me and george lucas just made a sound cloud hit
Below are some of my thoughts on doing work you’re passionate about. If you don’t care about my thoughts here, ignore this :).
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I hear this really often from friends:
I am currently doing X
I really really want to do Y
In order for me to leave X to do Y, I need to first do A, B, C, etc.
This logic has always been so weird to me. Why not skip directly to Y? Are A, B, C really required? During these conversations, I’ve almost always discovered that A, B, C are not usually necessary and are usually false barriers put up by people out of fear.
People expect too much of themselves!!
For example, this is one from a friend recently:
I am currently doing customer service for a software company.
I really really want to work on my own short films and get involved with the movie industry in general.
In order for me to leave my job and work on short films I need to save up enough money from my job, study film a lot more so I can improve my camera skills, and write my own script for my first short film so I can be ready when I leave my job.
Money is the barrier people always seem to put up and ~90% of the time it’s not a real barrier to them working on what they wanna work on. In this case, my buddy had $6500 saved up. If he moved back with his parents, his rent would be $0 a month and his only expenses would be the $ he spends on his films which would be super low budget (~$1000-$2000 per film).
The next barrier he stated is also one I see super often. “I need to get better at this one thing before I go and pursue this other thing”. In this case, my buddy felt he needed to gain more knowledge around camera techniques before he went off to do his own thing. But, then I was like — “well, can’t you just go make a few short films and learn these techniques on the fly concurrently while actually making your films?”.
“No, then the film would be bad and people wouldn’t take me seriously”.
Ah. There it is. Fear. He’s scared he’ll make a fool of himself! Got it. So, he wants to “prepare” as much as he can beforehand. The idea of people seeing his short films and making fun of him or thinking he’s a joke is tough for him.
The last one is similar. He wants a script for a short film before he leaves his job. I dug into this more and it was mostly the same thing. He’s scared that if he leaves his job without a really good idea about the film he wants to work on, he’ll be labeled a confused failure by his family members.
I hear stuff like this every day. People who are doing one thing, but have an insane passion for something else, but don’t pursue it because of reasons that stem usually from fear. And the path they build for themselves to pursue their dreams is usually unnecessarily twisted.
Very rarely is it financial reasons holding these people back. And when it is financial, I’ll always offer them my own personal $ to people so they pursue their dreams for 6 months (usually like $5K-$7K — note: I am not rich lol). But then it always turns into, “Okay but then I’ll also have these 4 other problems I need to prepare for before”.
At this rate, the dream is endlessly delayed based on constraints that don’t really make logical sense and are usually purely emotional. Often, fear.
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I’m not saying what’s right and wrong or telling people how to live their life. I’m still figuring that out too :).
Mostly just stating an observation. Fear seems to delay tangible progress toward some goal by making the path toward that goal super warped.
If you want to work in the video game industry as a journalist, why not write a few articles about some games and start a blog that gets ~25 readers and grow that?
If you want to make music, why not just go make a song and upload it to Soundcloud and grow that?
If you want to start a startup, why not just build an MVP and get ~10 users and grow that?