If you can't find it, make it!
After living in Los Angeles the past seven years, I am still constantly blown away by the amazingly talented, creative and brilliant people that come to this city to pursue their dreams of working in entertainment. But all too often, I hear the same story over and over and over again about how their dreams were dashed when they didn't land a big audition or when their music career didn't take off as they had hoped and so on. It's a repeated rollercoaster of emotions that thousands of aspiring actors, writers, models and musicians experience every year as they move to Hollywood to "make it big" but only find themselves praying their gas tank will make it on their drive back to their hometown.
This town tends to devour people who are desperate turning them into greedy, selfish monsters or into lowly, insecure beggars. It's rough. I guess that's why I empathize with them so much because I came to L.A. with a similar mindset wanting to be successful in entertainment with really big stars in my eyes.
In 2010, I moved from Virginia Beach to Los Angeles with everything I owned in my little Honda Civic. I was just glad to be alive after the 3,000-mile journey across the United States, but I was also overwhelmed with the size of Los Angeles and the crazy, rapid pace of the traffic and people. My desire was to land a television hosting gig or at least be a regularly paid commercial talent. I'm not a great actor, so I had to use my other talents from my broadcast news background or music background to land a gig. It was hard!
Coming from the MidWest, I usually had a 40-50% chance of landing an audition because the number of people was small. But when I came to Los Angeles, I was no longer one in fifty---I was one in a thousand. The stakes got a lot higher.
So, after struggling with the audition circuit for several sparse months, I finally landed a job at a small production company in Hollywood where I worked as a sales director calling and bugging ad agencies all day to try to get more work for our company. It was awful. I was terrible at being a bully and my boss was the epitome of a micro-manager combined with a Napoleon complex.
After that first job fell through, I worked odd jobs here and there as a teleprompter operator and script advisor for other production companies but still did not feel like my big goals were being accomplished.
Several years later after working in marketing for several corporations, I found my niche. I began working as an independent publicist helping to promote brands and eventually high -profile individuals. All the while, I got married to a great man and had a beautiful baby boy. Life seemed to be going really well, but deep inside my heart there was still a longing to be involved with television and film sharing stories and seeing audiences moved by them.
While on a long sabbatical in San Francisco for my husband's work, I was watching a new television show and found myself critiquing it and finally I said to myself, "You could write stories better than that!"
So, that evening I sat down at my computer and began writing. First, I wrote an outline of the story and then began writing chapters which turned into a full novel---"Broadway Girls". Little did I know, that a brief "detour" in my life would actually open a whole new chapter (literally) for me to discover my love and passion for writing.
I hope to one day turn my books into TV shows or films, but in the meantime I'm having a blast growing my talent and skills as a writer. I also just wrote and pitched a new web series which will be coming out by the end of this year.
Sometimes life can seem overwhelming when you get a thousand "no's" from auditions or interviews, but remember, we only need one "yes" and sometimes that "yes" is in your hands. If you can't find the perfect fit for your talents and skills, then make it yourself.
One of the most vivid and current examples of this mindset is the HGTV show "Fixer Upper" with Chip and Joanna Gaines. They didn't think their dreams of having a successful real estate or interior design business would ever take off, but they persevered and HGTV found Joanna's interior design blog one day and the rest is history! And now, Joanna will be focusing full-time on another dream of hers within the skincare industry with her new anti-aging line Allumiderm.
There are countless examples of people who have taken the little they had in their hands and made something better. We can choose to either get bitter from the "lemons" of life or add a little of our own "sugar" to make some pretty darn good lemonade.
Whether it's writing an article about your specialized industry to post on LinkedIn or making your own YouTube web series to be the character you've always wanted to play---the possibilities are endless and you have the creativity and mind to make it happen.
Let's make it happen!
