Degrees? Funds? Ideas? Street smart? Experience? Politics? Connections?
No. Not even close.
Your heart is the key to success. Passion is the fuel that sustains hard work, manifests talent and ties relationships. If you love what you do and love the people around you, you will succeed. If you don’t, you probably won’t – at least not in the manner you personally define success.
Like recruiting a band of freedom fighters, a company can commission a handful of different filmmakers to generate original content for a single narrative or non-narrative campaign unified by theme, message, dialogue or genre. By recruiting several auteurs to produce independent work, the company reduces brand risk by investing in multiple creative visions to satisfy one campaign. Odds are much higher that at least one of the dissimilar campaign videos will be successful online. As an added bonus, mercenary campaigns serve as strong breeding pools for discovering fresh directorial talent.
When pitting filmmakers against each other, it is much easier to negotiate competitive production budgets. Depending on the complexity of the campaign and nature of material, a brand could easily generate five pieces of content for the going price of one 30-second industry commercial. If your filmmakers are chosen through film school or a public competition online, you can offer as little as $1,000 budgets to each. Run productions concurrently and you can collect all of that content very quickly.
Coca-Cola has been doing this for 13 years through their Refreshing Filmmaker Awards. As another legitimate example, Philips commissioned RSA (Ridley Scott Associates filmmaker group) to shoot five short films using the same dialogue to promote their Ambilight Cinema Television. Five different directors produced radically different content and drove strong traffic to the brand. Carl Erik Rinsch’s film, “The Gift,” even sparked a studio bidding war.
As with crowdsourcing, trusting outsiders to produce video content could potentially compromise your company image. Thankfully, you are in control of your own brand – do not release the videos if they fail to satisfy your needs. Either way, it’s worth the experiment. Young, ambitious filmmakers like 5 Second Films could bring a lot to your campaign if you award them the freedom to do so.
Risk is a lot like crossing a busy street. You can go out of your way to find an intersection OR you can wait patiently for traffic to free up and seize your opportunity. In life, you can accomplish your goal by the book the slow way OR you can study your surroundings before making a direct move. In either case, there is a level of patience involved – leaping into risks unstudied can be suicide. The crosswalk or textbook may be safer, but they add time to your journey and do not force you to genuinely appreciate the physics around you. Crossing the street or accepting a challenge may end in failure, but you could save a lot of time and have much more to learn by doing.
Sometimes, the crosswalk may be the most direct route – embrace it. Other times, you may need to cross a six lane highway while racing the clock or a competitor. Only you can decide whether the time saved and lessons learned are worth it.
I am not advocating for jaywalking or breaking laws. But I do encourage you to seriously consider a more direct path. Put down the book and get dirty.
How much are you worth? How much money do you deserve to make? The only official frame of reference for that question is minimum wage. And I’m pretty sure you’re worth more than that.
But how much more? The average person is not comfortable discussing income with others. And some companies require employees to keep salaries confidential, for fear they might expect more, do less or leave for better. But why not hold our bosses accountable? We should share our numbers – at the very least with peers of the same age and industry – to frame how well we are being compensated for our work.
Getting paid more than peers? Great, appreciate your job more. Getting paid less? If you think you deserve the difference, knowing your friends make more should boost your confidence to ask for a raise or better negotiate future offers.
Aside from union stipulations, Hollywood is all over the map with compensation. Talented harder-working people can make as little as $100 per day while entitled fools make $5,000 per day filling the same position. And you wonder why Hollywood is wrought with ego?
Know where you fit. Earn what you deserve.
Most people do not eat breakfast in the morning, which is silly for three reasons:
Scrambled eggs are easiest of all. Whip eggs and other stuff together in a bowl, toss in a greased (with light butter or macadamia nut oil) skillet on medium-low temperature, cook until firm, and eat.
That said, scrambled eggs can get a little boring. I recommend a mix and match of any six of the following to mix it up to taste in the morning:
For another approach to a quick healthy breakfast, check out Tim Ferriss’s 3-Minute “Slow-Carb” Breakfast.
What else do you put in your eggs in the morning?
