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Posts Tagged ‘taking risks’

What Change Looks Like

Posted in Life, Personal Development, tagged , , , , , , on November 27, 2012| Leave a Comment »

I screwed up last week. Multiple times.

Photo by Kate Sumbler.

Here’s what happened. I got really excited about that vulnerability TED talk, which you can probably tell by reading what I’ve written about it. And I decided I wanted to be vulnerable about All the Things…or at least several of the things. So I was pushing myself on multiple fronts at pretty much the same time, which meant two weeks in which so much was going on and so much of it was challenging and emotional exhaustion now.

Apparently this is called a vulnerability hangover, but to me, possibly because I was so enthusiastic, it felt more like a vulnerability OMFG eight car pile-up on the freeway. Fun times.

But there was a strategy behind my madness! Or you know, maybe I’m just incredibly skilled at finding the bright side of the lemonade in that strange-colored cloud over there. But as it turns out, one way of finding out what we most need to work on is to push ourselves to a failure point and then watch what happens. (I don’t necessarily recommend this, by the way; but if it’s happened anyway, you might as well learn something from it, right?)

So as it turns out, my failure point was not being assertive enough. And I didn’t fail at this once, oh no. I failed at it multiple times. Like at least three, and realistically probably more than three. So I know it’s something worth focusing on for the next however-many-months-it-takes. Interestingly, I’ve written an article for this blog entitled “How to Become More Assertive,” but upon re-reading it, I’m not finding it super helpful, so obviously I need to write a new article all about it in the not-too-distant future.

I don’t like writing this. I don’t like telling you how I failed. I procrastinated for a couple of hours before I could make myself type this up. I watch bloggers like Penelope Trunk and James Altucher who let it all hang out and write all about their often spectacular failures, and I’m completely riveted even while I’m thinking to myself, “Wow, I could never do that.” Even now I’m not giving any particulars, which I tell myself is to protect the innocent but in reality is mostly me being a wimp.

But here’s the thing. I want to write about what making change looks like. And change involves taking risks and making mistakes and failing, sometimes repeatedly. It’s not like a training montage in a movie, and it’s not like that moment of realization in novels when the protagonist figures out what is really important. It’s messier than that. And it takes a lot longer than five minutes and seven costume changes.

But it’s part of the process. I keep reading about how the bad and the good go together: how suffering can presage positive change, how failure leads to success, how we embark on the hero’s journey and come back wiser. How before we can rebuild, we have to tear down. Change is certainly interesting and rewarding, but it is not easy.

So I’ll begin thinking about assertiveness. And I’ll fail to be assertive a lot, in a variety of situations, in a myriad of different and creative ways. And gradually I’ll become better at it, and I’ll mess up less often.

This is what change looks like.

 

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The Museum of Epic Failure

Posted in Arts, Life, Personal Development, Society, tagged , , , , on November 13, 2012| 5 Comments »

I stumbled across an interview with Brene Brown (whose TED talk I mentioned last week), and at the end she says if she was going to found a museum, she would call it “a Museum of Epic Failure.” At which point I instantly emailed a link to the article to my friend and said, “This is the title of my next blog post!”

Photo by the National Museum of American History Smithsonian Institute

We have such strange ideas about failure and success. I meet people again and again who assume that, having failed at something once, it makes sense to automatically give up and not try again. They wonder at the fact that I have written THREE novels, even though none of them are yet published. They make comments that call into question the entire premise of one of my failures, as if I have now automatically learned better.

Sure, sometimes a failure, and the lessons we learn by failing, cause us to change directions. Sometimes we decide we’re better suited to doing something different, or we’ve found a new passion to pursue. Sometimes our viewpoint has changed so that we no longer want the same things we wanted before. But failure can also mean that the next time we try, we’ll apply what we’ve learned this time around and do better.

Meanwhile, when we stop doing something we’ve been successful at in some form or another, people get confused and tell us it’s “too bad.” And if they like us (aka social success), they tell us to “never change.” There’s this idea that once success has been achieved, we need to hold onto it tightly while avoiding change at all costs.

