Creative Leverage
Bring Your Creative Leverage
“In an interview in Fortune magazine, Academy-Award-winning producer Brian Grazer was asked, “What’s the best piece of advice you ever got?”
He replied that when he was starting out in his career, he spent a year trying to get a meeting with the two chiefs of MCA. Finally, they let him in. And they gave him the following advice:
“In order for you to be in the entertainment business, you have to have leverage. Since you have none – no money, no pedigree, no valuable relationships – you must have creative leverage. That exists only in your mind. So you need to write – put what’s in your mind on paper. Then you’ll own a piece of paper. That’s leverage.”
With that, Grazer went on to write the screenplay for the movie “Splash,” a fantasy he had in his mind about meeting a mermaid. Since then, the “pieces of paper” he owns have generated more than $2.5 billion.”
Quoted in Michael Masterson’s Early to Rise Newsletter
This is some of the best advice anybody has ever received. For business. For film making for game development. For life.
What the executives basically told Glazer was this: Leverage replaces work. If you don’t have leverage, you have to work.
If you don’t have money; if you don’t have experience; if you don’t have connections, you have to work. You have to put in the time, energy and creative passion ahead of time.
You have to create a product. (The DIY Film Course is a great place to start, and it’s free.)
First, Do The Work
You have “Creative Leverage” in your mind. You have a concept or a dream that nobody else can create. Once you create it, it becomes very powerful.
But until you create it, nobody will believe in it. You have to do the work first.
Take Glazer’s example. He went and created the “Splash” screenplay from the leverage that was in his mind. And once it was no longer just in his mind, it became leverage he could use in the real world.
It went from creative leverage to created leverage. And it made him famous. Rich. And most important, it got him his dream.
That’s how it works. A rich family, well connected friends or a ready rep in the biz are all leverage. They’re coin you can exchange for a quick ride to success.
But there’s a better form of coin, the coin that’s rattling around in your head. Put it on paper. Put it on film. Put it into a compiler.
Turn it into a product. Every great entertainment product starts as “creative leverage.” It starts in somebody’s mind.
What’s in your mind?
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