It's never too late to create
My friend Whitney is one of the producers of an immersive show in Hollywood created by a midwestern woman named Carey Renee Sharpe. Carey was a born an artist and began playing the violin at 3 years old. Despite her promising talent, she turned down a music scholarship to pursue a more practical career and spent 12 years as a pediatric critical care nurse. While nursing is a noble profession, the calling to be an artist was still in her.
As a second career, Carey and her team created an immersive vampire pop opera called “Blood/Love” now playing in Hollywood at the Crimson theater. She is generously giving anyone reading this email FREE tickets for the Oct 11 &12 shows- send an email to tickets@bloodlove.com and say “KP sent you” to request tickets.
Whether you answer the call to create art in your early, middle or later years, it’s never too late to create. I applaud Carey for taking a risk and confronting any and all fears to bring her art to the stage.
“What’s worth doing, even if you fail?”
If you are born an artist, as some point, you must come out and create. Fear is what tends to stop us from doing it sooner rather than later. Author Elizabeth Gilbert spoke to Brene Brown on her podcast “Magic Lessons” about creativity and the question was posed “What’s worth doing, even if you fail?”
Failure is not an"if," it's "when, where, how often, etc...." The issue is how we can alchemize failure into fuel.
In my experience, failure is merely a compass directing us to our true purpose. It can help us reimagine our dreams, test our beliefs, or nudge (or force) us in a new direction that may be even better than we could have ever imagined.
“Not every door is yours to open”
Years ago, I wanted to work as a VP of Development at Paramount. I thought I was qualified and had industry professionals make calls on by behalf to help me get the position. The president of The William Morris agency at the time even made a call for me. Despite all of that power behind me, I didn’t get the job.
I felt like a failure.
Yet by failing to get hired by Paramount, I got a job I would have never dreamed of, I was hired as the VP of Development at Tony Hawk's production company, 900 Films. Tony is an entrepreneur, so he respected my hustle and was open to me having a side hustle I was passionate about (helping people get their first jobs in entertainment.)
Not only did Tony pay my salary, he became a "mentor in my mind." I got to see how someone with a very specialized talent leveraged it to build a mega-brand with loyal employees and fun office energy.
Had I not "failed" to get the job at Paramount, I couldn't have been redirected and become more aligned with my creative dreams. That “side hustle” in the early 2000s set the stage for my current career as a writer, speaker and business owner today helping people in creative jobs like TV, Film etc..