Thoughts

Inspiration: Ang Lee

It’s no secret that I’ve been inspired by Irving Berlin and the other great holiday songwriters of our lifetime. In this past year as an artist/entrepreneuer, I’ve also been inspired by Ang Lee.

The worst part of pursuing your passions, is being riddled with doubt and fear. Whether its from yourself or from the voice of others. You have to be extraordinarily strong and vigilant in defending your passions against these naysayers and those that want to take advantage of you. Sometimes my sleep is my only indicator of where I am in my journey. There is an inverse correlation between fear and sleep in my life. The higher the fear, the less I sleep. The less fear, the more sweet sweet REM sleep I get.

There are no manuals that give you step by step directions to follow your dreams. In my experience, it can be quite an inelegant experience. Something like a kitchen sink cookie, exhilerating, exhausting, fun, stressful, exciting, defining, humbling, humiliating, rewarding, sometimes anti-climatic but always delicious.

A question that always seems to come up in every interview is “Who is your musical inspiration?” The answer is almost always Whitney Houston, Stevie Wonder or Irving Berlin – depending on the aspect of inspiration they are looking for.

There is one person and example that has helped me maintain my focus is Ang Lee. Ang Lee did not find critical success until his late 30’s. He had been a stay at home dad and started his own pursuits in earnest at 30. During that time he would go on to write scripts that were constantly rejected, and did double duty as a stay at home dad. Living off his wife’s modest salary as a microbiologist. For 6 years, luck and success evaded him. It wasn’t until he was 36 that he found his breakthrough. I had the great fortune and luck to find this article about his endeavor:

“Put yourself in his shoes. Imagine starting something now, this year, that you felt you were pretty good at, having won some student awards, devoting yourself to it full time…and then getting rejected over and over until 2019…Can you imagine working that long, not knowing if anything would come of it? Facing the inevitable “So how’s that film thing going?” question for the fifth consecutive Thanksgiving dinner; explaining for the umpteeth time this time it’s different to parents that had hoped that film study meant you wanted to be a professor of film at a university.”

“If you’re an aspiring author, director, musician, startup founder, these long stretches of nothing are a huge reason why it’s important to pick something personally meaningful, something that you actually love to do. When external rewards and validation are nonexistent; when you suffer through bouts of jealousy, wondering “How come so-and-so got signed/is successful/got a deal/etc?”; when every new development seems like a kick in the stomach, the love of what you are doing gives you something to hang onto.”

I was so inspired by this article that I wrote the author an email thanking him for his post.  On my hardest days,  I Google Ang Lee and see what he is up to. He was no different than you and I. Just a person with a dream and a keen focus to stick with his dream.