Anthropologist Margaret Mead said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
There is no such thing as a one man show. No single individual can truly bring about change or an impact on his or her own. One may be able to initiate alone, but it takes at least two to see things through. It requires resources, time and talent beyond our personal scope to really make a difference in this world.
Get over it. Stop focusing on what you can do. Focus on what we can do together. Find your place in the talent pool, surround yourself with disparate skill sets, and venture out to do good together. There is no “i” in “team.”
L.A. Times sportswriter Walter ‘Red’ Smith said, “There’s nothing more terrifying than a blank piece of paper.” If you set a goal to create, that blank piece of paper is your worst enemy. Starting is always the hardest part.
We stall ourselves with the question, “Where do I start?” It doesn’t matter. Just start. Put something on the page. Do not bother starting from the top, your introduction will come in time. Free yourself from linear thinking. Start at the core of what you want to say, the examples, the conclusion – whatever comes to you first. Free yourself from focused thinking – something irrelevant on the page is better than nothing at all. Who knows what arbitrary thoughts may inspire you?
I started this post with the words, “I don’t know what to write.” Thus, this post was born.
You have no excuses. Go write.
The concept of failure as an educational tool is not new, nor is it particularly difficult to rationalize. Make a mistake and you are less likely to make the same mistake again. Touch a hot stove? Fail. Lesson learned. The human value of failure is obvious, right?
Easier said than done. Nobody likes to fail. More often than not, we shy away from the obstacles that may otherwise drive us to fail. Generally, we avoid risk. Consequently, we learn very little.
Former IBM president Thomas J. Watson once said, “If you want to succeed, double your failure rate.” In pursuit of a fulfilled life, we need to take more chances – and therefore prepare ourselves for a higher volume of failure. For what reason? Because every time we fail, we learn. The more we learn, the more equipped we are to iterate on our failure. With enough iterations, we will unlock our potential and succeed.
Abstinence from action is abstinence of growth.
Do not sit still. Take chances. Fail. And love it.
To start making money on YouTube, you need to become a YouTube Partner. To qualify, you need to consistently add content, build a subscriber base and drive a large volume of traffic. If you do not already, good luck.
While actual partner revenue statistics are kept private, you can roughly estimate that content creators are only making $1 per every thousand views on YouTube. At best, Rebecca Black has made $90,000 on “Friday” (not bad, but you can never expect to drive 90 million views to your videos – and you usually have overhead costs to cover like production gear and talent). But even that $1 per thousand estimate is high and often unrealistic depending on which adds are associated with your content, how often your visitors click on them, and how viral your content is.
The short answer is that your prime source of revenue will NOT come from YouTube itself. Major online video players are getting clever with product integrations, partnerships, freemium models, and much more to help print the bacon. Our entire new media division currently lives on front-end agreements with large brands.
Plan to make money with online video? Get creative.
Frankly, the question is bullshit. We are guided to answer it with a profession, a title or a lifestyle.
“I want to be an artist.” “I want to be the president.” “I want to be a film director.” “I want to stay at home and raise my children.”
The problem? There’s far more to life than a title, many roads to travel, and too much time to do only one thing. Your answer will change. It has since you were born, it will continue to evolve until the day you die. My answer changed throughout my life from Locomotive Engineer to Meteorologist to Starship Captain to Video Game Designer to Film Producer to Technology CEO. I have been all over the map, with passion and curiosity. I am sure you have, too.
I understand the question. “What do you want to be?” It is a focusing mechanism, the answer of which can help guide you into the trials and tribulations of adulthood. Unfortunately, the question suggests that there is only one answer per person. It distinguishes between future (“what will you become”) and present (“what you are now”). And it prompts you to cite conventional societal roles or industries as a solution to your life problem. Woe is you if your job title is at the core of your eulogy.
I propose a new question:
“What is your purpose?”
Purpose is your mission in life, your agenda, the core principal that guides you when you wake up in the morning and drives you to make decisions. No matter the career or role you play, purpose underlies everything you say and do.
What would you die for?
I want to bring people together. That’s my purpose. And that purpose is far more noble and omnipresent than my resume or my title.
Craig Ormiston 