This is an example of black and white thinking at its finest, where success is positive and good and to be cherished, while failure is negative and bad and to be avoided.

What is often overlooked is the necessity of failure. When we take a risk, it is risky because there is the possibility of failure. If we were one hundred percent sure we’d succeed, it wouldn’t be a risk at all, would it? And so many great successes and helpful learning moments come from the willingness to take a risk and allow ourselves to be vulnerable.

Most great art–be it visual, literary, musical, or theatrical–comes from reaching to see where we can go, from exposing ourselves in the act of creation.

Most great relationships–be they platonic or romantic–come from opening up and being authentic with one another, while not knowing how we’ll be received.

Most great entrepreneurial ventures–be they tech start-ups or service businesses or local merchants–come from taking the leap into the unknown and committing ourselves and our resources to a particular vision.

When we are engaged in these activities and being honest with ourselves, we know we are taking risks. We know we may fail. And it is when we allow ourselves the space to fail (say goodbye to perfectionism!) that we are capable of our best work.

Which is when we realize that failure isn’t inherently bad. It teaches us, it pushes us, it leads down paths we wouldn’t have noticed by ourselves. It makes success, when it comes, more meaningful, even while it keeps us grounded and connected. And when failure comes instead, and we feel flattened by its impact, we can remind ourselves of the alternative: staying safe, cramped, and complacent while being too afraid to really try.

We are each in the process of creating our own personal Museum of Epic Failure. I’ve already collected many interesting exhibits in mine. And each one has helped to shape who I am today.

Even things that are uncomfortable can have reasons to be celebrated. Is there a failure you’ve experienced that you learned something important from or that you’re grateful for now? Feel free to share in the comments.

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Tapping into Authenticity

Posted in Life, Personal Development, tagged , , , , , , , , on November 8, 2012| 15 Comments »

A couple of weeks ago I watched a TED talk by Brene Brown entitled “The Power of Vulnerability.” It’s twenty minutes long, but I highly recommend watching it when you get the chance. Brene Brown is a researcher who spent years studying vulnerability, shame, and human connection, and she shares valuable insights from her work and how it has affected her own life.

I’ve been seeing a common theme coming up this year, and it comes up again in this talk: that connection and well-being come from the inside, that they arise from our own beliefs and attitudes about ourselves.

I saw it in James Altucher’s post about Kamal Ravikant, who was desperately ill and miserable until he turned things around for himself and ended up writing a short book about the experience. His secret? He told himself that he loved himself a billion and one times.

I saw it in the reading I was doing about attachment styles. Apparently people with a healthy attachment style tend to assume that their needs will be met. And guess what? More often than not, their needs are met, one way or another. Part of this is probably because they are asking for what they need, and part of it is because they are attracting other people who are okay meeting some of these needs. The fact that they assume their needs are okay and will be met shows a greater sense of self worth.

And now here is Brene Brown, telling us that the one thing separating those people who experience a lot of love and belonging in their lives from those who do not is a sense of worthiness. When we believe that we are worthy of love and connection, when we believe that we are enough just as we are, then we can embrace our vulnerability, find our authenticity, and achieve greater connection.

And in her list of traits that these “heart whole” people have in common, she mentions them having compassion for themselves, because otherwise they are unable to have compassion for other people. This idea relates back to the Nice vs. Kind trap and one of the reasons being a people pleaser ultimately doesn’t work out so well.

At the end of last year, I wrote a post called “You are Worth It,” giving this message in yet another way.

This idea of worthiness circles back around on itself in a feedback loop. Take the recent World Fantasy Convention as an example. I entered into the convention feeling comfortable and like I belonged. Because of that, I was more relaxed, having a better time, and able to be very much Amy. So I could connect more easily with both people I knew and people I was meeting. Then people started joking that I knew everyone (not true, but thank you!), which made me feel like I belonged even more, and so made me connect more. Rinse and repeat.

