8 ms·

Just fucking figure it out

219 points by endlessvoid94 16y ago

andysinclair 16y ago
Yes, you need to just find the time to write and get on with it. For example I am sitting here on a Saturday evening writing an article on my laptop (as well as occasionally browsing the net!). I could be watching TV or playing computer games or something else, but I am writing. You need to dedicate time to write, and once you start you will find it easier and easier, and generally quicker and quicker to write. As Nike used to say, Just Do It.
- Tichy 16y ago
  You're so good.
  - andysinclair 16y ago
    No need for sarcasm. I was just making the point that getting something done requires commitment and often sacrifice.
    - josefresco 16y ago
      Try sacrificing something real like time with your family and let me know how it feels. Not everyone has regular TV time to replace.
callmeed 16y ago
Reminds me of Gary V's line: "stop watching 'effing Lost" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhqZ0RU95d4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhqZ0RU95d4
- CamperBob 16y ago
  Believe me, that's at the top of my list of Things to Do Right After I Get My Time Machine Working. Go back and invest in Apple and Microsoft, bet on the Saints to win the Super Bowl, and try my best to convince the LOST writers that they'd be better off playing World of Warcraft instead.
Tichy 16y ago
So if somebody comes up with the greatest script on earth, but doesn't work 17 hours a day as a slave for some TV producer, his script will never be made?
- sbarre 16y ago
  Correct.
- rick888 16y ago
  similarly. if you create the best web app on earth, but don't spend any time marketing it and nobody sees it, chances are it will fail.
  - Tichy 16y ago
    And marketing is making coffee for Michael Arrington?
    - apl 16y ago
      Wrong analogy. If you build a web app, you need paying customers. If you write a script, you need to get a producer to read it, like it and finance it. Different aims require different kinds of marketing - for writers it's networking on the producer-level.
      - chegra84 16y ago
        Which doesn't necessitates serving coffee.
- frederickcook 16y ago
  The amount of time and effort put into something is inversely proportional to how likely it is to fail. This isn't just because of the actual time and effort, but because as others observe this time and effort, they take the thing more seriously. For a startup, this is important because it not only means they're more likely to take it seriously, but that others are more likely to contribute their own time and effort.
gatsby 16y ago
Loved this message. Some of the most successful people I know fucking figured it out and just got shit done. Here on HN, we're exposed to countless stories of people with five kids getting shit done, and introverts making sales and getting shit done, and people with no money finding money to get shit done. Anyone can think of 100 excuses to not push forward, but in the end, we all have problems, failures, and setbacks, and a lot of life is about silencing our own excuses, fucking figuring it out, and plowing ahead.
frederickcook 16y ago
A corollary to the entrepreneur's mantra, JFDI: http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2009/11/19/what-makes-an-entrepreneur-four-lettersjfdi/ http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2009/11/19/what-makes-an-...
daniel-cussen 16y ago
I've always sort of admired people in the entertainment industry for their ambition and determination. Someone who is taking time off studying CS at Stanford and trying to make a company work is not taking a risk of remotely the same magnitude as someone dropping out of highschool, getting a GED, and working in the music industry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kesha#Childhood_and_youth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kesha#Childhood_and_youth). If you're a programmer, you have so much to bank on (the CS knowledge/degree) and even if you fail people will be pretty understanding. Try getting a good job in any industry with music skills and a GED. At the end of the day, a technical stopout founder is taking a smaller risk (really, losing the college experience) for a bigger potential reward (billions) and attractive intermediate rewards (talent acquisition). And frankly, the odds of making it big as a programmer (industry celebrity-big) are not very different from the odds of making it big as a musician (standard celebrity-big).
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
  - zaidf 16y ago
    It would have been more admirable if her mother could walk on one leg.
- palish 16y ago
  Kesha described herself in an interview as being "very studious" in high school; she would drive to Belmont University to listen in on Cold War history classes after school and achieved "near perfect" SAT scores.[7] However, she dropped out at age seventeen and earned her GED afterward.[9] She left school after being convinced by Dr. Luke and Max Martin to return to Los Angeles to pursue a music career. They had received Kesha's demo after Pebe passed it to Samantha Cox, senior director of writer/publisher relations at BMI, and were impressed. Why would she pass up that kind of opportunity? If it didn't work out, she could always go back to college.
  - gruseom 16y ago
    Ha. A friend of my father-in-law used to be a Montreal hipster. She and her husband ran a folk club (folk was the indie rock of the day) and Robert Zimmerman came through before he'd changed his name to Bob Dylan. His show was ok. Annette told him, "Kid, you need something to fall back on. Go back to college!" She was fond of recounting her spectacularly wrong moments. (The other was when Leonard Cohen played Suzanne for her and she told him it was dreck and asked him who wrote it.)
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
chegra84 16y ago
