The Hollywood Commandments Page 3
Remember what I said: you have to push, and push, and push, and push some more. Pushing strengthens you and unlocks the power within you—and let’s face it, you need that power because the world is tough and it pushes back.
The world does not give up what we want easily. This journey to fulfillment is not for the faint of heart. There will be roadblocks in your way, and when you clear one, there will be another, and another. You have to be relentless and keep doing the right things day after day without worrying too much about the reward. Put in the time, commit 100 percent to the process, and the rewards will come. Because the stronger, more determined, more focused, smarter person you’re becoming? That’s a reward in and of itself.
SETBACKS ARE SETUPS
All careers, without exception, are exercises in enduring phases of learning and acclimation. Michael Jordan didn’t start out as the greatest player in NBA history (sorry Curry, Kobe, and LeBron fans, I still believe Jordan is the greatest); he became that person through years of work and overcoming what seemed like setbacks, including being cut from his high school varsity team as a sophomore because he was only five feet ten. It’s true. In fact, when Michael was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, he not only credited that particular setback for determining his lifelong work ethic, he even invited Leroy Smith, the six-foot-seven player who took his spot on the varsity squad, to attend the ceremony.
Michael celebrated the setback because he knew it was really a setup that helped lay the foundation for his eventual success. That early disappointment taught him as a young man that if he wanted to be ready to achieve his full purpose, he would have to push through adversity and keep believing in who he knew he could be even in the face of circumstances trying to tell him otherwise.
The big problem with setbacks is that we often look at them without a spiritual perspective. When we do that, we only see failures or disappointments as setbacks that take us further away from our goals. Discouragement makes us doubt God and ourselves. We ask, “If God loves me so much, why would He allow me to fail? Why was I stupid enough to believe I could have what I want?” When we can’t reconcile the God we believe in with the life we believe we are destined to live, disappointment can take up permanent residence in our lives, detouring us indefinitely and leading to years of bitter unhappiness.
Now, try an experiment. Look at everything in the last year of your life that you’ve labeled as a setback and relabel it as a “setup” divinely designed to help you achieve your purpose. What do I mean? Think of Joseph in the Bible. He dreamt of one day being a ruler, but every step toward that dream seemed to become a setback that took him further away from its realization. He was sold into slavery by his brothers, falsely accused and thrown in jail, and forgotten in jail by the person he helped. However, once the dream was fulfilled, and Joseph became a ruler in Egypt, it became clear that the struggles and setbacks he faced along the way were in fact setups designed specifically to help him achieve his dream.
Setups prepare us to serve God’s full purpose in our careers. If God had made me a producer when I was right out of college, I wouldn’t have known what to do. I had no knowledge. I had no experience. Excelling in anything requires time to learn and to apprentice, and that’s especially true in entertainment, which is an apprenticeship business. You learn by doing under the watchful eye of those who have more experience than you do. It was that way before I got to Hollywood, and it’s still that way today.
God places setups in your path so that by the time you make it through them, you’ve become someone who can do the job in any capacity—who can lead and excel. By the time you pass the bar, get your teaching certificate, or reach the corner office, you’re ready, and you know what to do with the opportunity. You know how to maximize your potential, manage your time, and build alliances. It shocks me to this day how prepared I am to run my production company, Franklin Entertainment. Every day, it requires a piece of wisdom that I didn’t even realize that I was going to need, but I have it because I went through the process of setups at every stage of my career—intern, assistant, junior executive, senior executive, and producer—to acquire it.
My former colleague Pete Nowalk is a great example of this. When I was an executive at Sony Pictures, Pete was the assistant to the president of production, Matt Tolmach. Pete was always excellent at his job and incredibly accommodating with the needs various executives would have. Even though Pete was an assistant, he had dreams of one day becoming a writer. One of the benefits of working for the president of production is that all the scripts the studio is making come across your desk. Pete would read as many scripts as he could get his hands on, and then he started writing his own scripts on the side. One of those scripts eventually caught the attention of Shonda Rhimes, one of the most successful showrunners in television, and her ShondaLand production company. Pete left his job as an assistant and worked under Shonda for six years—first, as a writer on Private Practice, then Grey’s Anatomy, and ultimately, as a co–executive producer and writer on Scandal.
One day Pete came up with his own idea for a show about a group of ambitious law students and their genius criminal defense professor who become involved in a twisted murder plot that changes their lives forever. This idea became the hit ABC TV show called How to Get Away with Murder, one of the highest-rated and most talked about shows on television. Pete is the showrunner, and not only does he oversee the creative content of the show, he’s also responsible for overseeing all the writers on the show, working with the actors, and deciding on directors, interacting with the ABC network executives. It’s a full-time job that requires every aspect of his skills. All his years as an assistant prepared him by helping him develop the leadership and creative skills he now uses every day.
