You can do anything. Ask Robert Rodriguez.
Wow, been a while. Crazy month for me. I went through the hardest crunch of my life, I finished up everything I had to do for Daxter, my wife woke me up one day right before beta to tell me she’s leaving me and moving to the other side of the country to live with a guy friend of hers she met in World of Warcraft, then two weeks later my crunch ended and I have lots of free alone time now! Biiiiiiiiiig month for me, yes sirree. No, I’m not joking.
Anyway, Daxter’s just around the corner. We’re so close… everyone at the office has been playing it from back to front to back again. We have a REALLY fun game on our hands.
Also been reading quite a lot. I’ve read more in the last two weeks than in the previous six months!
I just finished this AMAZING book called Rebel Without A Crew by Robert Rodriguez, the director of movies like El Mariachi, Desperado, Spy Kids, Once Upon A Time in Mexico, and Sin City.
The book is a journal he kept of making his first feature length film, El Mariachi. He was poor and had no money, so he sold his body to science by offering himself up as a lab rat to a local hospital. They’d lock him up for 30 days and test drugs on him, and pay him money to do so. He took this time to write his movie and to earn the money he needed to make it.
Once he got out, he started filming and did EVERYTHING on the set himself. Filming, lighting, setting up the stage, directing, recording audio, everything. Then he cut and printed and scored the entire film himself, drove to Hollywood, and started trying to sell it.
Within about a week, through sheer effort, the PRESIDENTS of major movie studios like Disney, Paramount and Columbia were calling him personally to beg him to work with them, and were offering him hundreds of thousands of dollars to make movies. Simultaneously, his movie is winning major film festivals all over the country, while he is still dirt poor and trying to make it.
It’s an amazing day-to-day account of how everything came together for him through sheer force of will. If you’ve ever aspired to do anything yourself but need to be motivated to know that it CAN be done, read this book. Robert Rodriguez is absolutely amazing, and this book is super-concentrated inspiration juice. Buy it! You’ll feel like conquering worlds in no time.
I’ll be writing more soon. As I said before, I have basically nothing but free time now to read and do whatever I want, so why the hell not? :)
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February 9th, 2006 at 1:57 pm
Ouch. That sucks. The wife-leaving-you thing, I mean. I guess you get credit for looking on the bright side. I don’t think I’d be able to do so.
As for Rodriguez, it’s an inspiring story. It puts things in perspective, especially if you let things get lax while working for yourself. “If he was able to go through all that and still come out on top, what’s my excuse?”
February 9th, 2006 at 4:36 pm
It isn’t easy. :)
And you’re exactly right… couldn’t have put it better myself. Robert’s story is incredibly inspiring. Few people ever get to hear about the leap people make from nothing to something. They usually just assume that it magically happened, or they can’t really visualize that they weren’t always awesome.
This book is an awesome look into exactly how it DID happen, starting from something small and incrementally working toward something larger. And that anyone can do it. :)
February 13th, 2006 at 10:24 am
I think another problem is that people do hear about the rags-to-riches stories, but then they assume it was luck or circumstances. Either way, the result is the same: people stop thinking about how they can do it and assume it can’t be done.
February 13th, 2006 at 10:52 pm
I agree. I think a big part of success is being unwilling to believe that anything is impossible… merely improbable. :)
I can’t think of anyone that’s ever succeeded because everyone around him told him he COULD do it. It’s usually the opposite, no?