This guy doesn't even include Pareto principle in his guide to success. This guy has us working most of our time getting coffee. I say, better to write the script without a job and produce a 2 min trailer with your friends and show a couple people, than to work for months serving coffee that you hate and only to work on a script you can't complete. [I don't support balls to the walls philosophy, only do stuff that gets results, be ruthless about efficiency. Activity is not productivity.]
- dasil003 16y ago
  The Pareto principal is relatively easily applied by young programmers, but how can young screenwriters apply it? It's an industry of relationships. If they are a great writer they might get attention, or their brilliant script might never be read. If they aren't actually talking to people in the industry they'll never know, and if they aren't actually working in the industry the only way to talk people is to randomly harass them so their first impression of you is annoyance. Under that lens, getting people coffee might actually be the best 20% for an entry-level screenwriter.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
gamble 16y ago
I know nothing about the entertainment industry, but this idea of 'putting in your dues' by working your way up from a menial position based on personal relationships has always seemed naive. Either you can do something or you can't, and working as a dogsbody isn't going to impart those skills. This advice seems like the equivalent of telling someone who wants to be a game programmer to start in the QA department. You're better off just becoming a programmer. Create a game. Someone with a kick-ass demo is going to get ten times as many interviews as a guy who spends the same time pumping his connections. Maybe I'm naive about the way television works, but if I wanted to be a writer in TV I'd start by trying to write something that was so good, people couldn't ignore me. And if I couldn't find someone to produce it, I would try to produce it myself. More than one career started with a film that only cost a few thousand dollars to produce. And if it didn't work out, at least I'd have spent the time doing something creative and productive rather than wasting my life fetching coffee and dry cleaning.
- atomical 16y ago
  Well, if you define good as something that is not only a great story but in a list of themes that executives are looking to put up on the screen, then yes, that's probably all it would take.
- jerf 16y ago
  Supply and demand; the supply of people who want to be writers is too high, and you are going to have to go to great lengths to distinguish yourself or get really lucky. As others point out this may not be the only way in, but don't expect anything to be easy or even merely hard, because every metaphorical door into the place is jammed tight with people trying to get in. We get the same effect in our industry with games programming. Nothing about games really especially calls for endless deathmarches or 18 hour days with no overtime pay six days a week, any more than any of the many other industries in which programming is as critical or perhaps even more critical (there's more to games than programming) but somehow manages to get done in 40-ish hours a week. It's just the endless hordes of young programmers who think it's what they want to do driving the price through the floor by inflating supply until there's just no incentive for EA to treat them any better; they're not just replaceable, they're aggressively replaceable. I really recommend against any of these careers, the risk/reward just isn't there. The risk is much higher and it turns out there are many, many other jobs out there that are just as rewarding, except without the possibility of fame for a small percentage of jobholders.
ChristianMarks 16y ago
The Paris Review ran a series of interviews with successful writers. The one thing they had in common was a fixed, immutable writing schedule. A schedule impervious to deaths of family members (some will take offense to this, but writers aren't necessarily nice people--I grew up with one). I'm reminded of an alt.writers post from the annals of USENET. "... My opinion is that if you want to be a good novelist, start by being a bad novelist, not by becoming a good magazine article writer. Start at the top and work down -- don't start at the bottom and work up. On the other hand, I know people for whom "start small" has worked. But it doesn't for me."
coffee 16y ago
This snippet basically sum's it for me: "Yes, it’s hard. Yes, it’s lonely. Yes, you give up many other things that are important to you. But that’s what being an [entrepreneur] is."
cloudbrain 16y ago
Disclaimer: Everything I know about Hollywood I learned from watching Entourage... A big difference between breaking in to the script writing world and breaking in to the web app / internet startup world is the amount of effort required to evaluate your work. A new web app / start up can be evaluated in a few seconds. We do it all day long on this website ("Check out my new project..."). A new script for a movie or show probably takes a few hours to read (excluding Michael Bay movies...). That's a huge commitment to ask of someone. You always see producers / director being asked to "read my script". That's a lot of work. So, my guess is that all the work to start at the bottom and build relationships is required because the people you need help from (producers / directors etc.) need to like you before they will invest the 3 hours in reading your script. Michael Arrington doesn't need to like you to take 5 seconds to look at your MVP page.
- ruang 16y ago
  You could make a 5-minute trailer and put it up on YouTube.
postfuturist 16y ago
