Learn What George Lucas Did DIFFERENT | Most Quit Too Soon…

Everything I did, I was following something I really cared about.

Everybody said it was a crazy thing to do because in those days nobody made it into the film business. Everybody has talent, and it's just a matter of moving around until you've discovered what it is. I can't make the movies to make money. I just make the movies to make them good, and if they make money, fine. I don't ever see movies by myself. I always see them with other people. Most people, you know, you don't see the struggle part of a person's life. You only see the success they have.

Okay. You're so smart. Try this: happiness is pleasure and happiness is joy.

Compassion is really the secret to happiness. If we didn't sort of band together, we wouldn't survive. And that if one could make it, that one would help all the others make it.

He's an American filmmaker and entrepreneur. He's best known as the creator of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises, as well as being the founder of Lucasfilm. As of March 2015, George Lucas's net worth was estimated to be $5.1 billion by Forbes magazine. He's George Lucas, and here are his top 10 rules for success.

Everything I did, I was following something I really cared about, something I loved, something I was passionate about. And I kept following that passion, whether it was cars, whether it was anthropology, whether it was art, photography. And eventually it led me to my huge passion, my real passion, which was making movies, which combined all of those things. And I realized that had I gone on to get my degree in anthropology, I would have probably made anthropological movies in New Guinea or someplace, and eventually been on National Geographic and the History Channel, and been then making features, and I'd have done Star Wars just the same. If I'd have gone to Art Center and become an illustrator, I would have probably started doing animation and doing animated films and making animated things, and then ultimately I would have gone on and been right where I was. No matter which route I took, because I cared about all of them, they all led to the same place. Had I done what my father had wished me to do, which is to go into the office equipment business with him, which I knew I wasn't going to do, I knew I hated that, my life would have been unpleasant. And so I think it's very important not to do what your peers think. You should do, not do what your parents think you should do or your teachers, but to do what you inside, or even your culture thinks, but do what's inside you.

I decided to go to film school because I loved the idea of making films. I love photography, and everybody said it was a crazy thing to do because in those days nobody made it into the film business. I mean, just unless you were related to somebody, there was no way in. So everything else, silly, you're never going to get a job. But I, I wasn't moved by that, I set the goal of getting through film school and just then focused on getting to that level because I didn't, you know, I didn't know where I was going to go after that. I wanted to make documentary films, and eventually I got into the goal of, once I got to school, of making a film. One of the most telling things about film schools, you got a lot of students in those days especially, it's not quite so much today, but wandering around saying, oh, I wish I could make a movie, I wish I could make a movie. You know, I can't get in this class, I can't get any— you know, first class I had was an animation class. It wasn't a production class. Um, I had a history class and an animation class, and in the animation class they gave us 1 minute of film to put onto the animation camera, to operate it, to see how you could move left, move right, make it go up and down. And it was a test to see You know, then the teacher would— you had certain requirements that you had to do. You had to make it go up and make it go down, and then the teacher would look at it and say, oh yes, you maneuvered this machine to do these things. And I took that one minute of film and made it into a movie, and it was a movie that won like, you know, 20 or 25 awards, you know, in every film festival in the world, and kind of changed the whole animation department. And meanwhile, all the other guys were going around saying, "Oh, I wish I could make a movie. I wish there was a production class." And so then I got into another class, and it wasn't really a production class, but I managed to get some film, and I made a movie. And I made lots of movies while I was in school while everybody else was running around saying, "Oh, I wish I could make a movie." Everybody has talent, and it's just a matter of moving around until you've discovered what it is. A talent is a combination of something you love a great deal, something you can lose yourself in, something you start at 9 o'clock, look up from your work and it's 10 o'clock at night. And also something that you have a talent— not a talent for, but skills that you have a natural ability to do very well. And usually those two things go together. I really don't read too much about what comes, you know, I don't I don't read the reviews and I don't read what people think too much, because I've got to really make my movies the way I see them and the way I want them to be. And then people can take them for whatever they are. They can like them or not like them. That's their privilege. But I can't really, you know, I can't make my movies for all the influences that people around me, for better or worse, want. You know, I can't make it I can't make the movies to make money. I just make the movies to make them good. If they make money, fine. I can't make them to make toys. If they find something they can make a toy out of in the movie, fine. I can't make them to be entertaining in the way that certain critics like them to be entertaining. Star Wars especially have been created in a very particular style. And I've tried to be faithful to that style. If somebody doesn't like that style, it's fine. It's funny that one thing I did hear on the last film that came out was suddenly they discovered that it was a film for young people. And that was the big complaint. Why did they make it? Why did you make a children's film? I said, well, you know, they've all been that way. I don't know if you ever saw the other ones, but it's been that way forever. But everybody grew up and they thought that they were going to now see Terminator 5, and I'm not making that kind of movie. I think one of the reasons that Steven and I have been as successful as we have is because we like the movies. We like to go to the movies, we enjoy movies, and we want to make movies like the ones we enjoy. We want to be able to entertain the audience, we want to be able to startle the audience, we want to be able to blow the audience away and say— have them walk out of the theater saying, whoa, that was fantastic, I was really moved by that. That's where part of the fun of it is. And, you know, you want people to think, you want people to be emotionally moved. And there's a theory behind that in terms of storytelling. It's been around for thousands of years. And that's where something like live theater or live performances something that is very valuable because you get instant feedback from your, from your audience, and you kind of know the things that work and the things that don't work. That's the advantage that, you know, the Greek storytellers had and Shakespeare had that us in the film industry are harder to come by, which is, you know, to be able to see it, see an audience reaction, and adjust to what works. So you have to use your experience of sitting through a lot of movies. I don't ever see movies by myself. I always see them with other people, because I want to know what works. I want to know where they laugh, I want to know where they don't laugh, I want to know what they think about it afterwards, because in the end, that's the art that I'm working with, is trying to communicate in a way that is effective and people react to. No matter how easy it looks on the outside, it is a very, very difficult struggle. Most people, you know, you don't see the struggle part of a person's life. You only see the success they have. But I haven't met anybody here at the Academy or anywhere else that hasn't been able to describe years and years and years of very, very difficult struggle through the whole process of, you know, achieving anything whatsoever. So, and there's no way to sort of get around that. And the secret is just not to give up hope. And it's very hard not to, because if you're really doing something worthwhile, I think you will be pushed to the brink of hopelessness before you come through the other side. And you just have to hang in through that.

