It wasn’t that I wasn’t talented. It wasn’t that I didn’t work hard. It wasn’t that I wasn’t passionate. It’s that I didn’t believe. I mean, I thought I believed. I thought I was doing everything within my power but looking back now, I can see that I just didn’t know any better.

You see, we all have dreams. We all have that thing that we’d rather be doing than whatever it is that we are doing at this moment. It could be grandiose like being President or winning an Academy Award or it could be something more “reasonable” like starting a small company or changing to a different career path. I put reasonable in quotes because I don’t really see too much difference between it and grandiose. At the end of the day a dream is a dream, isn’t it?

Now my dream, as it were, was to direct a feature film. No Academy Award requirement. No making millions. Just tell a story as a feature film. I wrote multiple screenplays that I wanted to make. I went to seminars on how to produce a film. I read up about financing and did just about everything you could do to be prepared to start. I walked right up to that starting line and stopped.

The script was ready. The preparation was done. My friends and family were supportive but I just couldn’t seem to get out of the gate. I knew what to do. I knew how to do it. I just couldn’t actually do it. There was a question that was really bothering me at that time. “How could I take people’s money to make a movie when I didn’t know if it would be any good or not?”

And that’s what froze me. We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars if not millions. Taking on that amount of money with no guarantees scared the crap out of me. I mean, I’d never made a feature film before. I’d worked on short films and commercials and corporate projects but all of those were under 10 minutes or much less. A feature film is 90 minutes long. This kept me from making my dream come true.

I made all kinds of excuses to myself. It wasn’t a good time because I was trying to focus on my career or I was in graduate school or independent films weren’t in vogue and no one would take it seriously. I blamed people for not supporting me and thought that the system was set up against me. It was everyone’s fault but mine.

Now I know that’s not true. You see, there’s not a secret society that is going around and keeping us from attaining our dreams. There’s no one making sure that I don’t run into that potential investor or distributor. There’s only me and my fear keeping me from going for it.

I think lots of people have these dreams that they kind of keep in their back pocket. They think that one day they’re going to quit their job and make it happen. They think that one day in the distant, distant future they will pursue their dream. I know that’s exactly how I thought.

There is safety in not pursuing your dream because you get to hold on to it. You get to keep the hope alive that there is something that you are passionate about that you can go and do one day. So, no matter how horrible a day you have, you still have hope that life will get better because of this dream that sitting in your back pocket.

“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” ~ Michael Jordan

What happens if you pursue that dream and fail?  Then is there no hope for you? What if I go for it and fail? What then? I think in my mind it would confirm that I am a loser with no hope for my life. And, for a long time, I couldn’t risk that. I didn’t want to be a loser with no hope. Life was hard enough as it was. I couldn’t lose my dream.

The problem with that logic is that if you’re not pursuing your dream you’re actually making your biggest fear a reality. You’re settling for a life that you don’t want. Your everyday is dreaming about a tomorrow that will never come. And, that’s just sad.

One day I was editing a corporate video that wasn’t working out at all. My vision for it wasn’t coming through. The performances weren’t what I wanted. The camera work wasn’t quite right and wouldn’t cut together. So, I scheduled a few more days to shoot it and then we went and filmed what we needed to fix it. The next week, the edit came together beautifully and the client was very happy.

That’s when it dawned on me that I had failed on my first attempt at that video. I actually HAD to fail on that video in order to be in a position to see what it really needed to make it work. Then I started looking back at all the other work I’d ever done and the stuff that really worked well always had a few layers of failure in them. I just didn’t realize they were failures because I was in the middle of them and didn’t have any perspective.

Then I started thinking to other areas of my life where I’d failed. My first shot in basketball was an air ball. In fact, most of my early shots were air balls but, eventually, I played in high school and, for one season, in college. The first screenplay I ever wrote was horrible. I mean, it was bad. Poor structure. Poor dialogue. Poor grammar. Everything about it but the idea of it was bad. But, with each passing screenplay I wrote they got better and better until people starting paying me to write them. That’s when it really hit me.

My biggest successes are built upon my biggest failures.

My favorite athlete, Michael Jordan, has a quote that sums this up quite nicely:

“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” ~ Michael Jordan

Now I know that failure is not something to be feared, it is something to be embraced because with each failure we all get closer to our dreams coming true. Failure is an option because without it we cannot succeed.

The only real failure is leaving that dream in your back pocket and not pursuing it. Please, for the love of God, go after your dream. I promise you that you will fail and that’s okay because without failing you can never achieve anything worthwhile.