Welcome to another post here at Filmmaking Lifestyle. Glad to have you!

I’ve been talking quite a bit recently about hustle and its importance in business terms. It’s important in any business, but especially in a filmmaking based business like running a video production business.

I’ve covered hustle in quite a bit of detail lately, but I still have more to say. I hope this post is helpful in convincing you to adopt what I call the Hustle Attitude.

Hustle Makes The World Go Round

When Spike Lee was making his debut feature film, She’s Gotta Have It, he went all out. The guy embodied the hustle mentality and the account of it is chronicled in the autobiographical tome, Spike Lee’s Gotta Have It. I mentioned it on this blog a while back.

He wanted, more than anything, to make a feature film, but he had a few stumbling blocks:

  • He had virtually zero cash and was lying in a rundown apartment building at the time.
  • He’d never even made a feature before.
  • He had no actors or crew when the seed of the idea for She’s Gotta Have It came to him.

That didn’t stop Spike Lee. From late 1984 until the summer of 1986, he moved mountains to get his movie made, including writing the entire first draft of the screenplay in just a few weeks.

He was a man on a mission.

He put himself in a position in which great things could happen. He encouraged game-changing occurrences by being stubbornly stuck to his goal and never accepting no for an answer.

At one point in his journal, he quotes a fellow filmmaker who declared making a film as one of the hardest things someone could do in life, to which Lee says, “And making an independent film is even harder.”

As any readers who’ve actually made a feature film will attest to: it is darn hard work. Even if you’re not trying to make a feature your   job requires as much commitment towards completing a goal as Spike Lee showed.

Not only must you be bull-minded and stubbornly focused towards any goal you commit to, but also see yourself as a hustler, forever getting out there and doing your thing. You want success? You better be out there in the trenches working towards your goals.

Just like Spike Lee would say: “Word!”

Always Be Hustling

The great hip-hop entrepreneur Jay-Z is a master of the hustle. Yeah, he raps about hustling in his songs, but the man exhibits it in his life, too. Jay-Z, aside from musical accomplishments, also runs wildly successful record companies and clothing lines.

In an interview, he stated that “my brands are an extension of me. They’re close to me. It’s not like running General Motors, where there’s no emotional attachment.”

   

How do you hustle? Get out there as much as you can. It’s as simple as that.

If you don’t put yourself out there, then you won’t achieve the success you want. If you stay in your house instead of getting out there and taking action, networking and meeting people, then how do you expect to advance your career in filmmaking? How are people going to find out about you? How are you going to grow your business?

You’ve got to put yourself in positions where things will happen.

So maybe you are invited to a friend of a friend’s party. You’re a little reticent of going to the party as you don’t know the host too well and maybe even heard rumours that he might not be the kind of person that you’d get along with. Just go!

Take some risks. Putting yourself out there is how we make things happen.

I’ve mentioned before on the blog about the Golden Rule and how it’s a useful concept to adopt in your life. The Golden Rule states that for every hour you spend reading, listening or watching business-related books/courses/audio programs, you should put in two hours of Taking Action Time.

Yes, that’s two hours out there in the trenches of real-world action-taking. 2:1 ratio. No excuses.

It was the great man himself, Albert Einstein, that said: “Nothing happens until something moves.”

All the thinking, debating, analyzing and questioning in the world doesn’t mean a thing if you’re not getting real world experiences…on the regular.

Once you have these real-world experiences, you can start to form reference experiences. Then you can read more and the stuff you read will make sense as you now have reference experiences to explain what you’re learning.

   

So How Do You Get Your Hustle On?

One of the most under-utilized aspects of your life that you have at your disposal is your network. Most people completely under-value or even just misunderstand the importance and power of the network they already have in place.

You have a far broader network than you realize. This exercise will enable you to understand what you have and how you can use it:

1) Make a list of 5-20 people that you know.

2) Next to each person, write down what that person does (both for a living and hobbies and interests wise). Make sure you include any special skills or achievements that person has under their belt, as well as other people they may know in their own personal networks.

3) Once you’ve noted all this down, look at the list and spend some time thinking about each person on your list and how they could be beneficial to you.

4) Keep it within a human perspective and think win-win situations.

5) Now form a list of 5 specific things that 5 people on your list could help you with. Write 5 things for each of the 5 people who you think are the most beneficial people in your network.

6) Make sure you keep a record of your network, adding new people to your list as you meet them.

You’ll start to realize just how many cool and beneficial people you meet in your day to day life. This exercise will help open your eyes.

The key to developing a powerful network of people around you is to think outside of the box and be very logical in working out qualities and attributes of value-giving people around you, whilst still maintaining great relationships with people who don’t have anything to offer you.

I hope this was beneficial to you. It’s not about seeing people as commodities and only offering value in order to get something from someone. That’s a terrible way to look at the world and human relationships. I talk a lot on this blog about value exchange, but sometimes a friend is just a friend and doesn’t need to be an asset to your business and success.

Of course, every friend you have is a friend for a reason, and you’re therefore having a value exchange with each other in some way.

Thanks for reading! 🙂