Everything you’re going through in your life right now is preparing you to do what you’ve dreamed about. Prayer helps us know that we’re on the right path and inspires us to keep going. When we don’t look past the setups and the process but learn to cherish them, God gives us the means to achieve excellence in whatever field we choose.
Exodus
There are many well-meaning people who will insist that in order to get what you want, all you need to do is just work and prayer has no impact. Your prayers as an extension of your faith combined with your work are what produces the results. The path to success is as much spiritual as it is practical, and if you’re listening to someone who keeps trying to persuade you to drop the spiritual side of your success pursuit, then you might be better served by reducing that person’s influence on your life. It’s tempting to think that “we can do it all by our strength,” but true success is a combination of divine guidance and purpose and old-fashioned effort and persistence.
DO YOUR PART
How do I know this? After The Pursuit of Happyness, and before The Karate Kid, I was at a low at Sony. I thought I was trying to live according to what God wanted me to do, but it felt like there was something missing. While my career was good, I didn’t feel like I was being who I was supposed to be. I didn’t feel valued. I didn’t feel like I mattered at all. I felt replaceable. I felt lost.
At that time, I was praying, showing up at work, and saying, “Okay, God, I trust you’re going to work it out, but when is it going to happen?” Nothing changed, and I began to realize that maybe things were the way they were not because God wasn’t answering or wasn’t concerned but because I wasn’t doing my part. What was my excuse? I had the education. I had the relationships. I had the job. What was stopping me from going after the things God had promised me? I had been assuming God was just going to manifest new stages in my career. But remember what I wrote earlier:
God doesn’t give us what we have the power to get for ourselves.
That’s a big, uncomfortable idea. God wants us to grow and become our best
selves, and sometimes that only happens when we face adversity. I started to realize that maybe I had to go beyond prayer, beyond just waiting for God, and act. Now, I believe that there are times that you have to wait for God, but there are also certain times where you have to be active. You wait on God when you need insight, when you need to know His purpose for you, and what He wants of you. I already knew that; God had told me. But there I was, still waiting. However, the waiting season was over, and when I figured that out and started taking decisive action, things started to change.
There’s one more reason not to rely solely on prayer: you run the risk of weakening your faith. Now, I know you’re saying, “DeVon, how in the world can prayer weaken my faith?” If we don’t think it’s going to take everything we have, combined with prayer, to be successful, we can wind up putting too much on God. When we outsource our responsibility for our own lives and put everything on God, we create an expectation that can result in devastation. Because while God will do His work, He’s not going to do the work we’re supposed to do for ourselves! If our prayer life creates an unwarranted expectation that God will do it all, and then He doesn’t, that disappointment can prove devastating for our faith. We need a strong prayer life to gain God’s insight and motivation, but we also need a strong work ethic to make God’s purpose for our lives a reality.
One of my greatest inspirations is Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. His story and lifestyle are a source of pure motivation. Johnson is arguably the biggest movie star in the world; his box office hits like Fast and Furious, San Andreas, Central Intelligence, and Moana have earned billions of dollars. But he calls his production company Seven Bucks Productions because it’s a humble reminder that life wasn’t always this way.
Back in 1995, Johnson was in and out of depression because of his career. He had been playing football in the Canadian Football League but was cut two months into the season. He was sitting in his pickup truck with only seven dollars in his pocket: “In 1995, I had seven bucks in my pocket and knew two things: I was broke as hell and one day I wouldn’t be.” It was the turning point in his life because he began to prepare for what he had been praying for.
He decided to follow his father and grandfather and go into wrestling. He started wrestling under the name Rocky, but after a few bouts, the fans rejected him. Undeterred, he decided to change his stage name to “The Rock,” and this adjustment, along with a work ethic that few people on the planet possess, proved to be the foundation that would transform him into one of the biggest entertainers in the world.
It’s time to start doing your part no matter what circumstances you face.
STUDY TO SHOW YOURSELF APPROVED
Prayer can open your mind, but it can’t fill it completely. If you want to be in the fullness of God’s purpose, you need to study more. The great author and motivational speaker Jim Rohn said, “If you want to be healthy study health . . . if you want to be wealthy, study wealth . . . if you want to be happy, study happiness.” I agree completely. If you want to be successful in your field, study. There are knowledge and understanding that are vital to your success that you cannot attain no matter how long or fervently you pray.
No matter how much I prayed, prayer couldn’t teach me how to be a successful executive. That only came with intense study of the industry and lots of experience. From there, I was able to move on to other passions: author, TV personality, producer. None of these things would have happened if I hadn’t taken the time to study my industry, learn trends, learn how to develop scripts, figure out how to navigate personalities, learn what makes a project commercially viable, and so on.
In order to be successful, engage in intense, consistent study of the field in which you want to excel. Read. Assist more experienced people. Watch skilled professionals at work and take note of everything they do. If you don’t understand why they did something, ask. You’d be surprised at how willing most people will be to give you a response to well thought-out and insightful questions.
