When we start any endeavour or filmmaking or business project, we must start with positivity. It must come from a positive state of wanting to change. When we permit ourselves to change, we allow great life-changing things to happen.
THE ROOT OF THE P-WORD
Positivity has, thankfully, had a long history in our culture and society. Without it, we’d still be smashing rocks together and hoping for change.
Self-development pioneer Norman Vincent Peale said: “Believe it’s possible to solve your problem. Tremendous things happen to the believer. So believe the answer will come. It will.”
Now this isn’t just some self-help mumbo-jumbo that doesn’t mean anything. Treat this quote as the launch pad for the positivity that the rest of this post will give you!
Yes, you are going to start thinking in positive terms. Now there’s a positive statement! I just said, “You are going to…” It’s a command. Positive language. From now on. You can’t build a strong foundation if you allow that crappy, negative voice to creep up in your head.
You know the one – it says things like, “You can’t do that, because..” or “You are terrible at business” or “You should fear…[insert any number of things here]” This is the language of fear, the language of “can’t” and “won’t” and “shouldn’t.”
Let’s banish that sort of language from our vocabularies. Right now.
There’s a great Ralph Waldo Emerson quote that doesn’t get used very often. This guy is quoted everywhere, but you rarely see this one mentioned and this short and to the point quote is one of his best:
“The measure of mental health is to find good everywhere.”
Let’s take this well-spring of positivity and move onto the rest of our important work.
YOUR IDENTITY
There’s something of an obsession in the filmmaking and video production industry with “sticking points.” Sticking Points are perceived problems that a person has that are preventing them from achieving desired results in a certain area.
This is one concept that has just completely gone wild and can seriously undermine a person’s business and/or career. It gets to a point where people are imagining perceived failings and fall-backs just to have something to “work on.”
This obsession with change and improvement may seem fine on the surface, but it’s rendering some people crippled by their self-doubt and imagined faults.
Let’s make it clear right now: You have no sticking points.
Even considering that you have sticking points is a recipe for a long journey into many pointless and, ultimately, endless paths. Once you start to look for faults, you’ll find them. I’ll guarantee you that.
Face it, you have no sticking points.
That’s an interesting distinction you should consider. What if you finally acknowledged that you didn’t have anything holding you back from success? None whatsoever.
What sort of freedom would that give you? What sort of a powerful place could you start coming from?
You see, the idea of sticking points is really just a marketing concept. It was a useful concept back in the early phases of this digital revolution where cameras became affordable and creating a business became within reach for nearly anybody. People would post their challenging points and others would aid them. Sticking points were challenge points. It’s a slight change of wording, but a highly useful one.
But these days, since the industry is well and truly monetised, sticking points have been twisted into cruel marketing ploys for the big companies to make dollars off people.
Back in the early days of the digital revolution, filmmakers at least had something right when they focused on sticking points as something they could move through and help each other with. If I’d had my way, I would have called them learning experiences