Hey dudes.
I’m still very much here – but have been working on projects that pulled me away from posting on this blog.
Will start posting again soon.
(If you want to see one of the projects that’s absorbed a lot of my time the last few months, click here to read Fighting Broke, my blog on personal finance and career advice for Hollywood assistants.)
Talk soon.
Photo Credit: Mti Abhi
There was a contract on my desk I could not get through.
Every time I sat down, fourth (fifth… sixth…) cup of coffee in hand, armed with a pen and true grit, distractions plagued me from every direction.
I felt like Macaulay Culkin in the movie MY GIRL, who gets attacked by the Avenging Bee Hive, stung a million times, and dies.
Oh. Spoiler alert.
I’d get through three sentences, then someone would ping me on instant messenger, asking if we were having a staff meeting. Or an assistant would make a scheduling snafu, and would urgently need to reschedule — for a meeting six weeks from tomorrow.
And of course, the daily barrage of someone else’s phones that I answer.
By the end of the day, I’m an overcaffeinated quivering mass of “leave me the fuck alone,” and I’ve made zero headway.
Riding my bike home, I thought about the distractions, and why I couldn’t clear this contract off my list of to-do’s. It wasn’t a long agreement, but I got pulled away every time I encountered a term or some language I didn’t understand.
Somewhere on Palms and Venice, the answer struck me like an oversized Fendi bag swung by an pint-sized socialite coming out of Buchon: I wasn’t pulled away by distractions when I encountered difficult language. I encountered difficult language, then I ran away, towards the distraction.
I was a freaking electron in a parallel circuit, voltage squared off against ohm-age, and I did what physics commanded of me: I chose the path of least resistance.
I didn’t understand the contract. It was a Stage Play Adaptation Agreement. While the deal terms were analogous to book deals (e.g., “option payment non-refundable but fully recoupable” – in the publishing world, this is just called “an advance.” In the book-to-film world, this is an an “applicable option payment” — same principle, wrapped in different kinds of bacon) I still encountered jargon and structure I didn’t understand. Like:
These aren’t “difficult” questions. It’s not Elon Musk, hyperloop-level of thought, but it required some work. Instead of doing that, though, I let myself off the hook by allowing myself to be distracted.
In Hollywood, an industry of primarily soft skills (e.g., networking, story analysis, “connecting-the-dots” (understanding and leveraging the relationships between various elements)) any deep thought is our opportunity to learn tangible skills, but only if we pause the minutiae long enough to realize it.
To do that:
Photo Credit: debschi
I imagine most cyclists pump Skrillex or Sevendust through their headphones during their rides.
Currently, for me it’s a choice between Katy Perry’s new album PRISM or Seth Godin’s Medicine Ball Sessions. I chose the latter today because I can turn on the former when I get to work.
The Medicine Ball Sessions clarified this sense of urgency I’ve been having in the pit of my stomach. At one point, I attributed the urgency to my age and societal pressure and the effects of social media. I thought:
Not that these emotions and feelings weren’t real.
But they didn’t fully encompass the range of emotions I felt about my work and career.
It’s more nuanced than age
It’s subtler than how fast one can ascend the ladder in an industry.
After listening to Medicine Ball Sessions, I realized the urgency came from the speed at which entire industries rise and fall… so anytime we waste in a career space that isn’t “right” for us is dramatically heightened.
In other words, it’s not so much the race up the ladder, as much as choosing the right ladder to climb.
Here’s the part that resonated with me (transcribed with ease thanks to Transcribe, by wreally):
“The record industry was perfect. There were a lot of reasons. I’ll name a few. If I bought an LP because I liked it a lot, I would wear it out. So I’d have to buy another one.
If I loaned it to her, I don’t have it anymore, so I have to buy another one. If I have to buy another one, I have to get in my car and drive to a store.
In my car, I turn on the radio, the only thing to do in the car, and the radio, is devoted almost entirely to promoting this product, which the record industry doesn’t have to pay for, not legally anyone.
Then I get to the store, which the record industry doesn’t have to pay for, and the store has 100s or thousands of titles all in big containers, vying for my attention. So I might buy more than 1 when I’m there.
Then I get home, and my high school kid is going to the senior prom. The senior prom is not about shoes, it’s not about industrial equipment, it’s about music.
Then, I check my mail, there’s Rolling Stone magazine, all about the music industry.
