A Hollywood Lesson in Financial Planning
Today I tried to take some steps to move away from the crowd: extravagant wealth is not the goal.
I love reading how-to books, but the world is full of incomplete information on achieving financial independence. I remember when I spent some time as an independent filmmaker, and I was reading a book about surviving film festivals.
The book was Chris Gore’s Ultimate Film Festival Survival Guide, and although it had some functional key elements, I found myself reading his advice and then asking, “Well, exactly how do you do that?”
One thing that struck me was an interview by Joe Carnahan, a screenwriter, director, and producer. Joe is an extroverted guy who speaks his mind at the drop of a dime.
One of the things Joe mentioned was that everyone has the individual ability to emerge from the crowd. This is particularly important to note within the realm of financial independence.
Too often, people think they cannot do it alone, or they think it’s their fate to be working-class all their lives. This is not true.
The Building Blocks Of Building Wealth
Since I was a child, I’ve always understood that often one has to work harder and longer to beat the next guy, but that’s not all there is.
And what happens if there is no next guy? What if you’re only competing against your personal limiting beliefs?
Saving money, generating passive income, building wealth, and leveraging business opportunities are all required, yet very simple, tasks in the quest for financial independence.
These things do not need an extroverted personality. Accomplishing these goals simply means acting on your desire to get it done.
At that time in my life, I was banking on my independent film, The Broken Hearts Club, becoming the thing that filmmakers’ dreams were made of. It was going to set me off on the path to Hollywood dreams, multiple movie deals, a fat paycheck, residuals, and a chance to meet my favorite film directors.
Alas, it was not to be.
Broken Dreams And Blogging As A Financial Empire
I remember staying up late to handwrite 450 addresses on official Broken Hearts Club postcards and mailing them to distributors, producers, editors, film clubs, etc.
I was ready to do whatever was necessary to seal the deal.
What I hadn’t counted on at the time was my little personal blog blowing up beyond my wildest dreams. See, I was blogging about independent filmmaking long before there were sites like Blogger, BlogSpot, Medium, and, certainly, WordPress.
At the time, I wanted to document my struggles and capture the emotion of challenging moments for posterity. I had no idea how to make money from a blog, nor did I know people were becoming financially independent and earning six figures by blogging.
However, my attempt to share my information with the small but niche crowd of independent filmmakers through my blog drew tens of thousands of people from around the world to my site.
Then I posted my film trailers on YouTube. A year later, my YouTube “channel” was monetized, and I was getting checks from Google Adsense.
I’d always believed that the Internet was the subsequent California Gold Rush, but I had no idea exactly how to monetize it for wealth-building and financial gain. So, like most people, I tried everything.
The goal was always the same: to develop multiple streams of passive income until I became debt-free and financially independent.
I learned to blog when we only had Dreamweaver and Microsoft FrontPage to build websites. There were no such things as blogging software. I had to learn HTML and CSS to get started.
Financial Strategy #1: Sell Yourself On You First
I looked back at everything I’d done, and that’s when I knew that financial independence would soon be mine. Your harshest critic is always yourself. Yet, I sold myself on me when I look back at all I’d done.
I was hella-committed, hella-focused. I knew you didn’t get points for second place.
I began telling everyone in the business that I could only imagine they receive hundreds, if not thousands, of independent film submissions a year. What could I say to stand out from the crowd?
I told them that they would never find anyone on this planet who would work harder than I.
What was my Ace: In the previous four years, I’d made 13 films while managing a full-time job as an Information Technology Manager, husband, and father of two, three, and then four children.
Meanwhile, my blog was receiving 15-20,000 hits per day.
So, it wasn’t Hollywood that led me to financial success. Even though I was a hard-working writer, it wasn’t my high-concept horror script, my epic fantasy, the female-led actioner I wrote, or even the family film I penned that led me to financial freedom.
It was my blog.