and, put them onto a website, that website would eventually get the name Cheese Dosa and turn into the book that I published.”

More about Adi –

• Get his book on Amazon: CheeseDosa: The Legend-Dairy Tales of a Suburban Dork
• Follow him on instagram
• Read his blog