I had a terrific conversation with my friend Josh about taking risks in changing your career, following your calling and not letting the paycheck be the only thing that dictates your professional choices. He told me a story about what’s going on in his life right now that I wanted to share with you.
Josh has always been a hard worker, and he has no problem taking risks. Some people love him while others find him too challenging to be around. He’s not afraid to toot his own horn, but he also usually earns the right to do that. He has been a leader in his community, owned several companies, has been in recovery for 7 years from multiple addictions, was once a local politician and has seen his fortunes rise and fall as he continues on his interesting journey of life.
He’ll be the first to tell you that even at 45, he has no idea what he wants to be when he grows up. He’s one of those guys who is very smart and loves building things like companies and seeing if his ideas work or not. I’ve never seen someone handle failure or rejection as well as him. He just views it as another lesson, as data gathering, and as a victory in learning what doesn’t work. Josh has a certain charisma that if you don’t know him, may seem charmingly reckless, but he knows exactly what he’s doing and has cultivated that eccentric aura. It could be a defense mechanism, but I’m not here to psychoanalyze him.
Josh says he’s always been this way. He also says that his parents were the opposite. They had rough upbringings with often unsafe conditions. They internalized it was best never to rock the boat and carried that into their lives as elementary school teachers. He had a brother who was two years younger and throughout their lives growing up together, Dennis was shy and more risk-averse than Josh. When Dennis finished college, he went out to Los Angeles to try and make his fame and fortune as a screenwriter. I know the courage to do that impressed Josh and he wished his brother well.
In Hollywood, probably more than anywhere in the world, there can be no risk-averse thinking. You need to put 100% of yourself into your job 24/7 in the early years and expect to be rejected 99% of the time. Projects fall apart all the time, people change their minds and when you’re talking about the kind of budgets many of those TV shows and movie have, you’re just a tiny cog in the wheel.
Dennis started to make his way up the ladder, just as the script he wrote for himself dictated, and according to Josh, his baby brother was doing well. Then, there was a strike by one of the unions and Hollywood came to a grinding halt. This is where it fell apart for Dennis. When he didn’t know where his next check was coming from, he switched roles. He became a low-level producer for true crime documentaries.
Over the next 15 years, Dennis rose to be a showrunner for many true crime series. He made great money, but was more involved in budgets, insurance and production coordination. During the pandemic, somewhat unexpectedly, Dennis announced he was leaving Hollywood and heading back east to live in the same town he grew up in, this time with his wife and two young children in tow.
Josh said when Dennis arrived, he was excited about new possibilities outside of entertainment. He was considering going back to school, or getting into real estate, or simply resting for a few months while he remodeled his former uncle’s house. A few days after returning east, the brothers had lunch. Dennis told Josh that Hollywood beat him. He wanted to be a movie writer and ended up as an “administrative creative” in true crime TV.
Josh tried to build him up, saying that he adapted according to his needs and went further than most ever get. Dennis made his living in the entertainment industry for nearly two decades but Dennis explained the script he expected to follow was his dream. Instead, he didn’t have the stomach to stick out the strike. Every step along the way, he made the safe decision. Many would say he made the smart decision. But he didn’t make the decision that was best for him because he was scared.
I’ve talked a lot about scripts the last few weeks. Many feel like we’re cornered and have to follow ones that are set out for us, but the flip side, and just as sad to see happen to my clients is when they talk themselves out of the script they want to follow because of fear or not having the ability to take risks.
The frustrating endnote to this is that Josh sent me an email a couple days ago and said his brother finally found a job – making a true crime TV show remotely. Nothing changed, he just lives a few miles from the Atlantic Ocean instead of the Pacific. If he was my client, the first thing we’d do is figure out why he can’t say no and what it’s going to take to get him to take a risk.
You mustn’t let fear hold you back. You’re only in your 20s once. You’re only in your 30s once. You don’t get a chance to do-over days. If you’re going to seize the passion of your professional life, you need to get going immediately, and that’s what I help my clients do. Once the passion kicks in, nothing can hold you back.