Then I turn on MTV, an entire cable network devoted to this perfect industry. Oh, and if you want to start a music career, you need $100K to get into a recording studio because there’s limited means of production, you can’t afford that so you better do a deal with a record company if you want distribution through Tower Records.
You can’t do that by yourself, you better have a record label to do it, and radio, and on and on. The record label gets to keep all that money.
There’s only six or eight big record labels so it’s an oligopoly, there’s a lot of price-fixing, and its perfect…
Money, money, money. Consistent, planned. Show me the map, I know the artist will change, but the method doesn’t.
Then you all know what happened. How long did it take? 36 months? For the record industry to go from perfect to broke.
There’s more music than ever before, performed by more people than ever before, listened to more people than ever before, more widely available than ever before, but the music industry — gone. 3 years, maybe 5, that’s it. Over. That’s what happens.
Revolutions destroy the perfect, and then they enable the impossible. And it’s going to happen to your industry, whatever you do.”
We can define “right” many number of ways:
They all come back to complacency and comfort. We’re comfortable with:
We tell ourselves, why rock the boat? We’ve got a good thing going. I can take my time, because this job and this market isn’t going anywhere.
Just because we’re relevant today doesn’t make us relevant tomorrow.
The record industry proves that just because an industry is perfect yesterday doesn’t mean it won’t be a shell of its former glory tomorrow.
The world changes quickly.
If we’re already not happy with the work we’re doing, things will get worse faster than we think.
If we’re complacent to plod along, moving without urgency, how will we remain relevant in whatever version of the world that exists after the fallout?
If we’re complaining that “no one’s giving us the opportunity to succeed” but we’re not creating our own opportunities… well, why should they?
Photo Credit: serakatie
I’ve been thinking a lot about small failures lately.
In my experience, they’re more difficult to publicly face than large failures.
For example, in 2008, when my father opened the first Shogun, the idea that “this might might work” didn’t cross my mind too often. I felt like:
It’s a big risk. The economy is depressed. One out of 4 restaurants fail in their first year. That number rises, to three in 5, over the next 3 years.
We faced plenty of other obstacles:
There was an enormity to that task that made it okay if we didn’t succeed.
I followed the same logic with moving to Los Angeles and trying to start a career in Hollywood. There wasn’t much fear, because there were already so many challenges:
If things didn’t work, there was an enormity to the task that allowed me to shrug and say, “well, if it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t work out. Let’s give it a shot.”
I say this with no brag. This isn’t unique, people do it all the time with varying degrees of success.
Where it manifests and how to manage it, gets covered ad nauseum in the self-development world. Three techniques worth mentioning are:
For endeavors or projects that’d result in a big failure, these techniques are especially helpful.
On a smaller scale, however, it doesn’t work as well. Some examples:
This has been exacerbated, I feel, in part because the idea in Hollywood is that any failure is completely unacceptable. That you’re not allowed to misstep, and “assumption is the mother of all fuck ups.” When you do fail, it’s so public:
Which in turn, is further exacerbated by social media, where everyone naturally posts the good things in their life, and you begin to thinking everyone is doing better than you in their carefully crafted social presence. You begin to think you’ll be defined by this one failure.
So how do we overcome that?
What’s helped me is to find examples of others who faced public failure or criticism, and who have either addressed it, or moved on so quickly this was barely a blip on their radar. I make informal case studies of the “bigger names” out there, to grasp their mindset. Those are below:
Oprah and Arianna Huffington Ripped On in Deadline
In an article entitled DESPERATE: HuffPo and Oprah Team Up Now that barely passes for journalism, Nikki Finke reams out Oprah and Arianna Huffington for all of Hollywood to see. As Hollywood knows, Nikki never wears kid gloves, but in this article in particular, there’s an animosity that goes regular snark:
“This pathetic pairing sounds to me like an ill-conceived partnership, and it’s interesting that no mention is made of AOL which bought HuffPo last year.”
How does Oprah respond to Nikki? She doesn’t.
First she has a nervous breakdown.
Then she gets over it. And six months later, goes back to kicking ass.
Tucker Max versus Gawker
Tucker Max’s life has been fairly public. Posting stories and building a brand around all the women you’ve slept with and treated poorly will do that. He’s made the public very aware of his successes.