Best advice in this article: stop driving and take public transport. This applies to hackers as well as writers--really, anyone who can do creative / useful work on a laptop. If a typical commute is 30 minutes by car or 1 hour by public transportation, you may feel like you are losing an hour a day leaving your car at home, but you are actually gaining an hour of time if you bring your laptop, assuming you want to spend at least 2 hours a day working on things on your laptop outside work. Other upsides: cheaper, less stress, safer, better for the environment.
- ilamont 16y ago
  So true. I commute to school by foot, train and subway every day, just over one hour each way and during each trip I get in an extra 15 minutes of walking, 30 minutes of reading/computer work, and about 10-15 minutes reading the WSJ and NYT business and tech sections on my iPod touch, when compared with my classmates who drive. Admittedly, they're usually in their cars for 30-45 minutes each way, but it's not as productive, except maybe as a place for some solitary deep thinking.
- nostrademons 16y ago
  Or move closer to work. When I was in Boston, I had an hour commute, half by car and half by train. Yeah, I could read a book on the train. It was still a pain in the ass, and I could be doing much more productive things at home. When I moved out to Silicon Valley, my #1 priority for deciding where to live was "It must be within 15 minutes of work." I ended up getting a place that's 5 minutes by car or 15 minutes by bike from work. It was probably one of the best decisions I made moving out here. Now I can roll out of bed and into work, and when I leave work, I'm home and can do whatever I want.
ilamont 16y ago
Reminds me of something I read about the advent of cheap disk-based digital cameras with video capabilities and iMovie when they came out in the early to mid 2000s. The NYT or Rolling Stone or some other magazine interviewed a couple of documentary directors about how they were using these tools to test out ideas or do simple, short pieces. One of the directors basically said now that these tools were available, people who wanted to break into the industry no longer had an excuse to not make movies. "Lack of available time" might be considered a fallback, but as TFA points out, getting up an hour earlier every day, multitasking during your commute, or switching off the damn TV can work wonders.
- joezydeco 16y ago
  You know it's funny you mention that, because I just finished reading an AV Club interview with the producers of the original Saw movies. It was one thing to have a script passed around from place to place, but these guys went the extra step and made a 5-minute short to demonstrate the concept. Telling people you're talented and showing them you're talented are two different things, and it's surprising how few people take that one step to get into the latter category. And sometimes it's not that difficult to actually do.
  - gregpilling 16y ago
    So you are suggesting that people who want to make movies should create a trailer as a MVP? interesting concept.
    - joezydeco 16y ago
      From the interview: "When we came to L.A., we had our script in one hand and this DVD in the other hand. People liked the script, but they loved the DVD. As you quickly find out in Los Angeles, everybody’s got severe ADD. Reading a script is fairly boring—it’s a nightmarish task. Whereas people loved to be able to put the DVD in..." I used to be in a business similar to the film business where everyone and their brother had a winning concept, but the people that hand-built a prototype in their garage got the meetings. People are visual creatures, reading about a concept isn't the same as actually touching it.
chipsy 16y ago
A recurring problem with the creative media industries is that the path from initial concepts to audience awareness is quite lengthy and convoluted. Even great creative products tend to have a preferred niche, and rarely is the marketing information available to nail down niche audiences for a big launch day. But these industries are still mostly focused around big launches, because they have to completely reorganize with smaller budgets to attack the long tail. Music, comics, and writing have all made some progress towards this reorganization since both their production and marginal costs in digital form are low, so there's a great opening for the non-pop genres. Games are a bit less so, and video probably the least. But what's slowing this process down the most right now is that a niche audience has to be built from scratch, on a per-creator basis. So either you work within the system and hope for a big door-opening break, or you go completely indie and bootstrap your entire business model, customers, etc. from nothing - which effectively means that even if you are indie, you still need to find a bandwagon to jump onto, or you'll probably never get a critical mass of interest. I suspect that there's a business in providing aggregation mechanisms for untapped genres; I've just started building something along these lines in the last few days :)
mhb 16y ago
Or revealed preference sans expletives: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revealed_preference http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revealed_preference
njharman 16y ago
similar thought to jffio is behind why i try remember to tell people "because i don't make time" in stead of "i dont have time" when they ask why i havent started/finished the projects i talk about. making time aka passion, drive, determination is major factor in peoples "sucess"
shawnzizzo 16y ago
I love the message and the attitude in this article. Although it's about writing in the entertainment industry, I like that it's part of the Hacker News list. The point of this article (To get where you want, you have to make sacrifices and work your ass off) is applicable across anything in life. As a hacker, as an athlete as a business person, etc. This is hard to do. Why do you think there's such a short list of people that are absolute "guns" at their trade?

