I’ve been on a mission since we got back to get someone to finance another round out on the road. This journey is far from over!
In trying to “pitch” this people keep questioning, the purpose. Why am I doing this? What do I want out of it?
At first I thought this meant I had to put together some big idea of how this could play out, financially, so to get them on board. Why should they invest? What would make it financially attractive enough to them?
So I thought BIG. Book ideas, documentary ideas, soundtrack ideas, proposals and yet at the end of the day I still couldn’t put into words what real “purpose” was.
I still don’t know if I know what the purpose is. I don’t know if I want to have a purpose.
Here’s what I do know.
There are 2 little girls in Portland that found my journal on a shelf in a Barnes and Noble. They’ve been in touch on the regular and they represent everything that this project is about. They’re so fantastic on so many levels, it’s hard to explain. In my journal I list 30 things that I want to do this year. Yesterday these 2 girls emailed me a copy of their “Summer List”. A list of 66 adventures and things they are gonna do this summer from planting a tree, to kissing a guy they just met, to #6, hide a journal in a bookstore. (I’ll blog their list in a minute)
I may not know what people want me to say to sell this as attractive to Hollywood.
But this project represents an idea. An idea that we all matter. Everyone has a story. I want to matter. I want people to matter to me.
“We are a sum of our experiences and the people we meet”. I want my equation to have as MANY variables as possible!
I want to be affected with the best qualities from everyone that comes into my life through this project and have them shape me. I want to affect others with bright eyes and adventure and excitement. Enthusiasm is contagious, I wanna spread it.
This project represents an idea that anything is possible. That I rolled up on my little scooter to the set of Star Trek 2, with my little handwritten journal under my arm and my little book project idea, to meet with one of the biggest producers in Hollywood is proof. Have passion, follow it through, CREATE your own opportunities, dream epically! And make it happen. No excuses, No fear, No stopping until you have what you want, the way YOU want it.
To some the Summer List from the little girls in Portland might just be “B-roll”, as an agent from ICM put it to me. Claire (who I met in Texas on the road) and her spirit and cackle-laugh that literally changed the mood of every person around her, or Patrick (the homeless man in Vancouver) who helped fix my shoe and who gave me an umbrella cause it was yellow and he thought I was colorful, might ALL be “b-roll”. Falling through a floorboard in an abandoned ghost town store and sleigh riding at midnight after “panic eyes” on the trip won’t come across as flashy as Blockbuster Vampire Alien movies or explosive high speed car chases. Then again, I have to assume my “b-roll” has more depth and purpose than the everday doings of a Kardashian. And just take a look at them and their ratings.
This project represents the idea of possibilities. There’s endless ways this book project turns out. For me, if nothing else I have stories (ohh the stories!) and lasting meaningful relationships that I wouldn’t trade for a million bucks.
I guess I just worked out my purpose writing this.
The purpose is: to somehow share all of the ideas that this journey represents with as many people as I can.