“I’m so far up the power law curve of book sales, dude,” Tucker told me. ”The very tip-top are J.K. Rowling and Stephen King, Stephanie Meyer, James Patterson, and Paulo Coelho. People who sell tens or hundreds of millions of books. That’s just a different game. That’s like, the Bible. They’re competing with the Bible. I’m not in the Bible tier.” (I can hear the religious among readers thinking: thank goodness!)
“I’m on the tier below that. But still, on the power curve, I’m all the way at the tip. I’m on the same tier as Tim Ferriss or Chelsea Handler or Jeanette Walls—we’re in the 2, 3, 4 million range.” — as told to Michael Ellsberg
Of course, this kind of publicity is a double-edged sword. For every success Tucker trumpeted, Gawker splashed his failures all over its front pages. It’s even created a special page on the site, breaking down this Tucker-Gawker feud to its individual campaigns.
Some of Tucker’s public failures:
Yet amidst the waft of all this dirty laundry, Tucker has marched on. He’s moved beyond his fratire brand, started a new blog, published on the Huffington Post, and getting his rebirth featured in Fortune.
Love him, hate him, admire him or loathe him – he’s taken his brunt of public failures.
And he’s still standing.
Blogger / Entrepreneur Tynan and His narcissism
Blogger Tynan Smith and his lifestyle was recently featured (favorably) in the San Francisco Gate. What followed next, he describes in his blog post, was “hundreds of comments, 95% of them negative.”
“The negativity was absolutely astounding. I could hardly believe how many people spent the time to sign up and leave vitriolic comments.”
He could have ignored the article, and all the negative comments. He could have just called everyone haters. But Tynan didn’t. He addressed the fact many people felt he was a narcissist, and even owned up to it:
“I wear a silver necklace with my name on it.”
Then he went back to programming and writing. His work went on.
An Author’s Fans Vote “No”
Blogger and Science Fiction Author Jamie Todd recently put out a survey, asking his readers if they’d be interested in him putting out a newsletter. I don’t know how many readers/subscribers he has. But 50 people voted in this survey, and the response was overwhelming “no.”
Jamie could have swept this poll under the rug. He could have pretended like it never happened. Regardless of how stoic you are, that must take an emotional toll, your readers telling you, “no, we don’t want this.”
Instead, Jamie posts the results. He says, “thanks for voting. I appreciate the feedback.”
He gets back to work, posting nearly everyday, writing thousands of words a week, and continuing his Going Paperless Series.
Ramit Sethi covers “3 Crushing Fears I Had”
Best selling author and personal finance blogger Ramit Sethi covered these 3 fears to his email subscribers. They were:
He says:
“I looked around and saw other people doing better than I was. Posting pics on FB of their fancy vacations…getting covered in the press…having more RSS readers or email subscribers or revenues…and I would start thinking, “Maybe they’re just better at this than I am.” Notice I didn’t say — they’ve practiced their skills more, or they’ve learned more strategies, or they’ve just been at it longer. No, I made it about them being a BETTER PERSON than I was.”
He continued working though, chipping away at the fears, and growing his business. It’s not something that happened overnight — he’s been working at this “blogging thing” for 8 years now.
That’s the clinical or academic term for the space that exists between “knowing” what you’re supposed to do, and actually taking action on it.
For me this space is a gulf when it comes to acknowledging the fear of failure and doing something about it. I still listen to self-development nearly everyday, but find myself tuning things out if I’ve heard it before.
I say, “yes, yes, I’ve heard this before, let me find a new tactic.” But the value is in actively reflecting on the fears. This is work. It’s not something that happens when you half-ass it.
Reading and learning new case studies, though, and seeing how others approach their fear of small failure helps. It provides different lenses to see that fear, often so insidious, to spot it and face it down long enough to get back to the work we’ve set out to do.
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Photo Credit: epSos.de, Manuel Valadez Acuña
I think understanding context is crucial for education and self-development.
An example: my current employer, Intellectual Property Group is a successor to the H.N. Swanson Literary Agency, one of the greatest Hollywood Lit Agencies of all time.
Swanie represented some of the greatest literary heavyweights: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, etc.
The foreword to his memoir, SPRINKLED WITH RUBY DUST, was written by client, the late great Elmore Leonard.
I got offered the opportunity to work for a show runner the other day.