Very Much Amy

The key point, though, is that the nifty cycle I described started with me. It began with me taking my career seriously and feeling like I belonged in a group of professionals. It began with me taking myself seriously, as a person worthy of respect. Without that, the cycle wouldn’t have had a chance to feed back on itself.

We talk a lot about authenticity: to connect with each other, and in a professional context, to connect with readers. This authenticity comes from the courage to be vulnerable. And make no mistake, it does take courage; this blog has taught me that. And here we find another loop: courage builds feelings of worthiness, and a feeling of self worth increases our courage. 

Let’s be brave together.

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When the Personal is Important

Posted in Life, Social Media, Society, Writing, tagged , , , , , , on September 18, 2012| 9 Comments »

A couple of weeks ago, I was reading over some of my older blog entries. When I’d finished, I sat back and thought, “Huh. That was actually kind of personal.” At least, more personal than I had remembered.

There’s a place where the personal and the important intersect. And we who blog are then called to make a decision: how important is so important that I can’t stay silent about this? In my case, that means I often end up blogging about issues related to people pleasing and boundaries (and occasionally feminism). I know there are lots of people who grew up in dysfunctional families just like I did, who have similar issues, and I know how helpful it can be to know there are others out there in the world dealing with the same kind of thing you’re dealing with. It’s too important for me to stay silent.

This trade-off was brought strongly to mind during this year’s Worldcon, where I was lucky enough to spend some time with Jay Lake. For those of you who don’t know who he is, Jay is a prolific SF/F writer of some note. He also blogs. For the past few years, he has blogged in an unusually open fashion about his difficulties with cancer. He blogs about disease, about mortality, about what he feels his cancer has stolen from him. He blogs about determination, depression, despair, and joy.

He told me he gets more fan mail from his cancer blog than he does from all his published fiction.

Me and Jay at Epic ConFusion this January. Photo by Al Bogdan.

And he pays a price for being personal. I spent time with him at several points during the convention, and every single time, we were approached by people who expressed their sorrow about his health, or asked about it, or gave him their good wishes that he would recover. On the one hand, it was beautiful to see this outpouring of support from the community.

But I looked at him at one point, late-ish in the evening, after a particularly long stream of generic good wishes, and I thought, “This must get completely exhausting.”

And that is the price. Not everyone will be able to look past the cancer and see the man. Because he has blogged so openly about his disease, he can’t necessarily create a veneer of normalcy for himself when at public events like Worldcon. Part of his public identity is linked to his cancer.

But he pays the price with grace, and I admire him so much for doing so. Because it is too important to stay silent. We need to hear about cancer, about illness, about mortality, and about the physical and emotional struggles that come with these oh-so-human things. Our society tends to have dysfunctional attitudes around illness, around death and dying, around grief and loss, and part of changing those attitudes is talking about these things in a frank and open way. And people who have cancer, people who have other serious illnesses, people who have loved ones who are sick, many of them are helped by Jay’s blog, where by writing authentically about his own personal experience, he puts words to so many other people’s experiences.

So I think about this blog, which is perhaps a bit more personal than I had originally intended. And then I think about Jay. And I’m glad to have written about what I think is important.

I’m in fabulous company.

 

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Life as a Dream, Life as a Fairy Tale

Posted in Life, tagged , , , , , , on August 23, 2012| 4 Comments »

“Only those who truly love and who are truly strong can sustain their lives as a dream. You dwell in your own enchantment. Life throws stones at you, but your love and your dream change those stones into the flowers of discovery… People like you are unknowing transformers of things, protected by your own fairy-tale, by love.”

— Ben Okri (Thanks to Theodora Goss for bringing this quotation to my attention.)

I love this idea, of sustaining life as a dream. Dora rightly stated that this is what artists do, but it is what all of us can do, if we so choose. It is what I would like to do, and I think my (limited) ability to do it is part of the best of me.

Of course, most of the time I don’t think of my life as a dream, or a fairy tale, or an adventure. I forget. I get caught up in my to do list, the daily minutiae, my worries and little dramas. One of the reasons I loved living in London so much was that being removed from the very familiar helped remind me of life as a dream. But here in my life right now it is much harder to stay connected to my own fairy tale.