Well, I think ultimately we don't have to be mean.

We're not really that competitive.

I came out of film school. With a lot of friends. We all helped each other. We helped each other in our careers, and we just never were competitive about anything. We were always competitive in a friendly way, to say, you know, like playing cards or, you know, dunking baskets, to say, okay, you're so smart, try this, you know. And so it's that kind of competition, not the, you know, you must be destroyed and you must fail so I can win and all that sort of thing. Happiness is pleasure. And happiness is joy. You know, it can be either one. You add them up and it sort of falls under the uber category of happiness. Pleasure is short-lived. It lasts an hour, lasts a minute, lasts a month. And it peaks and then goes down. It peaks very high. But the next time you want to get that same peak, you have to do it twice as much. You know, it's like drugs. You have to keep doing it insulates itself, no matter what it is, whether you're shopping, whether you're engaged in any other kind of pleasure, that all has the same quality about it. On the other hand is joy, and joy is the thing that doesn't go as high as pleasure in terms of your emotional reaction, but it stays with you. Joy is something you can recall. Pleasure, you can't. So the secret is that even though it's not as intense as the pleasure, the joy will last you a lot longer. And people who get the pleasure, they keep saying, well, if I can just get richer and get more cars, you know, I'll never— you'll never relive the moment you got your first car. That's it. That's the highest peak. Yes, you can get 3 Ferraris and a new Gulfstream jet, and maybe you'll get close, but you have to keep going, and eventually you run out. I mean, you just can't do it. It doesn't work. So if you're trying to sustain that level of peak pleasure, you're doomed. It's a very American idea, but it just can't happen. You just let it go. Peak, great. Pleasure is fun.

It's great.

But you can't keep it going forever. Just accept the fact that it's here and it's gone, and maybe again it'll come back. And you get to do it again. Joy lasts forever. Pleasure is purely self-centered. It's all about your pleasure. It's about you. It's about— it's a selfish, self-centered emotion that's created by a self-centered motive of greed. Joy is compassion. Joy is giving yourself to somebody else or something else, and it's a kind of thing that is in its subtlety and lowness, much more powerful than pleasure. If you get hung up on pleasure, you're doomed. If you pursue joy, you will find everlasting happiness.

