I received an email the other day from a recent college graduate who found me through my college’s alumni database. This person was asking for advice on being a screenwriter.
What is ironic is the person giving the advice (me) is often the person who needs to hear it the most! Or I project what I need (and needed) to do to move the chains forward, to stay in the game, to do something meaningful.
While everyone out there giving advice on < insert industry/activity here > will have all kinds of tactical advice, what is universal is something we all know:
Work your ass off. Repeat. Again and again. And again.
Whenever we are looking for advice (or giving advice), we’re often trying to find something else to say, something more clever, more elegant, or more tactical – perhaps on some unconscious level that serves as some sort of “hack” to lessen the steepness of the road.
And yet it seems like it still comes down to resilience. The hard work of falling down and getting back up, repeatedly. A recent article mentioned that millennials have less “grit” (or resilience) compared to previous generations, but I think that’s not a generational thing, and just a part of life and aging. For many of us, we tend to become more resilient as we get older. With more years of adult life experience, we all experience setbacks of all kinds, and somehow today, we are still alive (in keeping with cliches, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger). So many of us like to think we were that much tougher and diligent when we were younger, but that again is projecting the adults we are today back to the kids we were decades ago.
Resilience isn’t a constant, but can develop and grow over time. And it’s this very resilience that we need as we’re knee deep in pre-production, heading towards our shoot dates coming up in less than a month!