So as I think about the not-so-distant future, I am asking myself: If I was running my own fairy tale (which I pretty much am), what would I do? Where would I go? How can I help myself develop my own personal world of enchantment?

Photo by Frank Wuestefeld

Transformation is a powerful magic. I half-joke about hating change, and of course the reason I hate it is because of the price. As any budding fantasy writer knows, all magic has a price; all magic systems must have drawbacks in order to compensate for the sometimes insanely powerful effects magic can gift to its user. In our world, the price is often pain and discomfort.

The trick, I think, is to turn that pain, that profound sense of displacement, into a fairy tale. To give the pain meaning, if you will. Part of that is finding the petals amongst the stones, the good that comes from the bad, the silver lining, the twist of happiness hiding at the heart of bitterness. Part of that is surrounding yourself with reminders of enchantment. And part of that is being aware of the story as you live it, to become a lucid dreamer of life.

Ben Okri is right. To stay in the dream takes enormous strength, and openness, and willingness to pay the pain price. It is not for everyone.

But for those of us who aspire to dwell there, it is its own reward.

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Sucking the Marrow From Life

Posted in Life, tagged , , , , , on July 24, 2012| 9 Comments »

Last week Theodora Goss wrote about becoming more fearless, and she had this to say:

“Perhaps it’s when you come to the realization that the point of life isn’t to be rich, or secure, or even to be loved — to be any of the things that people usually think is the point. The point of life is to live as deeply as possible, to experience fully. And that can be done in so many ways.”

I love this so much. I love it not only because I agree with it, but also because it redefines what “success” is. It allows us to be kind with ourselves about the inevitable mistakes and confusion and decisions that didn’t turn out the way we thought they would. Because all of that, the laughter and tears, the messes and triumphs, they all become woven into the tapestries of our lives. And to value all of them seems to me to be celebrating life in a more complete way.

It’s not that the other things Dora lists aren’t important. Money is useful for obvious reasons (read: not starving to death). Security–that feeling that the earth isn’t going to shift underneath you at any moment–well, I think some of us crave security more than others, and for those of us who do crave it, not having it can produce inordinate amounts of stress. And love–we all learned from The Christmas Carol that love, both the personal kind and the more general goodwill towards humans kind, is more important than wealth. And indeed, love of all kinds can be a deeply enriching experience.

However, all of these things can be stripped away. Here today, gone tomorrow. Huge financial crisis, lay-offs at work, a medical crisis, and your money is gone. Career change, bad health news, a house fire, and security is gone. Death, divorce, drifting away, and the love might not be gone, but it has certainly altered. Because the fundamental truth of being human is that the world and our experience of the world are in constant flux, whether we want that or not.

Photo by Dave Morrow

This is why I like what Dora said so very much. Because living as deeply as possible, that does not have to change, at least not until death. “As possible” is key here; we may not get to live as we would choose, but we can still have as our goal to live as fully as possible given our circumstances. There are so many possibilities of what that could look like. Maybe I can’t travel to China this year (wouldn’t that be a fabulous trip to take?), but I can go to Seattle. And write a novel. And read beautiful books. The challenge then becomes creating something meaningful out of what you can make possible.

Living like this takes a lot of courage, I think (which makes sense, given that Dora was talking about fearlessness). It is hard to let go of specific ideas of what we want. It is hard to create meaning when circumscribed in various ways. It is hard to accept that things change when we were comfortable or happy with the way they were before. It is hard to cast ourselves on the winds of life and attempt to steer even though we might not know exactly where we are going. (And if we do know, we are often wrong.)

But when I lie on my deathbed, I think this is what will matter to me, this passionate living of life. I’ll care a bit about the physical comforts that money can bring me, sure. I probably won’t care much about security given that I’ll be dying. I’ll care a lot about the people I love and the time I have been able to spend with them. And I’ll care about how I spent the time I had. I’ll care that I lived with all my being, that I did courageous things, that I listened to Thoreau and sucked the marrow right out of life.

