Tenacity is the name of the showbiz game. For example:
by John Ginty
early five years ago I started the journey to becoming a filmmaker. At the time I had a great job with benefits, three weeks of vacation, a decent salary, and great co-workers…
…but I was miserable. I wasn’t doing the one thing that burned with an unquenchable fire within me. All I wanted to do was make movies.
Now mind you, I am a father of three awesome children and husband to an amazing wife. I have a mortgage, a car payment, and of course your standard American credit card debt. But despite all of these very major (and for good reason) would be “road blocks,” I quit my job to pursue my dream of becoming a filmmaker.
Did I have a plan?
Nope, not really.
Did I have money saved up?
Not even remotely.
But what I did have was four very important things and ideas on my side as I began my journey.
1) The Full Support of My Loved Ones
This is vital to your success. It’s one thing to say your going to jump off a bridge if it won’t affect anyone around you. It’s a completely different story if there are people in your life that will be directly touched by life altering decisions. Which is why I talked to my wife FIRST.
When I told my wife about how I was feeling and how miserable I was, even though I was providing for our family, she had my back. 100%. She never doubted me or my dream for a moment. Was she scared? YUP. And that is to be expected. Venturing into a new career is scary enough, but going for a career with the greatest rate of people abandoning the dream is insane!
Soooo – what if you don’t have the full unadulterated support of your family or loved ones? Whelp, you have to make a choice. I recently got some great advice about making difficult choices. To paraphrase, he asked me would I rather live with the pain of regret for doing it and failing or the pain of “what if” and living with never knowing. (The choice I made in that instance was to do it and it turned out AMAZING…btw.)
But once I made the decision, what then?
2) Decision Means Nothing Without Action
After I experienced the euphoric sensation of leaving a job that I knew wasn’t tied to my future destiny, there was a numbness of “what now?” What was I supposed to do? I knew nothing about the film industry apart from what I had read in books. So every day I tried to learn something new….