David Resin’s THE MAILROOM is a collection of the trials and tribulations of Hollywood executives and agents whose first stop in their entertainment career was the agency mailroom. It’s a romanticized telling of the workaholic lifestyle, the hustle for cash$ and clients, and everything that comes after. It’s required reading for Hollywood hopefuls and I was re-reading it when an anecdote caught my eye, something I didn’t notice on my first pass.
(Tangent: don’t you love when that happens? Returning to something you read years ago, armed with life experience under your belt, and the material resonates at a completely new level, like it trickled through the diodes and wrinkles at a higher filtration rate, sticking deep to your subconscious? )
One mailroom trainee (who eventually became Mike Ovitz’s assistant) said of another agent, “he tried to make me his mentor, but he had a family and I realized that’s not who I wanted to be.”
I glazed over this nugget at first, but it stuck on my second pass:
Know what you want.
If you got that solved, and you stick to it, things work out.
The trainee knew the life he wanted. He knew who he needed to emulate to get there, so that’s who he pursued, ignoring all distractions. How many of us can say we’d do the same?
Would you have the clarity of vision to pass on someone’s help because you knew it didn’t get you where you wanted to be 10 years from now?
What Do You Want?
I don’t think it matters what version of the American dream you’re chasing. If you want the fast lifestyle, with an 80-hour work week balanced by wild weekends and emails pushed through to your smartphone every moment, and people who know your name and kiss your ass… Go get it, the way the trainee did. That’s a beautiful lifestyle and you have to earn it.
If that lifestyle doesn’t interest you though, why chase it? If family’s important, if you want to sit down to dinner every night or see your partner everyday, go after that. Don’t get lured away from your vision because what other people want from you. It doesn’t mean you’re exempt from those same hours or ethic (it might mean you have to work harder. College isn’t cheap).
Falling short of that vision wouldn’t be the worst thing.
The worst thing would be waking up 20 years from now only to realize you chased something you didn’t want, and lost everything you desired along the way.
THE MAILROOM was written a decade ago. Since then, it’s become more difficult to sort through the noise and distill clarity. We’re surrounded by distractions and tweets and feeds, and if you’re not cognizant of your end game, it’s easy to get steered off course.
That’s what Fighting Broke is about:
- Know what you want.
- Set up your life so every day, you’re working towards it, automatically.
- Cut the rest.
I write about Los Angeles and Hollywood and money as the carriage for this message, but that’s the nut of it. The idea applies almost anywhere, to any pursuit. You don’t save dollars and cut spending for the sake of being frugal, but because you have an end game and you know how much it costs. You don’t put in an 80-hour week because everyone else is still chained to their desks. You put in the 80-hours, on the right tasks, because that’s what your end game requires.
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Photo Credit: j-No
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