The Hollywood Commandments Read online

  Let’s be clear about one thing. If your goal is to get the house of a lifetime, the car of your dreams, or more money than you know how to handle, this book is not for you! I don’t care if you ever drive a Bentley, own a private jet, carry a Birkin bag, or buy a mansion in the hills. What I care about is seeing you live out your God-given purpose in this life, walk in your calling, and unleash the full power of your gifts. If you feel stuck in your career, feel a deep sense that there’s more to life than the life you’re living, or if you are just looking for information about how to get to the next level of your calling, then this book is for you.

  I define success as a deep sense of peace, and we find the most peace when we live out our true calling and fulfill the purpose we were created for. History is filled with examples of people who had an abundance of material possessions but no peace because no matter how much stuff you have, there’s not enough money in the world to fill the hole in your soul. That’s not the fate I want for you. I want to help you become the person you’re destined to be.

  The key lesson: you can be wildly successful in a secular world without losing your faith. A secular world is one that is not overtly religious, and whether we like it or not, this is the world most of us live in most of the time. But if you make the right choices, your success in the secular world can actually strengthen your faith. I’m proof of that. Too many people believe that “worldly” success contradicts the principles of faith, but the opposite is true. Faith will not hold you back from success; it will empower it. The truth is, you may never fully experience God unless you fully pursue the secular ambitions He placed deep in your spirit. After all, He put them there for a reason!

  In Daniel, God never condemns the fact that his people are working in Babylon. He uses Babylon as a tool to demonstrate how great He is—how universal and effective the ideas that come from His teachings are. When you live by your spiritual principles and enjoy secular success, you’re actually doing a service to the God you claim to worship.

  God never meant for His people to hermetically seal themselves within the church. The principles the Hebrew Boys applied to their success came out of their desire to be successful spiritually. If they had stuck to what they had learned in the synagogue, they would never have achieved true success.

  God wants us to ground ourselves in profound spirituality and faith and then venture boldly into our careers. Think of it as a spiritual version of the Star Trek motto: “To boldly go where no believer has gone before!” Life is a beautiful adventure, and you can’t be afraid to explore! It’s time to live your freest and truest possible life!

  A USER’S MANUAL

  The Hollywood Commandments is the user’s manual to doing exactly that. It’s based on the most important lessons I’ve picked up during my career in Hollywood as a successful producer and believing Christian. These lessons—a.k.a. “Commandments”—are the heart of the book and are relevant to any industry, from academics to tech to business to entrepreneurship:

  1.Your Prayers Alone Aren’t Enough

  2.You Are the Talent

  3.You Have to Carry a Crown Before You Can Wear One

  4.You Have to Know the Rules to Play the Game

  5.Your Gut Is Hiding God

  6.You Get What You Negotiate (Not What You’re Worth)

  7.You Must Master the Walk of Fame

  8.Your Difference Is Your Destiny

  9.Your Amnesia Is an Asset

  10.Your World Is Smaller Than You Think

  What I have found is that, contrary to what people of faith often believe, as you invest more of yourself in your career, spiritual wisdom becomes more relevant, not less. Character, wisdom, values, sense of purpose—the more you hope to achieve, the more they are the bedrock of what you can achieve. But by themselves, they are not enough. My time in Hollywood has shown me that, while God might reveal to you your passionate purpose, it’s still up to you to go after it. That means you have to do a lot more than heed God’s call, show up on the job, and say, “Here I am!”

  In his critically acclaimed book The Tipping Point, New York Times bestselling author and thought leader Malcolm Gladwell says we have to put in ten thousand hours to master anything. To me, that’s code for you have to be obsessed with what you do. Learn the skills, test your talents, and practice your purpose continuously. Being who God is calling you to be will take everything you’ve got: your spirit, physicality, emotion, everything. You have to push, and you have to push, and then you have to push some more. Reaching your dream is always harder than you think it’s going to be. The world does not give up what you want easily. It gives it up grudgingly. God will inspire, guide, teach, and reveal. But He won’t do the work for you.

  This book is a user’s manual for balancing the secular and the spiritual and for understanding how each fits into the other. The balance is that place where ambition meets accountability and what you want for your life meets what God wants for you. We’ll learn about understanding the rules behind that balance—the Commandments—and putting them to work in your life.

  Why life? Because life should be about more than how to earn a living. It should be about how to achieve the fullest expression of who we really are. Achieving that is one of the greatest ways to honor God. Does that mean you have to leave your job, start a business, or go for the promotion? Yes, it might! Does it mean you have to compromise in your faith? Definitely not. The Bible famously says that faith without works is dead, and that means that faith with works is life. True success means learning how faith and work fit together.

  1

  YOUR PRAYERS ALONE AREN’T ENOUGH

  Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays.