How do you want to spend your life?

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Man on the Moon Day, or My First Flash

Posted in Science fiction and fantasy, Writing, tagged , , , , , , , on July 11, 2012| 7 Comments »

My flash science fiction story Man on the Moon Day is now available on Daily Science Fiction’s website. Hooray! (Make sure you press the “Display Entire Story” button so you don’t miss out on the end.)

For those of you who don’t know what flash fiction is, it is super short fiction. The word limits vary, but in my own mind, I usually define flash fiction as stories of 1000 words or less. Other people say flash fiction is even shorter than that.

I wrote Man on the Moon Day for a contest of the Codex Writers’ Group called Weekend Warrior. The idea is that every weekend for five weeks, the participants are provided with a few prompts to choose from, and must write a story of 750 words or less. Then everyone reads everyone else’s stories and rates them all from 1 to 10 and provides brief comments (a sentence or two).

For me, this contest was a great education in flash fiction, a form of fiction I hadn’t been very familiar with before. I participated in three of the weeks (one weekend I was in Detroit for ConFusion, and the last weekend I was just tired and very steeped in Novel). My first two stories…well, they weren’t very good. And then I wrote Man on the Moon Day, edited it based on contest feedback (it’s now 850 words long instead of 750), and sent it into Daily Science Fiction. Thirty-five days later I received the e-mail saying they wanted to buy it.

This story challenged me in two particular ways (well, besides the challenge of learning to write at a much shorter length, which was hard enough!). First, I was playing with a protagonist who…well, she’s fairly bitter, and many readers did not find her particularly likeable. I actually enjoy writing about protagonists who aren’t likeable but with whom I still have some sympathetic connection, and I figured, if I couldn’t play with that in such a short form, when could I get away with it? The structure of the story doesn’t help this either, as it is just one moment in time in what I consider to be the denouement of the entire story. Showing more of the story would, most likely, have helped to build more sympathy for the main character. So it was definitely a risk to take and doesn’t work for all readers. Indeed, many of the readers on Codex adamantly didn’t like this story.

The second challenge was one of theme and how this story plays into the “great space explorer” trope of science fiction. Because the story should be about the spouse who travels off into the great beyond and founds a colony on the moon…shouldn’t it? Well, I didn’t think so. In this case, I thought it was more interesting to explore what (or in this case, who) the explorer leaves behind and ask the question, at what cost? I’m not trying to make value judgments here about the cost as much as present the question to the reader so they can answer it for themselves. At the same time, the story may cause some readers to question traditional gender roles and how gender privilege sometimes asserts itself into relationships. It certainly caused me to think about that, even though I didn’t originally intend to write a story about that issue.

So this is a story that very much challenged me, as both a writer and a human being, and I hope it will challenge some of you as well.

Meanwhile, if you are wondering why a Wednesday post, it is because I will be on a plane for most of Thursday. I’ll be at Readercon outside of Boston this weekend, my first time at this particular con. I have a group Codex reading on Friday at 12pm in Room NH, at which I’ll be reading this story (it is, after all, a Codex success story). The rest of the time, I’ll be gorging on exciting panels and interesting conversation. If you are going to be there as well, I’d love to say hello!

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Be Bold and Fail

Posted in Life, Personal Development, tagged , , , , , , , , on June 19, 2012| 13 Comments »

Let’s talk about failing.

Remember Adam Baker, producer of the documentary I’m Fine, Thanks? (The movie, incidentally, has now reached its funding goals, hooray!) He had this to say about how people overcome falling into complacency:

“They started to become comfortable being able to fail. I don’t mean they LIKED failing. Or even tried to fail. But they were o.k. with that being part of the process. Often, the desire NOT to fail was what kept people trapped for decades!”