Jesus knew all this. He absolutely took time to pray. But he was also on the move. There were towns that were not receptive to his message, so he would move on. He was looking for people he could inspire but also people who could help him prepare. He would go to the synagogue to listen and learn and preach. He knew that his time of impact would come when he was thirty years old, and every moment before that was for preparation and study. He had to learn the politics of the region, the economics of the region, and the religion of the region so that when his time came, he would be effective. Without question, he spent time in prayer, but he spent more time learning and practicing.
I meet many people who say they want to work in Hollywood, but their lack of study betrays the passion they say they have. If I ask them to tell me what they liked about the last movie they watched, and they talk about a movie that came out a year ago, I know they’re not taking their would-be career seriously. It’s like talking to someone who says he wants to be a sportscaster but hasn’t watched a game since the 2015 Super Bowl. If someone is truly passionate about an entertainment career, I can tell by the questions they ask me and their response to my answers. Both tell me if they’ve done their homework. If they haven’t, I know they’re not ready.
How you study your industry will either support or betray what you say you’re passionate about.
If you want to reach the next level in your career, become a student not just of where you are today but also of where you aspire to be in the future. Begin to study and put yourself in environments conducive to where you want to go. For example, if your dream is to start your own software company, learning about programming and even getting a computer science degree are both important, but they’re not enough. You have to do as Jesus did and put yourself in environments that will change who you are. Attend coding competitions like Google Code Jam. Go to startup events and boot camps near you. Go to the Consumer Electronics Show. Ask questions, listen, meet people, and learn what you can’t from prayer alone.
Away from the Workplace
This approach to prayer can benefit you in other areas of your life. For example, in something I’ve already talked about—physical fitness and health—God won’t make you lean and ripped, but He can give you the discipline and strength of will to stick to a workout and diet program when the going gets tough. If you have fitness goals, pray about them and make sure they’re the right goals. Then hit the gym hard and show the equipment no mercy. Stay focused and put in the work and you’ll see results in time.
IF PRAYER ISN’T ENOUGH, WHEN IS IT NECESSARY?
As I said in the beginning, this book is about applying spiritual and secular principles to achieve spiritual and secular success. I’ve been very clear that in going after your goals, there is no substitute for learning, work, and persistence. But doesn’t prayer also play a role in positioning you for the life you want?
Of course, it does. It’s critical—to a healthy soul but also to finding success. These are some scenarios in which prayer can give you an important edge:
•You’re uncertain about your purpose. Here, prayer is essential. If you don’t know what your purpose is or what career you should pursue, and you fear wasting years on a direction that will prove unfulfilling, ask God to reveal His purpose for your life, as He did for me. Look at your talents and gifts. Keep in mind that He may reveal your purpose not directly but subtly. You might feel a strong pull toward one industry or type of work or meet someone who’s engaged in a career that you hadn’t thought about but, upon further investigation, find fascinating. Whatever the process, discovering your God-ordained purpose is an unsurpassed blessing, a direct and meaningful connection to your divine destiny.
•You’re being asked to compromise your values. As I’ve mentioned, I observe the Sabbath, from sunset Friday to sunset Saturday. I don’t do any office work and spend my time in study, prayer, and fellowship with my church community and immediate family. But more than once I have faced pressure to bend my Sabbath obse
rvation—to attend a screening, read scripts, or go to work meetings. When the pressures of work make us question our convictions, prayer is invaluable. It centers us and reminds us of what is really important. Prayer can give us the wisdom and fortitude to stand firm and handle difficult situations.
Every time I’ve been asked to waive my Sabbath observance for work, I pray and then stand firm on my conviction, refusing to bow to pressure or compromise. Ironically, these refusals have actually helped my career, not hurt it. You’ll face similar situations, and when you do, pray and ask for guidance on how to handle the situation. What I know is that, even if people don’t agree with you, when you stay true to your convictions (no matter the cost), you will earn yourself respect from those around you.
Look at Desmond Doss in the movie Hacksaw Ridge, based on a true story. Doss was an army medic in World War II, yet he would not use a weapon because he believed it was wrong to kill. He faced ridicule, abuse, and tremendous pressure to compromise, but he resisted. As a result, he saved many lives and made history.
•You face a crossroads in your career. Being offered a new position? Faced with the chance to go back to school for an advanced degree? Unsure of what to do? Prayer can help bring clarity to the situation and help you make the right decision.
•You’re facing a steep uphill climb. Maybe you’ve been handed a difficult, tedious, but important project. Maybe you’ve started at a new company, and things aren’t going as planned. You know that hard work and persistence are the keys to advancement, but that doesn’t make them any easier. So, ask God for strength in daily prayer—in fact, pray every time you find your will faltering. After all, Isaiah 40:31 (NIV) says, “Those who hope in the LORD will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.”