My friend asked me to call him. He said, “This position is about to open up. I can tee it up for you, but you have to tell me ‘yes’ or ‘no’ in four hours. You’re the first person I’m going to, but if you pass I need to get someone else in the room.”
It’s a gun-to-the-head situation, but fair play.
I thought it over, as I tried focusing on check letters and connecting calls and the minutia of the day’s tasks.
I passed.
We finished our web series. Three episodes, six producers/directors, 11 actors. It was a fantastic two days:
I personally had to overcome to Get To Done:
Even after smacking around these barriers like they owed me money and reaching a success milestone… doubts linger. It probably stems from my immersion in self-dev (turns out you actually have to apply this stuff — intellectual mitosis it ain’t).
These questions hung me up throughout the process. Taking a hard look at those doubts, though, I realize:
Or as Nassim Nicholas Taleb is fond of pointing out, trying to make connections between disconnected events. Attempting to find casualty where there is none.
Unfortunately, the puzzle pieces of our lives don’t align as we move forward. They only slot neatly into place when looking back. When we study the past, the chain of events appear transparent:
I can’t even find casualty in the greatest experiences of my own life. Looking back , the truly amazing came so far from left field I still don’t understand how it all fits:
It always will. The trick is not letting it slow us down. Put less priority in aligning puzzle pieces, and more on the fundamentals:
“Brand” will follow. All will be illuminated.
Photo Credit: cypherone
I read this beautiful piece by Kevin Ashton called Creative People Say No. The gist of which can be summed below:
Saying “no” has more creative power than ideas, insights and talent combined. No guards time, the thread from which we weave our creations. The math of time is simple: you have less than you think and need more than you know. We are not taught to say “no.” We are taught not to say “no.” “No” is rude. “No” is a rebuff, a rebuttal, a minor act of verbal violence. “No” is for drugs and strangers with candy.
Creators do not ask how much time something takes but how much creation it costs. This interview, this letter, this trip to the movies, this dinner with friends, this party, this last day of summer. How much less will I create unless I say “no?” A sketch? A stanza? A paragraph? An experiment? Twenty lines of code? The answer is always the same: “yes” makes less. We do not have enough time as it is. There are groceries to buy, gas tanks to fill, families to love and day jobs to do.
It’s elegant in theory. Some caveats in application in Hollywood and entertainment:
Before we trumpet the “no” in the name of creativity, it’s important to point out: Ashton’s examples were all masters. At some undefined point, maybe after 10,000 hours or 1,000 true fans, they earned the right to say “no.” Until anyone exceeds that point, a blanket “no” seems like a very simplistic view.
Photo Credit: Steve Tran
There were dozens of fingerprints on it, but it was my world. I was the Alpha and the Omega, bitch.
Unfortunately, the execution was flawed. I populated my world with creatures to roam the land… but forgot to give ‘em lungs to breathe the air. Oops.
So when my friend Richard brought up a project called SUBTEXT by the Pander Brothers over lunch, it felt like a gut shot at first. He read the logline: “A young woman is led into a tryst by her boyfriend via phone texts, only to discover a painful truth about their relationship.”
It did
But the idea is malleable, like pressing Silly Putty onto a fresh newspaper: even though the words were the same, there is an infinite number of shapes and configurations. No, the idea wasn’t stolen or borrowed or lifted. It was just a good idea.
My friends and I tried to shoot TEXT two years ago. At the time, I had a good script, but lacked the vision to pull the project together in the only place that counted. Which wasn’t the page. The script was just a blueprint. When a skyscraper wobbles or your tablet crashes, you don’t see anyone crying over the CAD drawings, do you? I didn’t get it right in the fabric of space and time, where I was accountable for light and sound and shots and the intangible goodwill of friends who sacrificed a weekend to make my vision a reality.
That I know for sure. It’s reassuring. If I have 10 more ideas, if I’m lucky, I’ll have 1 good one. So I have to get through the 9 not-so-good ideas first. Of those 9, perhaps 2 will be worth executing, for the purpose of learning to execute.
Which runs counter to an idea I heard recently, about passion projects. I heard this nugget from a blogger the other day (excuse the lack of attribution, I have no idea where it came from): “If it’s not a joy to make, don’t make it.”
She suggests only taking on projects that are a joy, because that joy will drive you past the Dip. It will drive you to the finish line. But I think this idea deemphasizes the importance of practice. Of learning the chops — which isn’t always a joy.
