Author Archives: thevsstudioblog

“Show me the incentive, and I will show you the outcome.” -Charlie Munger “Incentives: the most powerful force in the world. When the incentives are crazy, the behavior is crazy. People can be lead to justify and defend nearly anything.” -Morgan Housel, book Same As Ever: Timeless Lessons on Risk, Opportunity and Living a GoodContinue reading “Follow The Incentive”

“Dance like nobody is watching; love like you’ve never been hurt. Sing like nobody’s listening; live like it’s heaven on earth.” -Mark Twain Consistently making deadlines that others set for you (i.e. for your job) is a very important quality. It shows you’re reliable. You can be counted on to come through. Consistently making deadlinesContinue reading “Next Level Deadlines”

“Ease is a greater threat to progress than hardship.” -Denzel Washington “A blazing fire makes flame and brightness out of everything that is thrown into it.” -Marcus Aurelius “We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.” -Archilochus “A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor.” –FranklinContinue reading “Trials and Training”

Most highly successful people will underestimate how hard they worked at the beginning of their careers. Just like it takes an enormous amount of escape velocity to get a rocket to leave the earth’s atmosphere, the same holds true for any passion project, let alone building a career. Putting luck and circumstances aside, it takesContinue reading “Blast Off Vs. Orbit”

“If you do need to do research because parts of your story deal with things about which you know little or nothing, remember that word “back.” That’s where research belongs: as far in the background and the back story as you can get it. You may be entranced with what you’re learning about the flesh-eatingContinue reading “Exposed By Exposition”

“The opening night of Waiting For Lefty was one of the historical nights in the American theater. What happened was you were seeing theater at its most primitive. You were seeing it at its grandest, and most meaningful. After each scene the audience stopped the show, they got up, they began to cheer and weep.Continue reading “It Doesn’t Get Better Than This”

Sometimes you try and you fail. Good. You learned something. Trust that was what was supposed to happen. Go help someone else with what you learned. Sometimes you try and you succeed. Good. You learned something. Trust that was what was supposed to happen. Go help someone else with what you learned. Notice the twoContinue reading “Can You Find The Difference?”

“And the boy loved the tree…….very much. And the tree was happy.” -Shel Silverstein, The Giving Tree “And…and you know what, maybe I’m crazy. But when I walk through a forest that I saved, when I hear the sound of wind rustling in young trees, trees that I planted myself, I realize that I haveContinue reading “As Lovely As A Tree”

“Sometimes the most powerful moments in a film are the quiet ones.” -Louis Malle For the filmmaker… A good discipline or practice is to go through every scene in the script and ask yourself the following two questions: Can I shoot this scene in one take? Can I communicate the story of this scene withContinue reading “One and None?”

“If you want to be given everything, give everything up.” -Lao Tzu “Being loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.” -Lao Tzu Free-free, set them free (oh-ooh-whoa)Free-free, set them freeFree-free, set them freeFree-free, set them free If you need somebody, call my nameIf you want someone, you can doContinue reading “The Infinite Loop Of Grace”