In this Believe Nation episode, host Evan Carmichael opens with a motivational message urging entrepreneurs to continuously challenge themselves and evolve their businesses. He then hands the conversation to filmmaker Christopher Nolan, who shares his creative process: he deliberately writes daring, unexpected ideas that scare him, then switches between writer and director mindsets to figure out how to execute them. Nolan explains that feeling the fear of execution signals he is pushing his limits, a principle he applies to filmmaking that parallels entrepreneurial growth. The segment underscores the importance of embracing risk, staying uncomfortable, and using that tension as a catalyst for innovation and success.
Good morning, Believe Nation. Today's message is keep challenging yourself. Over to you, Christopher Nolan.
Do you ever come up with ideas when you're writing a script that even scare you in terms of not being able to pull it off?
Uh, yeah. I mean, really, that's the challenge. I mean, as a writer, I try and take my director's hat off and not be afraid and just say, I want to write the most exciting thing, the most unexpected thing I can think of for the story. And then I pick up the script again, put the director's hat back on and go, okay, how the hell am I going to do that? And that's when you know you're in a good place because every film you want to be challenging yourself. You want to do something different.
I think entrepreneurs stop challenging themselves. I think when we start a business, there's a lot of challenge. There's a challenge in figuring out how we're going to make money, in what product and service we're going to be creating, in how we're going to manage our schedule. We don't have a boss anymore telling us what to do, and so there's incredible freedom to launch a company and a ton of challenges to figure out. And then once we figure out those initial set of challenges, I find that entrepreneurs stop continuing to challenge themselves. You find something that you think is working and you just then repeat that over and over and over and over again. Just keep repeating the same thing constantly. And what ends up happening is you start to get bored. You start to get bored of your business. You feel boxed in, but nobody's put you in a box. There's no boss around you who put you in that box. You put yourself in a box. The thing that as entrepreneurs, we hate being boxed in, and here you are putting yourself in a box, being bored, doing the same thing over and over and over again. And what ends up happening to a lot of entrepreneurs, they don't realize that they should have been changing a long time ago, And instead they think, "I'm bored of this business, I wanna move on and start something else." And then their business just plateaus. Like you may have had some growth and it just, it stagnates 'cause you're not injecting anything new into it. Where the key isn't necessarily just to drop the business and move on to something else, it's that you need to constantly be adding something to challenge yourself in your business on a regular basis. Like once you figure something out, solve a new problem. Come up with a new challenge, right? Stretch yourself even more. What new product or what new service, what new addition can you add to it? How can you better yourself? As you grow and evolve as a person, you need to grow and evolve your business. And if you don't do that, your business will die and you will die emotionally. You will die. You will stop feeling the creativity and the love and you'll start being negative. And people around you will wonder what happened to you and you'll see your business just flatline. That's because you're not getting joy from your company anymore, and you're not getting the growth from your company anymore, and that's on you. If you go back and look at my YouTube channel from when I started to where I am now, and you look at all of the changes that I've brought to the channel and am constantly bringing to the channel, that's part of what drives me. Like, if I had to just do the same thing over and over and over and over again, I would get bored of it. I need to change, and I inject my creativity, my love, my spirit into each video and into the new series that I try out. And thankfully, you guys like them, at least most of them, and that brings a lot of joy to me as well. But if I stop experimenting, if I stop trying to add new things, then I will start to lose interest in this. Because entrepreneurs, you know, we have entrepreneur ADD, a lot of us. We like the new, we like searching for new things, we like going out and trying a bunch of stuff. And so when you're in a job, it's easy to blame the boss. And it's easy to have timelines and projects that you need to work on because it's all been assigned to you. When you're in your own business, you need to challenge yourself constantly or have a group of people around you who force you to step outside your comfort zone and find the next challenge. As soon as you start getting bored, as soon as you're not excited to go and do the work that you're about to do, if that happens for too many days in a row, you know that you need to find a new challenge to bring to your business. So the question of the day today is, I'm curious, how do you challenge yourself? What do you do? Leave it in the comments below. I will join the discussion. Thank you guys so much for watching. Have an amazing day. Continue to believe, and I'll see you again tomorrow morning for another shot of espresso. <LYRICS>I wake up every morning, espresso keeps me going.</LYRICS>
