A personal story about being shot in 2017, then watching a business partnership fall apart and a Netflix pitch fail in 2019. The speaker chose these collisions, and they shaped what came next.
I didn't know it was so important until 2019, when everything in my life imploded. Okay, everything imploded. So I got shot in 2017, and 2019, it imploded. But by my choice, I fired my Hollywood agent.
I was gonna say, like, how did. How was. How was 2019 worse than getting shot in 2017? So I'm curious to hear the rest of the story.
2017 was the moment. It was like the catalyst. Like in every great story, there's an inciting incident, and then the hero needs to decide, what do you take of this? If you read any book, if you watch any movie of superheroes, there's always like an inciting incident. And it's usually a bad thing. It's usually like something that the. The hero doesn't know how to control, or they don't know what to do with this, or it's something completely out of their hands. And then a hero is somebody that can take that inciting incident and grow from it and learn from it. And I didn't know any of this either at the time. Now I study storytelling so I could be like, wow. Getting shot was not the story. Getting shot was the inciting incident. Everything that came next was actually the story. And usually in a hero's journey, there's the moment where, you know, this thing happens to them, and then they recover and they think they're good, and then, like, spirits are high. And then actually that wasn't even the hardest part. And then something knocks them down even worse than when they actually got the inciting incident. And then them crawling out of that hole is what happens next. So 2019 was that moment for me where a lot of things have had happened. I was still with my old business partner at this point. I was making my own videos on the YouTube channel. We had gained a bunch of success. We were making tons of money. It was great. On the outside. I had a team of contributors that I loved, and I really wanted to grow a business bigger than me. And it was happening. But there was always friction with my old business partner. And we were 50 50. And by the way, I had gotten this tip from an entrepreneur years prior. He was the CEO of this multi million dollar company. And he was like, no matter what you do, never go 50 50. And I thought I knew best because I was this young college entrepreneur. And he said, like, hey, if you don't have a tiebreaker, if somebody disagrees, you will lose. I swear that was the foreshadowing, that little nugget that was like the poison that eventually found its way to the top. By 2019, we were disagreeing on everything, and so nothing was able to happen without, like, borderline screening matches, which is just not how you want to live in a business relationship. So at the same time, I was pitching a show, and it was a show for both of us. It was me and my old business partner. And I told myself, I'm like, this is the last hurrah. I will go into this pitch. I will give it my all. I'll do the song and dance that we've perfected over the years. And I really do believe in this show, so if it sells, I'll be okay. And I pitched this to Netflix, and that was our dream.