  —Soren Kierkegaard

  My wife, Meagan Good, is an actress who has enjoyed a tremendous and fulfilling career in entertainment. Last year she felt compelled to embark upon a new goal: become an action star. However, Meagan is very petite. And while she’s been a leading lady most of her career, she hasn’t done many action roles. Most people in Hollywood didn’t see her as the action-movie type, which created a dilemma. She needed to change how directors, producers, and casting directors saw her, and that meant one thing: changing herself physically.

  To be clear, nothing was or is wrong with Meagan’s body. Action stars simply require a certain level of physicality and fitness to be successful and credible. While all action stars have stunt doubles, they still do a good portion of their stunts, which mandates they be in peak physical condition. Meagan hadn’t ever trained for that level of physicality or fitness before.

  She prayed about her goal and asked God for confirmation. She believed God had spoken in her spirit and told her that action films were the next stage in her career. However, I would come home from work and see her on the couch eating junk food. When I asked her if she had gone to the gym, she would have an excuse for why she hadn’t gone on that particular day. This pattern repeated itself often. Then one day she was expressing her frustration that, while she had been praying consistently, she wasn’t receiving opportunities to go out for action parts. I was a little nervous to tell her what I was thinking, but I hoped she would receive it in the love with which I intended it. I turned to her and gently said, “You have to prepare for what you are praying for. You can’t expect God’s promises to manifest in your life if you aren’t getting ready for them.” It took her a minute to respond, but once it sunk in, she agreed.

  Since we’ve been together, Meagan has never liked the gym. But in order to prepare for what she was praying for, she had to do something she didn’t want to do: work out regularly. She had no gym membership, gym clothes, or workout program, so she got them. She started to go to the gym, take Tae Kwon Do classes, and get up early every morning to exercise. After a while, she started saying things like, “I love working out,” and, “I don’t feel right if a day passes and I haven’t worked out.” When I heard that I’d think, “Who is this new woman in my wife’s body?” I couldn’t imagine tha
t a person who hated working out so much had become so obsessed with it.

  Before long, the work started to pay off. Meagan started to transform physically, and she began to look like the action star she wanted to be. She became lean and muscular and learned to throw a spinning back kick that could knock a grown man back five feet. People began to ask her if she was preparing for a role, and she would reply, “Yes, I already have it; it just hasn’t manifested yet.” Finally, after months of preparing and working, Meagan got the opportunity to be the new Foxy Brown, an iconic female action character dedicated to protecting those who can’t protect themselves. It’s being developed as a TV series for Hulu.

  AN IDEA THAT MIGHT GET ME KICKED OUT OF CHURCH

  Prayer is important. It’s the cornerstone of our relationship with God, our private time with the Creator. Now, let’s look at why preparing and taking action is as important as praying. To some people raised in the church, this idea is straight-up blasphemy, which is why I said that it might get me booted out of—or at least, politely disinvited to speak at—a few churches. I was raised in the faith, and we’re taught that the Lord is all-powerful and can achieve anything for those who have faith in Him. And that’s all true. But just because God can do anything doesn’t mean that he should . . . or that he will.

  This builds on an idea I discussed in my first book, Produced by Faith. Think about the relationship between parents and children. If you’re a parent, it’s your job to love your kids, protect them, be an example of discipline, compassion, and wisdom, help them develop intellectually and spiritually, and put them in situations where they can learn strength, self-esteem, and faith. It’s not your job to do everything for them or give them everything they want. Sure, you could buy them a fancy car when they turn sixteen, and you could do all their homework for them so they never get a grade below an A. But what happens to kids who never learn the value of doing things for themselves? Exactly. They grow up spoiled, entitled, and helpless.

  Well, we’re all God’s children, and because He is a great parent, He doesn’t do everything for us. Preparation is for our benefit and edification. Preparation is also bold faith in action. You pray because you believe God is going to do what you’ve prayed for. If God had sent Meagan a fantastic part in an action movie before she was prepared for it, she probably wouldn’t have valued it when it arrived, and she would have been unprepared to take it on because she lacked the physicality she needed to be successful. God brings us insight, inspiration, strength, and relationships with people who can help us. But we have to put in the work and prepare so that when the harvest comes, we’re ready.

  In other words:

  Your Prayers Alone Aren’t Enough

  Prayer is the way we communicate with God and learn what path he wants us to take. However, what I learned from Meagan’s experience is that while getting what you want should always begin with prayer, if you actually want to see results you can’t stop at prayer. Anything you are praying for you must also prepare for.

  We all want the harvest because harvest time is sweet! We want our season of reaping and enjoying the fruits of our labor, yet we spend too much time either complaining about why it hasn’t come yet or getting frustrated with the amount of work required to produce it. In the end, one of two things happens: we don’t get the harvest at all, or when harvest time comes we are incapable of maximizing it because we didn’t prepare for it in advance.

