Last week brought a loss to a family and the week since has done the thing grief always does, which is strip away whatever you thought was urgent and leave you staring at what was actually important the whole time.

So this is for the founders, the filmmakers, the people building something from a standing start.

The film business runs on gatekeepers who have nothing behind the door and salesmen who have nothing in the bottle. 

They will take years off your life if you let them. 

They will take your weekends, your birthdays, your evenings with the people who actually love you, and they will give you a maybe in return, and then a softer maybe, and then silence. 

The pursuit is the product they are selling you. 

The pursuit is how they stay relevant without ever having to deliver anything.

Almost every founder and filmmaker I have ever talked to came in carrying the same injury, which is years of chasing people who were never going to turn around. 

Years of fixing something for a company or HNWI who was never going to fund it. 

Years of taking the call, taking the meeting, taking the note, taking the next meeting, and ending up exactly where they started except older and with fewer people still waiting up for them at home.

The would-be brokers, the credential-inflated coaches, the people whose entire offering is access to a room they themselves have never actually sat in, they are not obstacles to route around. 

They ARE a tax on your remaining years, and the bill comes due in the people you stopped showing up for while you were paying it.

Stop chasing people who do not care whether you make it. 

Put the hours into the work itself and into the people who would still be there if none of it ever happened.

If the people you love are not still around to see what you built, you did not build it for anything.