219 points by endlessvoid94 16y ago

Yes, you need to just find the time to write and get on with it. For example I am sitting here on a Saturday evening writing an article on my laptop (as well as occasionally browsing the net!). I could be watching TV or playing computer games or something else, but I am writing. You need to dedicate time to write, and once you start you will find it easier and easier, and generally quicker and quicker to write. As Nike used to say, Just Do It.

Tichy 16y ago
You're so good.
- andysinclair 16y ago
  No need for sarcasm. I was just making the point that getting something done requires commitment and often sacrifice.
  - josefresco 16y ago
    Try sacrificing something real like time with your family and let me know how it feels. Not everyone has regular TV time to replace.

callmeed 16y ago

Reminds me of Gary V's line: "stop watching 'effing Lost" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhqZ0RU95d4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhqZ0RU95d4

CamperBob 16y ago
Believe me, that's at the top of my list of Things to Do Right After I Get My Time Machine Working. Go back and invest in Apple and Microsoft, bet on the Saints to win the Super Bowl, and try my best to convince the LOST writers that they'd be better off playing World of Warcraft instead.

Tichy 16y ago

So if somebody comes up with the greatest script on earth, but doesn't work 17 hours a day as a slave for some TV producer, his script will never be made?

sbarre 16y ago
Correct.
rick888 16y ago
similarly. if you create the best web app on earth, but don't spend any time marketing it and nobody sees it, chances are it will fail.
- Tichy 16y ago
  And marketing is making coffee for Michael Arrington?
  - apl 16y ago
    Wrong analogy. If you build a web app, you need paying customers. If you write a script, you need to get a producer to read it, like it and finance it. Different aims require different kinds of marketing - for writers it's networking on the producer-level.
    - chegra84 16y ago
      Which doesn't necessitates serving coffee.
frederickcook 16y ago
The amount of time and effort put into something is inversely proportional to how likely it is to fail. This isn't just because of the actual time and effort, but because as others observe this time and effort, they take the thing more seriously. For a startup, this is important because it not only means they're more likely to take it seriously, but that others are more likely to contribute their own time and effort.