Children teach the most important thing of all, which is compassion. Um, and compassion is really the secret to happiness and the secret to a good life. And it's a hard thing to learn. It's hard to learn not to think about yourself and to think about somebody else. But when you have a little baby, it becomes pretty easy if you're open to it. And any parent that is reasonably normal and open to these sorts of things really does learn compassion and caring about another person through having kids and putting that other person first. I guess the advantage that my generation had is when we were in film school and we were starting in the film business, the door was absolutely locked. And it was a very, very high wall, and nobody got in. Therefore, all of us beggars and scroungers down at the front gate decided that if we didn't sort of band together, we wouldn't survive, and that if one could make it, that one would help all the others make it, and we would continue to help each other. So we banded together. I mean, that's how cavemen figured it out. Any society starts that way. Any society begins by realizing that together, by helping each other, you can survive better than if you fight each other and compete with each other. If I got a job, I would help somebody else get a job. If somebody got more successful than me, it was partly my success. I wasn't— my success wasn't based on how I could push down everybody that was around me. My success was based on how much I could push everybody up. And eventually their success was the same way, and in the process they pushed me up, and I pushed them up, and we kept doing that. And we still do that. And even though we all have, in essence, competing companies, we see it as if everybody succeeds, or my friend succeeds, then everybody succeeds. So that's the key to it, is to have everybody succeed, not to gloat over somebody else's failure. One of the basic motifs of fairy tales is that you find the poor unfortunate along the side of the road, and when they beg for help. If you give it to them, you end up succeeding. If you don't give it to them, you end up being turned into a frog or something. So it's something that's been around for thousands of years, a concept that's been around for thousands of years, and it is even more necessary today when people are much more into their own aggrandizement than they are in helping other people. I mean, the one thing about you here at the Academy here is constantly about public service, about helping others. I don't think there's anybody who's become successful that doesn't understand how important it is to be part of the larger community, to help other people in the larger community, to give back to the community. And it's not something you do, you start doing when you've made it. Now I'm on the top, I can sort of enhance my joy and self-esteem by helping the poor underlings. It's when you are at the very lowest level and you're struggling. When we were in film school and stuff, we were all very, very poor. We were all very, very struggling. We all need jobs very desperately. And if one of us couldn't get a particular job, we'd send another friend in on the interview because we were hoping that one of us would get the job. And so you do it right from the very beginning. You can start every single day whether it's helping your brother or sister or helping your peers at school or helping in the community. But it's not just a kind of public service thing, it's a way of life. If America is the pursuit of happiness, the best way to pursue happiness is to help other people, because there's nothing else that will make you happy. You can be as rich and famous and powerful as you want to be, and it will not bring you happiness. And that's said over and over and over again. It's such a cliché that it hardly goes— it hardly needs to be said, but people don't understand that it's actually true. And you can find people rich, powerful, and famous, and they aren't happy. And you can find people who have discovered the fact that it's really helping people, it's really being compassionate toward other human beings, that makes you happy.

Thank you so much for watching. I made this video because Kevlar Blast Shield asked me to. So if there's a famous entrepreneur that you want me to profile next, leave it in the comments below and I'll see what I can do. I'd also love to know which of George Lucas's top 10 rules meant the most to you. Leave it in the comments, I'll join in the discussion. Thank you so much for watching. Continue to believe, and I'll see you soon.

If there is one thing that you would like to be remembered for, one project that you have done or that you have yet to do, what would it be? Raising my kids. There you go. That's a human being right there, folks. Learning to make films is very easy. Learning what to make films about is very hard. And what you really gotta do is focus on learning as much about life and about various aspects of it, uh, first, and then learn just the techniques of making a movie, uh, because that stuff you can pick up pretty quickly. But having a really good understanding of history, literature, psychology, um, sciences are very, very important to actually being able to to make movies.

For all of my friends who are successful, all the same age, all went to school together, all had fun, the secret ingredient which everybody's like, "Why are you guys so successful?" is we all love movies. We aren't doing it to get rich. We never thought we were ever gonna get rich or be successful or anybody would even like it. But we love movies and we make the kind of movies that we'd love to see. Say, "Oh, I'd like to see that." And we have the advantage of being able to actually make the movie. You know, say, "Okay, well, it's not coming out, so let's just make it and we'll bring it out."