Boldly going somewhere: A friend’s story on taking a chance on himself … even in this economy.
June 5, 2009
People are losing jobs at an alarming rate. GM has gone into bankruptcy and so has Iceland. WMA has let go of 100 people, most of them agents and a lot of them my close friends. It’s enough to make your head spin.
However, today’s blog is about betting on yourself — even at the most unlikely time. A good friend of mine who was an agent at one of the big three agencies recently quit his job to launch his own company.
In other words, when everyone is desperately trying to keep his/her job or find a new one, he said thanks but no thanks to a guaranteed salary and expense account, and fearlessly jumped off the cliff and started his own business.
Now my friend is very good at what he does and very smart. And if he looked at all the numbers and thought there was a way for him to carve out his own niche in this crazy marketplace then I know without a doubt he will succeed.
Which just goes to show that, if you believe in yourself enough, it’s always worth betting on yourself. And, yes, it might be scary and uncertain and crazy but also exhilarating, challenging and very rewarding (I say this from the experience of having started four companies).
And, yes, while it might be a scary time to launch your own business — it is also the best time. Because studies have shown that, if you can make a business succeed during a recession, you will have built a strong, sound business that will truly flourish when the economy recovers.
So if you suddenly find yourself without a job or just even hating the job you are in now, this might be the perfect time to bet on yourself and go out on your own!
Actually, aside from agreeing with the spirit of this blog entry (in my own blog I have discussed how lucky I feel as a freelancer during this economic apocalypse), I wanted to comment on your last blog–about the internet as an arbitrating force on the content of television. It makes so much sense! Why hasn’t this been done or at least begun in some way before this? Could it be that the kings don’t wish to relinquish the throne?
I do wonder if the “mini-sodes” of “Rescue Me” available on the web that Dennis Leary talked about when that show was still many months away from returning to television helped with his show’s audience and/or ratings when it did come back. If the mini-sodes didn’t help, though, at least the name, ‘mini-sode’, provided John Stewart with comic fodder for Leary’s appearances on the Daily show.
That’s worth something.
A last thought—could the entities making the pilots become more independent productions, so that they could put their pilot on the web and use the internet popularity/response to sell their show? Or is the production of pilots driven solely by the televsion upper echelons?