gatsby 16y ago

Loved this message. Some of the most successful people I know fucking figured it out and just got shit done. Here on HN, we're exposed to countless stories of people with five kids getting shit done, and introverts making sales and getting shit done, and people with no money finding money to get shit done. Anyone can think of 100 excuses to not push forward, but in the end, we all have problems, failures, and setbacks, and a lot of life is about silencing our own excuses, fucking figuring it out, and plowing ahead.

frederickcook 16y ago

A corollary to the entrepreneur's mantra, JFDI: http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2009/11/19/what-makes-an-entrepreneur-four-lettersjfdi/ http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2009/11/19/what-makes-an-...

daniel-cussen 16y ago

I've always sort of admired people in the entertainment industry for their ambition and determination. Someone who is taking time off studying CS at Stanford and trying to make a company work is not taking a risk of remotely the same magnitude as someone dropping out of highschool, getting a GED, and working in the music industry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kesha#Childhood_and_youth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kesha#Childhood_and_youth). If you're a programmer, you have so much to bank on (the CS knowledge/degree) and even if you fail people will be pretty understanding. Try getting a good job in any industry with music skills and a GED. At the end of the day, a technical stopout founder is taking a smaller risk (really, losing the college experience) for a bigger potential reward (billions) and attractive intermediate rewards (talent acquisition). And frankly, the odds of making it big as a programmer (industry celebrity-big) are not very different from the odds of making it big as a musician (standard celebrity-big).

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
- zaidf 16y ago
  It would have been more admirable if her mother could walk on one leg.
palish 16y ago
Kesha described herself in an interview as being "very studious" in high school; she would drive to Belmont University to listen in on Cold War history classes after school and achieved "near perfect" SAT scores.[7] However, she dropped out at age seventeen and earned her GED afterward.[9] She left school after being convinced by Dr. Luke and Max Martin to return to Los Angeles to pursue a music career. They had received Kesha's demo after Pebe passed it to Samantha Cox, senior director of writer/publisher relations at BMI, and were impressed. Why would she pass up that kind of opportunity? If it didn't work out, she could always go back to college.
- gruseom 16y ago
  Ha. A friend of my father-in-law used to be a Montreal hipster. She and her husband ran a folk club (folk was the indie rock of the day) and Robert Zimmerman came through before he'd changed his name to Bob Dylan. His show was ok. Annette told him, "Kid, you need something to fall back on. Go back to college!" She was fond of recounting her spectacularly wrong moments. (The other was when Leonard Cohen played Suzanne for her and she told him it was dreck and asked him who wrote it.)

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

chegra84 16y ago

This guy doesn't even include Pareto principle in his guide to success. This guy has us working most of our time getting coffee. I say, better to write the script without a job and produce a 2 min trailer with your friends and show a couple people, than to work for months serving coffee that you hate and only to work on a script you can't complete. [I don't support balls to the walls philosophy, only do stuff that gets results, be ruthless about efficiency. Activity is not productivity.]

dasil003 16y ago
The Pareto principal is relatively easily applied by young programmers, but how can young screenwriters apply it? It's an industry of relationships. If they are a great writer they might get attention, or their brilliant script might never be read. If they aren't actually talking to people in the industry they'll never know, and if they aren't actually working in the industry the only way to talk people is to randomly harass them so their first impression of you is annoyance. Under that lens, getting people coffee might actually be the best 20% for an entry-level screenwriter.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

gamble 16y ago

I know nothing about the entertainment industry, but this idea of 'putting in your dues' by working your way up from a menial position based on personal relationships has always seemed naive. Either you can do something or you can't, and working as a dogsbody isn't going to impart those skills. This advice seems like the equivalent of telling someone who wants to be a game programmer to start in the QA department. You're better off just becoming a programmer. Create a game. Someone with a kick-ass demo is going to get ten times as many interviews as a guy who spends the same time pumping his connections. Maybe I'm naive about the way television works, but if I wanted to be a writer in TV I'd start by trying to write something that was so good, people couldn't ignore me. And if I couldn't find someone to produce it, I would try to produce it myself. More than one career started with a film that only cost a few thousand dollars to produce. And if it didn't work out, at least I'd have spent the time doing something creative and productive rather than wasting my life fetching coffee and dry cleaning.