How often do we hold ourselves back because we’re afraid to fail? Maybe people won’t like our final product (or us, heaven forbid). Maybe people will say no to us. Maybe people won’t buy our book, or listen to our songs, or even know we exist, even when we’ve given it our best shot. Maybe we’ll sound stupid. Maybe we’ll realize a major flaw only after our idea/plan/creative work has already been made public. Maybe maybe maybe.

So in order to protect ourselves from all those maybes, those things that might happen in the future, we fail before we even start, by not allowing ourselves to start (or finish). In this way we can preserve some illusion of perfection, of possibility, of “I could have done this if I’d really wanted to.” Some of us have been taught that failure is an unacceptable and unendurable sort of experience, and thus, we protect ourselves from the imagined agony it will cause.

Except. Failure only has the power over us that we grant it. Failure only causes us agonies if we allow it to do so. When we reframe failure to be okay, to be a learning experience, perhaps even a way of being able to tell that we’re saying yes to our own potential, then it loses its power to wound so deeply.

Even in the hero’s journey, the hero fails before succeeding.

“Boldness is genius.” I read this post by Sarah Peck recently, and it suits my current frame of mind (I even gave a spirited live reading of it, which I wish I had video of so we could laugh about it together). I’ve been trying to be more bold lately. And you know what has mostly happened?

I’ve failed. A lot more than usual. Things have fallen through. People have told me no. Vast quantities of uncertainty have wrapped their tendrils throughout my life. I’ve miscalculated the risks involved. I’ve been disappointed and frustrated. Sometimes I have a sensation not unlike banging my head repeatedly against a hard object.

But you know what? Failure? It’s not so bad. I haven’t disintegrated into a pile of green goo. My sense of self worth still exists. Sure, I don’t particularly enjoy being disappointed or frustrated, but I’m pretty sure I’d feel those emotions no matter what, and this way I’m not giving them power over me in the same way. I feel frustrated? Let’s try something new, take a break from whatever is getting under my skin. I feel disappointed? I’ll only dwell on it until I try the next thing. And if I’m being bold, that means I’m trying the next new thing a lot sooner.

The idea that failure always equals disaster is just plain wrong. Boldness IS genius. Comfort with failure unlocks many doors. And allowing ourselves to separate from all those crippling maybes is freedom.

How are you going to be bold this week?

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What does it mean to live a dream?

Posted in Life, tagged , , , , , on June 5, 2012| 5 Comments »

Observation: a lot of people who talk about “living your dream”

aren’t really doing so themselves.

–Chris Guillebeau

I suppose this is a shot at self-styled lifestyle gurus who aren’t practicing what they’re preaching. But as easily as we bandy around the idea of “living your dream,” it isn’t always so straightforward, is it?

Sometimes it is straightforward. Sometimes it is just a case of doing some basic research, of putting together a budget in order to save toward a do-able goal, of deciding to take the risk and go for it.

But other times it isn’t quite so simple.

Do I live my dream? Kind of.

But parts of my dreams have been put on hold. I’ve let parts of them go. Some of them I haven’t yet discovered. And some of them are in the middle of being baked, and I’m not sure how they’re going to turn out.

Part of the inspirational speak is tell people how easy it actually is to live your dream. And then we will all feel all fired up and ready to tackle anything. But that’s simply not true. Sometimes it’s simpler than we think, and sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes it’s quite difficult. And sometimes we achieve our dreams only to realize we’ve been chasing the wind, and the dream we thought we wanted isn’t actually our dream anymore.

Have you ever had that happen? It’s a real eye-opener.

Perhaps living our dreams is more of a state of mind, an acknowledgment of life’s possibilities. In accepting life’s disconcerting lack of permanence, we can see how that very lack can simultaneously be one of the best and the worst parts of being human. The worst because we have things (experiences, relationships, our own physical bodies) that we don’t want to let go of. The best because now is going to change, so even if our dreams feel far away in that now, soon it will be another now, maybe one in which those same dreams feel closer.

Or perhaps living our dreams is about living an examined life instead of a blind one. Do many dreams exist without a give and take? What are we willing to sacrifice and when do we find compromise impossible? What do we give up in pursuit of our dreams?

