1) I was 30 years old. And in what many would consider a dream job. But I was pretty miserable. Because I knew I was letting my real dream--to become a screenwriter/filmmaker--die.

2) Sitting in my office one night, it hit me, if I did let the dream die, I would become toxic, because that's what death does, and that toxicity would ooze out of me, onto those I loved.
3)In that instant, I decided to make a shift, to find a way to finally, after years of denying it, do the thing. Try, at least. So I went to my best friend, @DavidLevien, who was already writing, and asked him for help.
4) David gave me The Artist's Way and said that when we had the right idea, he and I would write a screenplay together.
5) Soon thereafter, I had to good luck of walking into an illegal poker club in NYC, called David in the middle of the night, and we decided to write the thing.
6) we began outlining it, meeting whenever we could. And then, finally, on Columbus Day, 24 years ago today, we met at my office at work, because the company was closed for the holiday, and we started writing the actual script.
7) We wrote the first 10 pages that day, Oreos included, were off and running. Ever since, no matter what, we work on Columbus Day, together, this year, on video conference.
8) Whatever that creative thing is that you know you you're meant to do, but it scares you, do it, try. You don't have to quit your job. You don't have to tell the world. You just have to try, a little every day. And you can start on this day.

More from Life

THREAD: 12 Things Everyone Should Know About IQ

1. IQ is one of the most heritable psychological traits – that is, individual differences in IQ are strongly associated with individual differences in genes (at least in fairly typical modern environments). https://t.co/3XxzW9bxLE


2. The heritability of IQ *increases* from childhood to adulthood. Meanwhile, the effect of the shared environment largely fades away. In other words, when it comes to IQ, nature becomes more important as we get older, nurture less.
https://t.co/UqtS1lpw3n


3. IQ scores have been increasing for the last century or so, a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect. https://t.co/sCZvCst3hw (N ≈ 4 million)

(Note that the Flynn effect shows that IQ isn't 100% genetic; it doesn't show that it's 100% environmental.)


4. IQ predicts many important real world outcomes.

For example, though far from perfect, IQ is the single-best predictor of job performance we have – much better than Emotional Intelligence, the Big Five, Grit, etc. https://t.co/rKUgKDAAVx https://t.co/DWbVI8QSU3


5. Higher IQ is associated with a lower risk of death from most causes, including cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, most forms of cancer, homicide, suicide, and accident. https://t.co/PJjGNyeQRA (N = 728,160)

You May Also Like