atomical 16y ago
Well, if you define good as something that is not only a great story but in a list of themes that executives are looking to put up on the screen, then yes, that's probably all it would take.
jerf 16y ago
Supply and demand; the supply of people who want to be writers is too high, and you are going to have to go to great lengths to distinguish yourself or get really lucky. As others point out this may not be the only way in, but don't expect anything to be easy or even merely hard, because every metaphorical door into the place is jammed tight with people trying to get in. We get the same effect in our industry with games programming. Nothing about games really especially calls for endless deathmarches or 18 hour days with no overtime pay six days a week, any more than any of the many other industries in which programming is as critical or perhaps even more critical (there's more to games than programming) but somehow manages to get done in 40-ish hours a week. It's just the endless hordes of young programmers who think it's what they want to do driving the price through the floor by inflating supply until there's just no incentive for EA to treat them any better; they're not just replaceable, they're aggressively replaceable. I really recommend against any of these careers, the risk/reward just isn't there. The risk is much higher and it turns out there are many, many other jobs out there that are just as rewarding, except without the possibility of fame for a small percentage of jobholders.

ChristianMarks 16y ago

The Paris Review ran a series of interviews with successful writers. The one thing they had in common was a fixed, immutable writing schedule. A schedule impervious to deaths of family members (some will take offense to this, but writers aren't necessarily nice people--I grew up with one). I'm reminded of an alt.writers post from the annals of USENET. "... My opinion is that if you want to be a good novelist, start by being a bad novelist, not by becoming a good magazine article writer. Start at the top and work down -- don't start at the bottom and work up. On the other hand, I know people for whom "start small" has worked. But it doesn't for me."

coffee 16y ago

This snippet basically sum's it for me: "Yes, it’s hard. Yes, it’s lonely. Yes, you give up many other things that are important to you. But that’s what being an [entrepreneur] is."

cloudbrain 16y ago

Disclaimer: Everything I know about Hollywood I learned from watching Entourage... A big difference between breaking in to the script writing world and breaking in to the web app / internet startup world is the amount of effort required to evaluate your work. A new web app / start up can be evaluated in a few seconds. We do it all day long on this website ("Check out my new project..."). A new script for a movie or show probably takes a few hours to read (excluding Michael Bay movies...). That's a huge commitment to ask of someone. You always see producers / director being asked to "read my script". That's a lot of work. So, my guess is that all the work to start at the bottom and build relationships is required because the people you need help from (producers / directors etc.) need to like you before they will invest the 3 hours in reading your script. Michael Arrington doesn't need to like you to take 5 seconds to look at your MVP page.

ruang 16y ago
You could make a 5-minute trailer and put it up on YouTube.

postfuturist 16y ago

Best advice in this article: stop driving and take public transport. This applies to hackers as well as writers--really, anyone who can do creative / useful work on a laptop. If a typical commute is 30 minutes by car or 1 hour by public transportation, you may feel like you are losing an hour a day leaving your car at home, but you are actually gaining an hour of time if you bring your laptop, assuming you want to spend at least 2 hours a day working on things on your laptop outside work. Other upsides: cheaper, less stress, safer, better for the environment.

