Dear Writer Director Letter #94
It’s not a flex to be ‘too busy’ for things.
Dear Writer Director,
It’s not a flex to be ‘too busy’ for things. The richest people on earth respond instantly to a text message. Wealth is not created through the act of hoarding. True wealth is created through the act of giving freely of yourself to others. The phrase ‘what goes around comes around’ is real. The steps of building wealth goes as follows: 1. Listen to the world around you. 2. Notice when someone or something needs something that they don’t yet have. 3. Think about what resources you have that could solve their problem. 4. Offer those resources instead of gatekeeping them behind money. 5. Allow people to pay you if they wish to pay you.
For the past two weeks straight, I have been raising money. By April 5th, I will have raised the equivalent of $20,000 respectively. I have already raised $8,500. It’s Saturday March 29th, and I’ve come along way, and I have a long way to go. I’m not achieving this by doing cut and dry transactions. The steps of what I’m doing are as follows: 1. Allowing people to know what I am up to both publicly online and privately in emails and texts. 2. Allowing them to respond with whatever they have to offer. 3. Asking them about what is going on in their life that I can support. I might ask them, “What keeps them up at night?” which I learned from a business coach earlier this year. 4. I offer what resources I have to make life easier for them. It turns out that most people enjoy the nature of an exchange like this. After my initial Gofundme drop in their DM’s, I am greeted with whatever trauma response they have when it comes to being asked for money. This doesn’t surprise me, but a lot of people have had severely negative experiences in the past with this. Those experiences have hardened them. It feels nice to be the person who melts that ice a little bit with a pleasant use of time and hopefully, something immediate for them. I’ve written about this before, but I have Tim Brigham, a mortgage broker, to thank for this mindset. Business should really just be as simple as giving and receiving exchanges of value. A lot of things have value. Money also has value, but so does time, energy, networks, learned wisdom. I’d argue allowing one’s self to receive is the biggest block most of us have. It’s hard to see and acknowledge the beauty of being handed a present from another person.
It’s not a flex to be ‘too busy’ for things. The “busiest” people are generally the saddest people. It’s the way a successful person works before they realize they do not actually have to work that way. It’s the way a successful person works who cannot, for the life of them, see that they are actually successful yet. In the year of our Lord 2020, I used to work from 7am to 11pm every night and forget to eat unless my partner happened to cook and shove food over to my desk. I thought I was “so productive”, but I had never been more unhappy and totally lost as to what I was productive for. In hindsight, I was using work to shield me from the fact that I wasn’t all that interested in the actual life I had built. I didn’t want to look at what was going on between me and my now ex. I just thought to myself, all the time, if I get ahead, my life circumstances will automatically change. That’s not how that works. You have to get rid of stuff, things, people, attitudes before you get anything new. You’re not just handed an award from on high. You have to earn it by walking into fire and subjecting yourself to transformation.
The first bold act I did to get myself out of that rut was apply to the MFA program at University of Nebraska at Omaha for Screenwriting. My friend India had gotten accepted, and I had a dream I was supposed to go with her, so I applied. Within two days, I got in, and the program was really excited to have me. I had no idea how I was going to pay for it. At that time, I was extremely ignorant of student loans and how they even worked. Once I did some digging, I realized that through the assistance of loans and being able to work while going to school, I could put myself through grad school. I signed the paper, and I committed to transforming myself into a professional screenwriter. This was my big step away from the theatre world and into my new life in Indie Film and Social Media. Once I committed, that’s when the rest of my life started to blow up, and I could finally see what I had to get rid of if I was ever going to survive grad school and become a confident writer.
Dear Writer Director, your life doesn’t change by you working hard. Your life radically shifts when you let go of what’s no longer meant to be there. When you free up space, you can see so many more possibilities for yourself. Only then, will you have the brain space to see what you couldn’t see before.
As you adventure along your journey, the most important thing is to provide value to other people along the way. That strategy will never steer you wrong.
Love,
O