Or perhaps, just perhaps, living our dreams is something each one of us has to define for ourselves.

May you live the dreams you wish to live, when you wish to live them. It probably won’t be easy, but it might very well be worth it.

Or, as Theodora Goss says, “When things are difficult? That’s when you know you’re having an adventure.”

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Creating Your Own Life Plan: a Conversation with Adam Baker

Posted in Arts, Life, Personal Development, tagged , , , , , , , on May 31, 2012| 5 Comments »

Today I have a really special treat for you. I’ve interviewed Adam Baker, the producer of the documentary I’m Fine, Thanks, which was one of the Kickstarter projects I highlighted on Tuesday. I was really excited to do this interview because the subject of the documentary, complacency, is so in line with what I talk about here on the Practical Free Spirit: priority setting, having adventures, being willing to take risks, and living an examined life.

So without further ado, here is the conversation Baker and I had:

What originally drew you to the topic of complacency in modern life?

My own story! Haha.

My wife and I were living that exact life that we discuss and talk about in the movie. We were doing o.k., but we weren’t doing what really made us come alive.

We made choices based on what we should do – or were supposed to do – and not really what was in line with our values.

In one of your blog posts, you said that two of the interviews made you cry. Will you tell us which two?

Well, at least two! But I’m sure I know the ones I was talking about then.
The first was Jonathan Fields’ interview. And that was twice. The first time was during an emotional story he told about 9/11 – and the second was when he told a different story about his daughter (I could relate as a parent).

The second interview was Victoria from Austin, TX. She’s a successful attorney who finds herself stuck between her career, wanting to stay at home with her young daughter, and her overwhelming debt from law school. The weight of her decisions was heavy for all of us in the room (you’ll have to wait and see it). 🙂

What are some ways in which we can combat complacency in our lives?

We found two common things amongst those that had successfully fought this problem:
  • They changed WHO they surrounded themselves with. The spent less time with people who brought them down and more with time with people who inspired and lifted them up. It was really that simple.
  • They started to become comfortable being able to fail. I don’t mean they LIKED failing. Or even tried to fail. But they were o.k. with that being part of the process. Often, the desire NOT to fail was what kept people trapped for decades!

Why do you think so many people are struggling with this issue right now?

It’s so easy to get caught up in the default life path. It’s encouraged and safe. It’s comfortable. So we all fall into that pattern.

It’s far easier to live someone else’s plan for your life – rather than to create your own plan. Creating your own plan is tough – REALLY tough.

But all the people we talked to said one thing – it was worth it!

What has been the hardest part of the process of making this documentary for you?

The sheer amount of work.

We spent 16-18 hour days on production while on the road. And, honestly, post production has almost been that crazy, as well!

We gave ourselves an incredibly short time frame – I’m sure we’ll be happy once it’s over – but during the process it can be stressful!

How did what you learned through making this film change you or the way you want to live your life?

It re-fortified my belief in what I’ve been trying to do for the last few years.

I’ve been working towards a more intentional life – but always have ups and downs. It’s the meaningful projects like this that remind me to stay the course!

What can people do if they’re interested in supporting this movie?

First, watch the Kickstarter trailer. (Amy interjects to add: Check it out! It’s a kick ass trailer.)

Second, if they feel compelled – back the project on Kickstarter (for as little as $5) – which gets you a download of the movie. We have many more levels for you to back, but kept it very affordable to help share with as many people as possible.

By supporting the Kickstarter, you ensure that this story can get out into the world. If we’re successful we’ll be able to share this with tens of thousands more people!

Lastly, just spread the word. Whether you can back the project or not – sharing the trailer and the campaign with your family and friends means a lot!

We’re on pace to become one of the most backed projects on Kickstarter (total number of people supporting us) – which is amazing!

Thank you, Baker, for taking the time to talk to us about your film. I can’t wait to see it! And I can pretty much guarantee I’ll be referencing this interview again, especially those excellent points on how to combat complacency.

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