ilamont 16y ago
So true. I commute to school by foot, train and subway every day, just over one hour each way and during each trip I get in an extra 15 minutes of walking, 30 minutes of reading/computer work, and about 10-15 minutes reading the WSJ and NYT business and tech sections on my iPod touch, when compared with my classmates who drive. Admittedly, they're usually in their cars for 30-45 minutes each way, but it's not as productive, except maybe as a place for some solitary deep thinking.
nostrademons 16y ago
Or move closer to work. When I was in Boston, I had an hour commute, half by car and half by train. Yeah, I could read a book on the train. It was still a pain in the ass, and I could be doing much more productive things at home. When I moved out to Silicon Valley, my #1 priority for deciding where to live was "It must be within 15 minutes of work." I ended up getting a place that's 5 minutes by car or 15 minutes by bike from work. It was probably one of the best decisions I made moving out here. Now I can roll out of bed and into work, and when I leave work, I'm home and can do whatever I want.

ilamont 16y ago

Reminds me of something I read about the advent of cheap disk-based digital cameras with video capabilities and iMovie when they came out in the early to mid 2000s. The NYT or Rolling Stone or some other magazine interviewed a couple of documentary directors about how they were using these tools to test out ideas or do simple, short pieces. One of the directors basically said now that these tools were available, people who wanted to break into the industry no longer had an excuse to not make movies. "Lack of available time" might be considered a fallback, but as TFA points out, getting up an hour earlier every day, multitasking during your commute, or switching off the damn TV can work wonders.

joezydeco 16y ago
You know it's funny you mention that, because I just finished reading an AV Club interview with the producers of the original Saw movies. It was one thing to have a script passed around from place to place, but these guys went the extra step and made a 5-minute short to demonstrate the concept. Telling people you're talented and showing them you're talented are two different things, and it's surprising how few people take that one step to get into the latter category. And sometimes it's not that difficult to actually do.
- gregpilling 16y ago
  So you are suggesting that people who want to make movies should create a trailer as a MVP? interesting concept.
  - joezydeco 16y ago
    From the interview: "When we came to L.A., we had our script in one hand and this DVD in the other hand. People liked the script, but they loved the DVD. As you quickly find out in Los Angeles, everybody’s got severe ADD. Reading a script is fairly boring—it’s a nightmarish task. Whereas people loved to be able to put the DVD in..." I used to be in a business similar to the film business where everyone and their brother had a winning concept, but the people that hand-built a prototype in their garage got the meetings. People are visual creatures, reading about a concept isn't the same as actually touching it.

chipsy 16y ago

A recurring problem with the creative media industries is that the path from initial concepts to audience awareness is quite lengthy and convoluted. Even great creative products tend to have a preferred niche, and rarely is the marketing information available to nail down niche audiences for a big launch day. But these industries are still mostly focused around big launches, because they have to completely reorganize with smaller budgets to attack the long tail. Music, comics, and writing have all made some progress towards this reorganization since both their production and marginal costs in digital form are low, so there's a great opening for the non-pop genres. Games are a bit less so, and video probably the least. But what's slowing this process down the most right now is that a niche audience has to be built from scratch, on a per-creator basis. So either you work within the system and hope for a big door-opening break, or you go completely indie and bootstrap your entire business model, customers, etc. from nothing - which effectively means that even if you are indie, you still need to find a bandwagon to jump onto, or you'll probably never get a critical mass of interest. I suspect that there's a business in providing aggregation mechanisms for untapped genres; I've just started building something along these lines in the last few days :)

mhb 16y ago

Or revealed preference sans expletives: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revealed_preference http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revealed_preference

njharman 16y ago

similar thought to jffio is behind why i try remember to tell people "because i don't make time" in stead of "i dont have time" when they ask why i havent started/finished the projects i talk about. making time aka passion, drive, determination is major factor in peoples "sucess"

shawnzizzo 16y ago

I love the message and the attitude in this article. Although it's about writing in the entertainment industry, I like that it's part of the Hacker News list. The point of this article (To get where you want, you have to make sacrifices and work your ass off) is applicable across anything in life. As a hacker, as an athlete as a business person, etc. This is hard to do. Why do you think there's such a short list of people that are absolute "guns" at their trade?