  We’re all anticipating something good coming to us in our careers—advancement, a big opportunity, or even a new career path. But while you’re waiting for this thing to come to pass, please prepare. Pray that God will lead you to your destiny. Pray for opportunities that align with your true self. Absolutely, pray and seek His will in everything. Yet when prayer is done, get up and put in the work. Every day I pray then I go to work! I work on becoming a better speaker, a better author, a better producer, a better businessman, a better husband, a better friend, and so on.

  False Idols

  When does furious intensity to succeed become something to criticize instead of admire? When it compels you to compromise what is right. Doing something illegal or immoral for the sake of advancement can derail God’s purpose for you because doing it turns you into someone else—someone different from the person you were created to be. So, a short-term compromise for the sake of the high-speed rush to get results can lead you down the slippery slope. At the bottom, you won’t find success but shame and loss.

  PRAY AND PREPARE

  Make “Pray and Prepare” your personal motto. Prayer is only the beginning of the process. God told me I was going to be a producer when I was a child, but that purpose took years to manifest, and it didn’t manifest just because I prayed. I had to move from Northern California to Los Angeles. I not only attended college at the University of Southern California but also maintained an internship and sometimes held down two jobs while being a full-time student. I had to get up every day and put in work on my skills, grow my understanding of the industry, and build relationships.

  It took eighteen years from the time I set foot in Los Angeles to the day I closed my first producing deal! That’s 6,570 days, 157,680 hours of preparation. Each day I would pray to God for it to happen, and then I’d prepare myself for when it did happen by pushing myself to learn everything there was to learn about what He was calling me to do. By the time my harvest came, I was ready for it. Everything I went through up to that point was necessary to prepare my heart, my integrity, and my ability to manage the harvest when it was time.

  Why do so many people think that prayer is enough to achieve their highest purpose? I think there are three main reasons:

  1.Fatalism. Among some of the faithful, you can find a dangerous kind of fatalism—a belief that we don’t have the power to change things in our life, so all we have to do is just ask God for something and then sit back and wait for Him to bring it to us. That’s treating God like He’s a genie, and we’ve rubbed a magic lamp, or like prayers are spiritual quarters for God’s vending machine. But God doesn’t work that way. If you pray to Him for something that’s beyond your power to produce—healing for a loved one who’s gravely ill, for instance—He can and often does deliver miracles. But when something is very much within your power to manifest, like researching the industry you desire to work in or putting in a resume with a company you admire, God’s more likely to say, “What are you asking Me for? Go and get it done!”

  2.The “in this world but not of this world” doctrine. As Christians, we are sometimes warned that we should live separate from the secular world. The reason is that the world outside the church walls is evil and could aggressively turn us against God—so much so that we should fear going “too deep” into the world. Based on this line of thinking, is it okay to be ambitious about a career outside the confines of what the church deems acceptable? No, sir! We were taught that was something that would tempt us and draw us further away from God.

  I believe we’re commissioned by God to be the instruments of His Word in the world, and what better way to do that than by living according to the values of our faith in our careers and lives, where we can have the greatest effect on other people through our words and actions? Even Jesus says, “I’m not asking you to take them out of the world, but to keep them safe from the evil one” (John 17:15, NLT). I developed the ambition to go into entertainment specifically because I felt that God’s purpose for me was to help bring change to the world through film and television—the most powerful communications media on earth.

  There is nothing ungodly about focusing on your career or having strong career ambitions, as long as those ambitions don’t distance you from the values of your faith. Don’t be afraid to go after every good thing God has put in your heart to pursue, even if it doesn’t line up with other people’s vision for you.

  3.We obsess over the end result and forget to value the process. For me, the process looks like this. My day of rest is the Sabbath, so from Friday night sundown
to Saturday night sundown I go to church and recover from the stresses of a tough week. When Sunday comes around, it’s time for me to get ready for the week ahead. On a typical Sunday, my first workout might be at eight in the morning. Then I’ll usually check out a sermon online. I might have a call with a screenwriter to give them notes on a project or have a script I need to read. I’ll get my wife’s car and my car washed, go to the grocery store, sometimes get in a second workout in the afternoon, then carve out time to spend with Meagan if she’s not working.

  None of those activities helps me to magically arrive at the fulfillment of my goals. But that’s not why I do all that stuff. To go back to the harvest metaphor, it’s easy to focus all your attention on the vegetables you’re going to reap in the autumn. But if you do that, then you’ll neglect the planting, watering, fertilizing, and weeding—the maintenance—that makes the harvest possible. We love results, but we hate waiting for them. When you set about transforming your body in the gym, and you work out for a month, you’re not going to see results. If you work out for six months, you’ll see some results, but you won’t see the fullness of those results. It might take a year or more to manifest the results you have in your mind today. In life, we often quit too early. We put in minimum effort and expect maximum return. Receiving the best life and career don’t work like that.

  If you don’t learn to fully commit to the process required for success, you will never achieve all the results the process can yield. If you just pray and do half the work, you’re never going to achieve the fullness of your purpose.