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If you’ve ever felt like your dream will never come true
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If you’ve ever wondered how you’re going to make time for what you really want to do…
If you want to make money being creative…
If you’ve ever thought your dream is crazy…
I have a story for you.
Just two weeks after graduating from college, a young man woke up in his parents’ house in small town, Massachusetts wondering if he was actually going to go through with it.
Most of his friends, regardless of their dreams and talents were starting jobs at banks and law firms with cushy salaries and nice Manhattan apartments. From where he stood, jobless with no where of his own to live, that wasn’t looking so bad.
But he just knew, if he wasn’t going to make the time now, he may never have the guts again.
I never heard exactly what he thought about on the drive, but I hope it was filled with fantasies about being a comedy writer in Hollywood, a dream he had since he was a little boy.
He landed at a family friend’s house who put him up for the summer while he looked for a job and a place to live. After pounding the pavement, he landed a job as an assistant in a production company. He spent his days running errands and doing brain numbing work and at night he wrote TV shows and movie scripts and sent them to agents and film contests.
After three years and three more assistant jobs, he didn’t feel any closer to his dream than he did after college. He wasn’t seeing anyone making the leap from assistant to writer and LA was starting to wear on him. He realized he couldn’t keep putting what he wanted for his life on hold for a career that was starting to feel more and more impossible to make happen.
So he packed up his car and drove to New York City, again with no place to live and no job, just the guts to start over. Questioning whether or not he was cut out to be a writer, he took an aptitude test at a top company and not only did they tell him that yes, he was meant to be a writer, but they offered him a job. They promised him a good salary and strict 9-5 hours (rare in NYC), which gave him the physical and mental space to write after work.
Every night he came home after work and wrote for 3 hours. He joined a writers group and an improv group. When he got sick of just having his writing sit on his computer, he submitted a web series to his writers group to produce. His script won the vote and as a group they went to work to create a nine episode web series about a young man who runs an airbnb out of his apartment and all of the characters who came to stay. For months, he worked tirelessly every night after work, developing the characters, tightening the prose and making it as funny as possible. Every weekend the team got together to shoot and then there were hours and hours of editing.
The series mybnb, created by my brother, Pearson Jenks was just released a few weeks ago and it is hilarious. You can watch it here.
If you’re expecting the ending of this story to be something along the lines of “Amy Poehler just happened upon the web series and he just got a huge contract”, not gonna happen. The point is not that he’s been “discovered” or that he finally landed his dream job, it’s that Pearson is making it happen. He is a writer even if no one is paying him to do it right now. He created his own show with no budget while holding down a full time job. He is out there making it happen and shows up for his dream every single fucking day, and that’s enough.
I’d love to hear your dreams in the comments.
xo,
Sarah