If you’re a professional, it doesn’t matter if a particular project is a joy, or if it’s your passion project. You bring your fucking A-game no matter what. You prepare, you sketch, you debate, you run over every possible outcome from A to Z. Yes, there are moments of joy. In equal parts as moments of “what the hell did I get myself into?”
Lake Bell wrote and directed her short, WORST ENEMY first, as a means to learn the chops before she directed (and produced, and starred in) IN A WORLD…
My father opened his first Japanese restaurant in a wonderful but small town. There were only 37 seats. Which gave him the chops to open a bigger sister-store in a more trafficked location, with about 80 seats. He lost a lot of sleep over the restaurants, and took on a great deal of risk. There were a lot of those “what-the-hell” moments. And neither were his passion project — but they paved the way to the third restaurant, which is.
Someone who helped me with TEXT recently, um, texted me, and asked “Whatever came of the Texting short?”
I considered fibbing: saying it was stuck in post, or there was still hope to fiddle with it. No one else had said otherwise yet, so technically it was true.
Instead, I admitted the truth: the project was dead.
Saying it aloud made it true. It made the failure real. More importantly, it embarrassed me, but it didn’t kill me. It did not make the good idea a bad one. It made it clear the only thing left to do was find more good ideas, and make them real. Alpha and Omega.
Photos Credit: Ruben Ras
Hopping aboard any digital sharing bandwagon was always a struggle: Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook. Before that: LinkedIn, LiveJournal, MySpace, Xanga.
So on. So forth.
Or what I had for breakfast. Didn’t think this literature was worth the digital space of 1’s and 0’s it took up. I made attempts through the years, but never felt strong doing it.
It’s easier, I think, to catch this early wave of social sharing that leads to YouTube sensations and pop-culture-websites-to-book deals when your parents convinced you you’re a unique snowflake whose opinion carries weight, even if it’s the opinion of a 12-year-old girl who’s never wanted for anything except a pair of Louboutins. Or your parents taught you education isn’t an institution but a street market in New Delhi where grades can be haggled over, and that your spot on the “A” soccer team isn’t hinged on being one of the best 11, but because of the $3,000 donation towards the booster club’s new bleachers.
My first day of work, ever, I wore pleated Dockers, a checked shirt and plastic Payless shoes, the latter of “Buy 1, get the 2nd ½ Off” sale. My father sat at the kitchen table, putting on his socks, which is where he attended to all things foot-related. He offered one nugget of advice, one sock already wrestled up his calf, and the other in his hand: “Don’t talk back. Listen first. You don’t know as much as you think.” The idea stuck with me.
It’s held me back times when I should have stepped forward. When I was the smartest person in the room (admittedly, a tiny room). Instead, we’d follow the leadership of someone who didn’t think from A to F, never mind A to Z. Who struggled to spell “piss” and do it when confronted with a toilet. But she was bold and fast and not scared to look foolish. She stepped forward and there’s merit in that.
Anyone with an Internet connection can step forward now. We’ve all got a soapbox. We just need to make the choice: shout at every passerby, refusing to be drowned out by everyone else clamoring for attention? Or do we whisper, so that the few who want to listen, must lean in? If the latter, we better make our message worth the lean.
Answering that challenge is difficult. To quote the hipster I overheard at the Last Bookstore on Spring and 7th in downtown Los Angeles: “it’s all so completely derivative, man.” He might be right.
I’ve never shied from the fact that I’m a byproduct of self-dev. I’m the amalgamation of those self-help aisles in Barnes & Noble with placards that boldly proclaiming LEADERSHIP and MANAGEMENT and RELATIONSHIP, always questioning whether this iteration of me, with the cheap haircut and hand-me down clothes, is in fact the best version of me. I’m also the byproduct of all those times I listened when maybe I should have spoke, not because I didn’t understand the words but because I wanted to stay inside myself, and take it in.
It’s left me behind those who can form an idea and Tweet it out to the Universe with naught a thought. I’m still calculating. I pause — “Is this what I’m really thinking? Is this how I actually feel?” I’m not far behind though. Everyday for these last few years, I’ve grown a little more confident. Still listening, still taking in all in, but with a little more hand raising. A little more, “I’ve seen this. I’ve done this. I can lead the way.
Photo Credit: Shuo Wang